It’s Q4 – what are you doing with the rest of your marketing budget? Should you build assets, invest in a last dash experiment, optimize your approach, or forward invest?
As both a brand-side marketer and service provider, I’ve learned that no one ever got rewarded for giving the rest of their budget back to the company. In fact, just the opposite typically occurs – you are allocated less budget the following year because you’re “so efficient”.
So really, you have a few choices. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pros and cons of each.
- Create more assets – The bane of every marketer’s existence is having enough diversified content to keep the machine running. Whether it’s social assets, website content, event content, sales enablement tools, thought leadership, photography, video, podcasts, or what have you, there is never enough. This of course would be a solid investment that addresses a huge pain point, but there is a risk in developing content that is quickly outdated in today’s fast-moving, living-in-the-moment, real-time world. Recommendation – consider this, but make sure the assets you create are as future-proof (at least in the intermediate-term) as possible.
- Experiment – Ah, yes, the “Hail Mary”, the cool, innovative thing that could make the quarter or even the year if you’re falling behind. Sure, it could work, but more often than not it becomes a waste of effort, time, and budget. Most likely, your sales cycles are longer than a quarter, so any impact would occur next year. Please know I am not against experiments, in fact, quite the opposite. I recommend all marketers allocate 20% of their annual budget to innovation. That said, be smart about it. Plan, strategize, and make sure your experiments are well-thought-out. Understand the risks, and do everything you can to nurture the idea to ensure success.
- Optimize your approach – While we all should be measuring and optimizing our tactics and programs throughout the year as we go, in the heat of battle, this is often neglected. Q4 is the perfect time for closing, reflecting, planning, and optimizing for the next year. As a strategist, this of course is my favorite. The time, money, and effort you allocate here pays returns well into the future. If you get better every year, and make a larger impact to the success of the company, your budget and career will grow. And, if you’re really good. You become famous – well, marketing famous – someone will blog about you. 🙂
- Forward invest – If you’re one of the few, lucky marketers that can keep your budget and roll it over onto the next year, Godspeed. If not, there are a few opportunities here.
- Hire talent – go and get that person for that capability you need now. It gets them onboard and allows you to absorb recruitment costs this year.
- Use your agency as a bank – There, I said it. No one admits this, but most marketers do it. Agencies are happy to help you create amorphous scopes-of-work to get through procurement for projects that are started this year, but actually roll into the future. There is risk here though. I know of some agencies that have kept these forward investments on the books for years without delivering any value – the reasons are many, but often are on the brand side.
- Hire the consultant – We love being engaged in #3 above, and this is the perfect time for us to engage with, and help you, before you’re in the heat of battle again.
Botton line– Always use it, but be smart about it. How have you spent your Q4 budget? Please comment below.