What can you do in 15 minutes each month?
May I suggest ... a marketing budget review.
A very quick but thorough financial review of your discretionary spending each month let's you:
💰 track key metrics (actuals vs. budgeted)
💰 allocate spending across offices, markets, and/or service lines
💰 identify red flags that may need a budget reallocation
💰 prep for ROI calculations
Once you get into the hang of the monthly review, you'll see opportunities to increase investments, reduce waste, drive revenue, and improve profits.
Every month, I think marketers should be doing a 15-minute budget review. And I'm not talking about looking at salaries or benefits or any of those overhead costs that just come with employing people. I only want you to look at discretionary spending and it should only take you up to 15 minutes every month.
This may be something that you have to sit down with your financial partner at your company to go over these expenditures. But some things that you should be tracking are ads and sponsorship dollars, the cost of attending events, and that includes shipping costs and sending people (travel).
Photography and videography for projects or photos you're taking in-house. Anything that you're outsourcing that comes with a cost you want to be able to track it. Press releases cost money to put out there on the wires. Award submissions are the same thing. Those cost money to submit for those.
Any kind of educational events for your team, you want to make sure that you're keeping track of those expenses. Consultants and freelancers, you want to look at those costs on a monthly basis. And then the last thing is company swag.
Whenever I say that you want to look at these in 15-minute increments of a budget review every month, it's making sure that everything is still in line with your budget that has been set for the year.
And also finding where do you have some fluctuation to put more money into, maybe in a future quarter, in a future month, or saying, "Hey, we actually spent too much this month. So we're gonna scale back in our future month." You are making sure that you're spending company money wisely, but also making sure that return on investment is easily tracked back to these expenses.
Because you don't want to wait six months down the road asking "what was the ROI of that event that we went to?" You have the financial numbers already there, and then you can pull the CRM information to understand the ROI that you were able to get out of the various things that marketing is involved in.
Definitely do a 15-minute budget review every month. And over time, if you find out, the first month took you an hour to do, the second month may take you 30 minutes. But it will get shorter and shorter. Once you get comfortable doing this quick monthly review, you're probably going to complete it in 10 minutes every month and it will help you out in the long run.
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