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Marketing Benchmarking: is it just for making Savings?
Marketing Benchmarking has become a critical touchpoint for brands. The conversations around marketing, procurement and spend have become more strategic after Project Spring was launched by the World Federation of Advertisers. They put the spotlight on transforming the complexities and negative practices that are know to impact the marketing procurement community.
We get asked all the time…
Benchmarking is it just for Marketing Budget Savings?
We have certainly seen a shift in the focus of marketing procurement professionals, there is less a need to ‘race to the bottom’ and instead a shift towards delivering value from the marketing supply chain. And that is when Benchmarking becomes your biggest ally in a noisy, competitive and, often, expensive market.
Most companies allocate marketing budgets according to historical levels and priorities, not according to effectiveness or company strategy. In fact, around a third of global brands aren’t comparing their marketing investments against any benchmarks. Something, that fundamentally has to change if they want to see more marketing budget savings.
Marketing benchmarking is a constantly shifting landscape – you can spend hours unpacking insights from the information available and still not get real clarity in the outcome, because they aren’t using real world, live data. Instead relying on internally sourced or historical marketing procurement data.
Benchmarking = marketing budget savings
You don’t want to spend more of your marketing budget than you need too, and it can be shocking to discover that a campaign cost you 20% more than others in the same market.
Marketing procurement data is also incredibly useful when applied to marketing campaigns running across multiple markets. Country-specific data will provide you with clear picture of your investment into each global market.
Brands looking to enter a new territory need access to granular level of benchmarking data to provide a yardstick against which to accurately measure the investment into each scope of work and then monitor the spend in real-time.
Accurate and up to date data, that includes asset costs, staffing rates and deliverables provides full visibility into your marketing spend and empower you to make informed decisions around agency, campaign and budget allocation. What you need, is a marketing benchmarking platform that has collated a rich tapestry of data touchpoints to give a depth of insight and ensures you can fully assess your marketing cost parameters before you finalise your agency negotiations.
With access to all your scope of works and pricing in one place, you can track and monitor marketing campaigns against these costs and confidently negotiate with your agency. Marketing Procurement data also plays a pivotal role in building a more transparent relationship with your marketing agencies.
Negotiation may be part of the everyday for a procurement professional, but data-driven negotiations enable you to be clear in your requirements and set realistic expectations.
Benchmarking helps you to determine the right compensation and negotiate based on facts, not assumptions. Changing the way in which you approach your marketing agencies and how you measure the value they deliver will enable you to build stronger relationships with greater accountability on both sides.
Improved Efficiencies and Strategy
Marketing Benchmarking is also a metric to enable you to dig deeply into your scope of work to determine whether or not it has met your targets, or if one agency is performing better than another. A mixed dataset allows you to analyse different metrics and determine how you will measure the impact to ensure marketing campaigns are aligned to your wider brand strategy.
Marketing benchmarking all of your active marketing markets determines campaign efficiencies and scale. And, being able to do so on an easy to access marketing procurement platform ensures that insights can be used to further customise your marketing spend to meet strategic goals, and enable you to micro adjust your investment to get the best possible value.
Marketing benchmarking also enables you to monitor the overall cost savings to enable scrutinization of your marketing costs, assess the areas that require improvement, and make significant top line marketing budget savings.
Any marketing budget savings can then be redeployed into additional campaigns or more creative with agencies that have met the benchmarking metrics and are performing according to expected standards.
Benchmarking, is it just for marketing budget savings?
It’s so much more. It’s about transforming intelligence and insights into measurable value-adds across cost savings, improved efficiencies, transformed agency negotiations, global campaign best practice, the list is endless.
Find out more, by booking a call with the RightSpend team.
