Defending Your Media Budget

Many businesses are facing increasing pressures to cut costs, including marketing budgets, due to economic headwinds, high costs of living, and continued uncertainty.

Advertisers who survived the COVID-19 pandemic must navigate new challenges and adapt to shifting consumer behaviours. Again. 

The impact of these challenges on advertising is multifaceted, affecting both supply and demand across channels. While some industries thrive and capture new business without increasing marketing spend, others struggle to adjust their media investments, creative strategies, pricing, and distribution channels.

In this climate, it’s crucial for marketing teams to use data to defend their budgets and ensure long-term brand success.

Key points

1. Prove the financial benefit of long-term brand building: Demonstrate the long-term value of maintaining a strong brand presence, even during difficult times. Check out Mi-3’s piece on how a US brand (with guidance from a kiwi!) followed the marketing science guidelines for outstanding results.

   Our marketing attribution technology, Marketing Evolution, helps advertisers quantify the baseline of sales and what’s driven by brand, as well as connect campaign optimisation to brand KPIs (e.g. awareness, consideration etc.). The platform allows multiple KPIs for optimisation, so you can create scenarios where a campaign is designed to both increase brand consideration and sales, and even test the expected results at different levels of long/short weighting. 

2. Identify competitors pulling back and seize the opportunity: Keep an eye on your competitors’ marketing strategies, and consider increasing your share of voice if they are cutting back on advertising. This can give you a competitive advantage in the long run. Search Share of Voice can be a great way to get up-to-date data that is typically a leading indicator of total market SOV. Pi Datametrics has great built-in SOV metrics for search. Check out Les Binet’s work on this: Share of Search as a predictive measure.

3. Be prepared to adjust media plans as the market stabilises: As the economy finds its footing and the new, new normal takes shape, be ready to adapt your media plans accordingly.

   It can be tempting to lock in longer-term deals with certain publishers (especially for advertisers with some scale), but this can come at an opportunity cost if you’re not equipped to funnel budget to different channels or publishers when the market is shifting. 

   SaaS marketing attribution platforms have regular cadences of updates and refits to adjust to the shifting sands of media pricing and consumer behaviours.  You can measure the cost of being locked into publisher deals, but you can also better plan your media taking into account those commitments too.

   When you’re called in for a last-minute meeting with the CFO to discuss budget changes, hands-on access to an easy-to-use platform can actually move CFOs to invest more heavily in marketing, as they have the tools and data to be able to see that your activity is an engine of growth and not just a large line item on the P&L.