How to effectively justify marketing spends to senior management

Stump The Strategist

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Q: I am the marketing manager for a small building and construction company. Senior management is always asking me to justify my marketing spends. How can I do this effectively?

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Ashton Bishop - Head of Strategy, Step Change Marketing

Jeff Cooper - Senior Partner, Step Change Marketing

Tiffany Jones - Founder and CEO, Momentum Advisory Group
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A:

Marketing is about leveraging sales effectively. This means establishing risk. Identify management's appetite for risk and go from there
To justify this risk try using the three Ds – Data, Demonstration and Demand. Use your data to establish whether you are creating more or less pain by following your marketing strategy. Then demonstrate – who is doing it better, worse or different to you. And finally, have you created demand for the marketing spend? If so, how much?
Break your marketing calendar up so that it can be determined by what can and what can't be measured
In particular, measure your return on objective. Unless you specify the exact objective, you're never going to know if your marketing is effective to that objective or not
Consider walking management through the marketing tactics, giving each a score out of 10 for aspects like brand fit, cost, strategy, reach and frequency. This will help management understand what each tactic contributes to the business
People often look at marketing spend as a loss. Get management to stop thinking about it as a cost, and start thinking about it as an opportunity to grow