In the PIC Process, our first step is Discovery. In this step of the PIC Process, we are learning about your goals and introducing ourselves as a potential partner. Knowing a budget range is critical for next steps.
Infinite Ideas - Finite Budget
Ford spends Billions on marketing. Maybe you will not. But you'll likely have a billion dollar’s worth of ideas. The trick with a marketing budget is getting the most value out of each marketing dollar you can.
To do this, you need to organize your marketing initiatives by the cost to execute and the impact you believe it will have on your business. This gives you your order of execution.
But first… you need to have a budget amount for your marketing efforts.
Finding your Total Marketing Budget
Your marketing budget percentage is a percentage of your revenue that you should allocate to marketing.
The CMO Council recommends:
- B2B companies spend between 2 and 5% of their revenue on marketing
- B2C companies spend between 5 and 10%.
B2C typically needs to invest in a wider range of marketing channels than B2B so they need a larger budget allocation.
Now, this is not a black-and-white rule. If you are in high growth mode, or a competitor is in high growth mode, you may need to adjust your marketing budget accordingly.
Why do we need a ballpark budget for Discovery?
We put a lot of time into our consultative sales process.
Our Discovery call typically lasts 45min to an hour. We then spend 2-4 hours preparing our Alignment deck for the Alignment call. There is a significant amount of time put into what we need to do to achieve your growth goals.
Prepping for the Alignment stage, we present your Discovery notes to our strategists. After we review the Discovery and talk about the account a bit, one of our strategists will step forward and champion your business.
From there, we begin the Alignment process. It's important for your PIC team to have a budgetary number so we can build strategy options that will have the most impact for each dollar.