5 Tips For Planning Your B2B Marketing Budget for Q4 of 2012 & 2013

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It’s time to plan your next quarter ( Q4 ) and 2013 budgets.

Despite the fact that marketing is exactly what’s needed in tough times, when businesses feel pressure, the marketing budget is often the first thing management wants to cut. Reminding everyone that marketing is what fills the sales funnel and pointing out how the competition’s marketing is succeeding sometimes can help protect your budget. Use marketing performance management disciplines to help justify and quantify your value to the business.
TIPS TO TURN THE CHALLENGE INTO OPPORTUNITY:
1. Review and adjust strategy. Regardless whether you’re being asked to do more with less, review your ROI from last year and see what worked and what came up short. Change what you can to spend on the best channels to reach your targets. Make sure you really know which channels.
Have you tried Proformative’s marketing solutions? If you missed the opportunity in 2012, don’t repeat the same mistake next year. <we are smiling>
2. Don’t be too in love with your outgoing messages. Stay connected to what’s coming in from real people rather than ideas and product-based communication. Watch inbound marketing metrics and other KPI. You can produce relevant results and give yourself the information you need to keep realigning your budget to meet demand as you more effectively track behavior.
3. Have you failed to take advantage of social media? It’s cost-effective, proven to work for other businesses and it offers opportunities for narrow targeting and audience profiling. Gather and leverage this data in your other marketing programs. As we all have learned, social media is anything but a fad; turning more attention here might even create a positive structural change when you put together next year’s budget.
Some might think that only Facebook and LinkedIn offer access to analytics for your social account. If you target senior corporate finance executives, you can gather more specific data that is more relevant to your business if you list it in Proformative’s B2B marketplace – the portal is interactive and highly searchable by Proformative’s community of over 600,000 members.

4. Seek opportunity in other areas of your business; see where you are generating content that can be used to market your solutions to corporate finance executives, or are creating events or products that can carry your messages to this audience. While you’re at it, let the pressure call forth your creative best and come up with new ideas that provoke conversation.
5. Remember, this is an election year and ad costs are certain to rise this fall, but the price change will affect only some channels. Study opportunities for Q4 and 2013 and reflect on what budget reallocation might be logical for the end of the year.
Attend our webinars and our demand generation white papers to learn more about how to sell to today’s CFOs.
Now, tell us how you’re adjusting your marketing budget for Q4.

• What are your strategies?
• What channels are you choosing to promote your brand and reputation? 

Please comment on our questions and share this article with others.
Download our white paper “How To Market To Today’s CFOs” and let us connect your content with a captive audience of over 600,000 corporate finance executives, members of Proformative

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