It’s the time of year when we, as your full service marketing agency, are examining the effectiveness of your previous year’s campaigns with a focus on measuring results. Those expenditures dedicated to marketing communications are often found under the Marketing Expense category on balance sheets. Although you are paying for these efforts and most assuredly feeling the outflow of money, let yourself view what is deemed a Marketing Expense differently.
An expense, as defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary, and as it is categorized on ledger reports, is a “burden” to your business. Yes, you expend money to purchase advertisements, boost posts, print signage, and everything else done to ultimately communicate with your audience. When discussing financial expenditures, marketing efforts are rarely seen by companies as a benefit. Rather they are seen as a burden. In all reality, marketing is an expense, a burden. To push money out the door with no solid guarantee that it will generate new traffic, higher sales, increased exposure, or more attention is, in fact, very cumbersome.
I discussed the expense versus investment comparison with a colleague recently and it has disturbed me since. Marketing is often the first to be cut from the spending allowances when money is tight, it is viewed as an unnecessary expense. Postage is an expense. Your company’s reputation is an asset! In order to be of value, you must invest in that reputation. If you need to increase the bottom line by decreasing spending, ask yourself this: How will people know who we are and what we do without an investment in our marketing? I’ll go ahead and answer that for you. They WON’T!
Although financial investments are uncertain, unstable and nerve-wracking, we trust that our financial advisors will steer us in the right direction and ultimately those investments will pay off in spades. Our professional qualities, as your marketing agency, are highly comparable to that of your financial advisor. We provide an educated, strategic, targeted plan to invest your marketing dollars where it will garner the most return for your business. We create campaigns, monitor expenses as well as results, revise strategy and reinvest time and money to grow your assets. The payoff is not in just the next blog post or print advertisement, a short term fix. It is clearly a long-term investment that is necessary to establish your business in the eyes of your target audience, which will not happen with intermittent funding and disposable strategy. It is our job to provide you with the most high-yielding opportunities and to pursue them responsibly.
Just as the stock market has no guaranteed payoff, the exact return on your marketing investment cannot be predicted. Although the powers that be may never change the budget line item to Marketing Investments, if we treat it as such, it can pay off big in the long term.
