Defending Your Marketing Budget

B2B executives are constantly under fire to justify requests for incremental spend, as well as the dollars they are spending now. The foundation for any marketing investment request should be the linkage of spend to a broad range of business outcomes. Benchmarking is a powerful tool to justify required investment, and to identify where spend is not being optimized.

Looking at the last two years of our benchmark data indicates that the overall allocation to marketing has remained largely flat; to break out of this trend, marketers must prepare a straightforward, fact-based defense that justifies to senior management what they need and why. In this report, we share four areas marketers must incorporate into the defense of their budgets, or risk another year of doing more with less.