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How to effectively justify marketing spends to senior management

Written by Step Change Marketing | April 16, 2015

Stump The Strategist

Watch below as we answer:

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?

  • Featured strategists are: 

    Ashton Bishop - Head of Strategy, Step Change Marketing

    Jeff Cooper - Senior Partner, Step Change Marketing

    Tiffany Jones - Founder and CEO, Momentum Advisory Group

  • About Stump The Strategist:

    • Questions from the floor, answered live in nine minutes
    • It's opinion, not advice
    • Step Change charges clients for advice, Stump The Strategist is free

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

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