How Do I Plan My Marketing Budget for 2021?

Last week I had the pleasure of joining a webinar with Allocadia about how to think about budgeting for 2021. It seems like 2020 has flown by and taken forever at the same time, Fall is upon us (yay football!), and planning and budgeting season is in full swing.

We learned a lot about resiliency in the past nine months as marketers, having to switch to all digital marketing mixes, throw out months and months of field and industry trade show plans that moved online or were canceled. So this is the first time we’re attempting to be in the driver’s seat with so much uncertainty ahead for 2021.

I shared some benchmarking about spending on physical and digital events as a percentage of marketing programs budget and asked the audience how this compared to what they saw in their organizations. 40.8% of poll respondents reported that they are spending less. This is not surprising because of the shifts that have happened within marketing organizations over the past year. Encouragingly, 30.8%of respondents saw this as very similar to their current budgeting mix.

One of the core components of this is understanding several scenarios that could happen so that your budgeting is done with a level of flexibility. A great tip that my co-presenter, Caitlin Ridge, Director of Corporate Marketing at Allocadia, brought up is that you should always plan for four scenarios. Stopping at three tends to make people always gravitate towards the middle or compromise option.

If this is of interest to you, make sure you download Allocadia’s new report on budgeting State of Spend and check out the on-demand version of our webinar too!