Allocating insufficient budget for marketing or cutting it in the process

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Such a decision is no more logical than stopping the construction of a new workshop because the workshop has not produced any products in a couple of months of construction. In both cases, the investment is guaranteed to burn out.

We agreed with one of our clients that we would launch an email newsletter. In a month and a half, we developed a strategy and content plan, launched the first three letters, after which the client decided to stop working, since he did not see an increase in his sales. Although in industrial marketing, almost any promotion tool can become brazil whatsapp phone number effective after at least six months from the time of launch with constant and systematic work with it.



This immediately has a negative impact on marketing efficiency. This is not only about the impossibility or cancellation of the launch of important and strategically provided promotion tools, but also, for example, about reducing the team due to budget constraints, replacing the contractor with a less professional, but cheaper one.

For an industrial or B2B company, the minimum budget for launching marketing is usually 1% of annual turnover (there is no point in going below this level, marketing will not produce results).

If a company has been operating on the market for a long time, the budget is on average 1-5% of turnover. It can be higher, but it depends on the specifics of the business and the market: for some product positions, the entire marginal profit of an enterprise can be 10-12%. And it is clear that it is impossible to direct half of the earnings to marketing. But if the business is just starting out, investments in marketing may initially even exceed the current turnover.



Increasing the advertising budget at the expense of other marketing expenses
We already know that industrial marketing costs consist of expenses for launching advertising tools and for paying the specialists who study the market, develop a strategy and set up these tools.

Costs should be in a ratio of approximately 40/60 (in B2C marketing - 10/90). Because in industrial markets, familiar tools like contextual advertising do not work "head-on". For successful application, they require a specialist to have a deep understanding of the market and careful adjustment to its specifics.

For example, your company's competitor has achieved that all large design bureaus initially include its equipment in projects for customers. Therefore, it will not be possible to outplay it by offering customers the same product with a 30% discount through contextual advertising, even if you pour a million into this advertising. And the smaller the scale of the business, the larger the share of the marketing budget should be occupied by the work of marketers.



Mistakes in working with a team that deals with marketing
The team can be in-house or outsourced, but there is always a risk of hiring bad specialists (the less the manager understands marketing, the higher the risk).

This topic deserves a separate article. But we can talk about two main "red flags" for a manager. The first is vague cases (without specific figures) and the promise of quick results from marketing at the stage of preliminary negotiations. The second is the lack of control over the work of specialists.

Of course, you shouldn't meticulously and daily control the execution of each task. But there should be a strategy with written work plans and deadlines. For example, what needs to be done during the first 3-6 months, what tools to launch and what they will give. These results need to be checked. Otherwise, it may turn out that in six months, nothing has been launched in practice or is poorly configured and does not work, or the specialist has spent all his time studying the market.