Marketing Underfunded

Many marketing functions are underfunded and it's not because they can't make an impact on the business. It's because marketing, as a culture, has taken so long to bring self-awareness to its function.

Spotting a marketer who admits that a campaign they invested time, effort and money into didn’t work is like spotting a unicorn. It doesn’t happen that often, if at all.

Counterintuitively, Marketing’s best means for gaining credibility is sharing the failures of initiatives that didn’t work and then sharing a plan for how that spend will now be better reallocated.

The way to overcome this budget barrier is data. Having the right data helps us shift the conversation to the value marketing is driving. That makes getting more budget easier because we can say how effective marketing is and what ROI can be expected with increased spend.

The data also brings self-awareness to the marketing organization so that it can tell the rest of the organization when something isn’t working.

That's when everyone else in the organization starts taking marketing more seriously.