UK marketing budgets are on the rise and we love to see it! Here’s how we’re supporting businesses as they reinvigorate their investment in marketing activity.
IPA Bellwether’s Q2 report, released last week, indicates growing confidence – at last! – in UK businesses, Total marketing budgets have risen to their highest level in a decade, with a net balance of 10.2% of companies reporting increased budgets in Q2 2024.
We’ll raise a cautiously optimistic glass to that. Especially because online advertising, particularly video, has seen substantial increases in investment. Yet we’re ever mindful of the need to look round corners and foresee challenges that might prompt a knee jerk reaction to cut marketing budgets at a time when businesses need to look to growth rather than stagnation.
Given that the overall growth and projected growth of marketing budgets looks to fall beneath the rate of inflation, it’s our duty as practitioners to show our clients where they’re best placed to spend their funds.
Debriefing on the brief
Businesses are under pressure. Clients are under pressure. Services are under pressure. As a business that offers professional services to clients, we truly understand your pain points! We take clients through a session to debrief on their brief, capturing the bits that were committed to grey matter rather than paper.
And rather than pulling the brief apart, it’s propping your instructions up, to make sure we spend your marketing budget effectively and responsibly to achieve the commercial aims that lie behind the brief.
Understanding attribution
Clients value seeing the wood for the trees, so we make a point of being clear on where marketing activity assists in their marketing efforts and within the marketing funnel.
Are awareness campaigns a waste of money and for vanity metrics only? Probably not, if you have issues at the top of your funnel and you want to always have an influx of new customer acquisition. Will they have an immediate impact on conversion rate? Probably not, in the absence of a decent marketing roadmap and some revisions to your content and landing page experiences.
Will amping up paid search equate to more sales? Almost certainly on a last click basis. And while we do that, we’ll fine tune other parts of your marketing journey to assist those conversions and avoid wasted ad spend.
Calling a spade a spade
A sure fire way to gently encourage investment in marketing is to avoid smokescreens and unnecessary terminology. So we use our client’s language to enable conversations rather than obstruct them.
If you call social content ‘socials’ then so shall we. And if you use ‘PPC’ to cover paid search and display ads, we’ll adopt the same terminology too, allowing you to have conversations at board level with ease.
Always innovating
All that said, clients employ their agency to be their eyes and ears when it comes to innovation.
So if something is new, we look at it in detail and assess how it might expand or enhance your marketing mix. And we do that before writing it off as a fad or presenting it as something for serious consideration.
Like the cut of our jib? Drop us a line to see how we can effectively manage your marketing budget through challenging – but cautiously optimistic – times.
