Match Your Budget to Your Market Position

Build a flexible budget by aligning to business goals and justifying ROI.

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Member Challenge

Tech marketers must balance the need for quick results with the challenges of getting the budget to support essential long-term campaigns, all while facing challenges such as:

A leadership team with ideas for marketing that are often not based on metrics or experience.
CFOs who do not understand marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.
Conflicting priorities of both quick-win revenue strategies and pushing to implement scale-building activities.
Being asked to be first to cut budget in times of economic headwinds.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

In the past, marketers might have argued that some marketing activities were too difficult to measure. But today's successful marketers know that there are ways to measure the impact of all their marketing activities, and they use this data to improve their results and justify their spend.

Impact and Result

The blueprint aims to guide CMOs at every stage in their mission to become full participants in their company’s growth. It also provides them with the tools they need to defend their budgets in the face of adverse economic headwinds. The blueprint outlines strategies for CMOs to earn respect and become integral parts of their company’s growth. Successful CMOs speak the language of metrics, set up metric-driven organizations, collaborate well internally, and balance short-term revenue campaigns with long-term brand building.

Research & Tools

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1. Match Your Budget to Your Market Position Deck – Create a transparent, aligned, and agile budget to build your status as a respected leader and to drive company growth.

This deck helps CMOs review budgets, create forward-looking strategies, prioritize spend, and pivot to low-effort, high-return campaigns. It's the perfect tool for CMOs who want to get the most out of their budget.

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Match Your Budget to Your Market Position – Phases 1-2

2. Marketing Budget Worksheet for Software & Technology Companies – A comprehensive tool that allows you to create a marketing budget based on your annual recurring revenue goals, the size of your company, and your average annual contract value.

Built specifically for SaaS and tech companies, our worksheet lets you create a data-backed marketing budget tailored to your business growth goals. Just input key revenue metrics like your ARR target, company size, and average contract value. Our worksheet calculates your recommended budget as a percentage of ARR based on benchmarks.

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Marketing Budget Worksheet for Software & Technology Companies

3. Marketing Budget Presentation Template – A template to show the budget allocation compared to benchmarks and the alignment of the marketing budget to the company goals and other teams who need marketing support.

With designated sections for company goals, marketing objectives, cross-departmental alignment, budget allocation, and benchmark comparisons, this template provides a streamlined framework to demonstrate the strategic value of your marketing investments.

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Marketing Budget Presentation Template

Onsite Workshop: Match Your Budget to Your Market Position

Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.

Do-It-Yourself Implementation

The slides in this Best Practice Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.

Project Accelerator Workshop

You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.

Module 1: Conduct a Marketing Campaign Audit

The Purpose

Conduct a comprehensive review and audit of your current marketing campaigns and budget. Identify areas for improvement and potential opportunities for growth.

Key Benefits Achieved

Review and audit your current marketing campaigns and budgets, developing an audit framework and metrics to improve strategy, optimize budget, and foster collaboration. The outcome leads to better decision-making and long-term success in the market.

Activities	Outputs
1.1 Workshop kickoff and objectives	List of KPIs for each campaign, along with data sources, monitoring frequency, and people responsible
1.2 Review current marketing campaigns and budgets.
1.3 Develop audit framework and metrics.
1.4 Audit campaign performance.
1.5 Analyze audit findings and identify opportunities.

Module 2: Develop a Marketing Performance Model

The Purpose

Establish a performance model that effectively measures the impact of marketing efforts on your business objectives

Key Benefits Achieved

A data-driven approach to decision-making and the ability to optimize marketing strategies for better results and ROI.

Activities	Outputs
2.1 Determine metrics for model.	Formula for scoring marketing campaigns
2.2 Map marketing efforts to metrics.
2.3 Build a draft performance model.
2.4 Test and refine model with sample data.
2.5 Finalize model and methodology.

Module 3: Identify High-Value Customer Segments

The Purpose

Analyze customer data to identify and prioritize target segments, enabling you to create more effective marketing strategies tailored to specific buyer personas.

Key Benefits Achieved

Increased customer engagement, higher conversion rates, and better allocation of marketing resources.

Activities	Outputs
3.1 Analyze customer data to identify segments.	Profile of high-yielding customer segments
3.2 Profile target segments and buyer personas.
3.3 Identify priority segments based on value and propensity.

Module 4: Optimize Spend and Resources

The Purpose

Assess the effectiveness of the marketing campaigns in terms of ROI and spend efficiency and identify opportunities to optimize your marketing budget and resources.

Key Benefits Achieved

Key benefits include cost savings, improved campaign performance, and a more efficient allocation of resources, ultimately leading to better marketing results and a stronger competitive position in the market.

Activities	Outputs
4.1 Analyze campaign ROI and spend efficiency.	Identification of the resources and programs that have the highest returns
4.2 Identify improvement opportunities.
4.3 Develop optimization recommendations.
4.4 Create plan to shift budgets and resources.

Module 5: Create a Strategy to Implement the Changes

The Purpose

Review and validate the performance model, develop potential downturn scenarios, and create a marketing blueprint for various economic conditions

Key Benefits Achieved

A more resilient and adaptable marketing strategy that can effectively navigate fluctuating market conditions, ensuring long-term success and growth for your business.

Activities	Outputs
5.1 Recap days 1-4 and day 5 objectives.	Strategy for harvesting and reinvesting marketing funds, timing of marketing investments, and planning for a comeback in the event of a downturn
5.2 Review performance model and flexibility.	Action plan for implementing the blueprint
5.3 Develop downturn scenarios and forecasts.
5.4 Present blueprint and wrap up workshop.

Match Your Budget to Your Market Position