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Marketing benchmarking provides Chief Marketing Officers with visibility into agency performance and the opportunity to transform campaigns and creativity.
How are Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) allocating their marketing budgets?
Gartner has aptly described the current situation as one where ‘volatility becomes the new normal’ and so CMOs need to consider the cost of disruption in their marketing budgets. This is made more complex by the fact that budgets are largely still frozen – the global economy, geopolitical instability and the continued whispers of a recession are certainly not fertile ground for budgeting.
It is definitely the time of ‘do more with less’ as 71% of CMOs believe their budgets aren’t enough to deliver on their strategies and most only comprise 9.1% of total company revenue – a dip from 9.5% in 2022.
CMOs are looking to find the balance between getting more from their agencies whilst leaving room for creativity, experimentation and growth. They need all this and still some room in the budget to find new ways of capturing customer attention, exploring new markets and opportunities, and growing the business through lead generation and development.
It sounds like an impossible task. But is it?
The marketing benchmarking advantage
Marketing benchmarking can offer CMOs so much more than just numbers and financial savings. There is depth within marketing benchmark data that can provide immense value across planning, decision-making and relationship-building.
A recent Deloitte study across more than 400 CMOs found they are becoming increasingly entrenched within the C-Suite with 71% now considered as part of this leadership group. With more than 50% responsible for spend across more than 11 marketing areas, most are focusing on the need to enhance collaboration and credibility as part of their mandated role, which means that marketing benchmarking is key to driving richer relationships across the business and agencies.
Thanks to the sheer volume of data available to CMOs, they can leverage technology to tease out insights from within the data to improve efficiencies and add value across campaigns. Using a marketing benchmarking platform, CMOs can collate multiple data touch points over an extensive period of time to build more transparent relationships with their marketing agencies. But, marketing benchmarking is not simply about shaving costs to the bone or demanding more done for less which damage agency relationships with the sharp edges of budget cuts. Instead, marketing benchmarking is about using data to refine and fine-tune expenditure and planning so everyone benefits over the long and the short term.
Marketing Benchmarking for Creativity & Growth
Marketing benchmarking allows CMOs to gain transparency into return on investment (ROI) and spend across multiple metrics, agencies, regions, campaigns and markets. This then allows for brands to dig into the scope of work to assess whether or not it is meeting targets and if a campaign is performing to expectations. With a mixed dataset, the CMO can analyse the different touch points and use this information to refine campaigns and potentially carve out extra budget where performance is poor or needs to be redirected. Understanding each element of expenditure to the fullest, and making informed decisions, driven by data.
With more budget freed up, the CMO can direct marketing funds towards additional growth of the business. From a creativity perspective, marketing benchmarking also allows for agencies and brands to collaborate on exciting, different and unusual campaigns and use benchmarking and data to assess how well they meet objectives. Imagine being able to fine-tune campaigns based on real data and insights that can measurably shift the boundaries of creativity? This is where marketing benchmarking can provide inordinate value.
Marketing Benchmarking Transforming Budgetary Boundaries
Of course, marketing benchmarking benefits the business because it does deliver savings. Data that includes marketing costs, agency fees, rates and deliverables ensures that you have visibility into expected marketing costs and helps you to make informed decisions around agency, campaign and budgets. This type of data is also incredibly useful when applied to campaigns that run across multiple jurisdictions and countries.
Region-specific insights help you to gain a clear picture of the market and how much it costs to run campaigns within that market, and with which agencies. For companies looking to gain a foothold in a new market, this granular level of detail provides a yardstick against which you can realistically measure the cost of a scope of work.
The value of Marketing benchmarking
Marketing benchmarking is perhaps one of the CMOs most reliable tools. A rich repository of insights pulled from relevant data that can help you do more with your marketing budgets at a time when funds are tight and belts are even tighter. With the right tool, you can build stronger agency relationships, refine campaigns, expand into new territories and have informed discussions that help you take your agency even further.
RightSpend provides you with detailed insights into industry trends, campaign spend, ROI, achievable targets, agency costs, deliverables and so much more. And each of these insights will help you measure performance, expand your creativity, enhance relationships and grow the business, even when times are tough.
