Question remains frequently asked these days is: how much marketing budget has skunk considerably due to the financial cutback? Well, we must admit that marketers’ psychology is indeed affected by the economic downturn. But how you justify the reduce of your marketing spend depends on how marketing works in your organization.
Let me borrow a view from Max Kalehoff’s blog AttenionMax, which I must agree:
B2B marketing is becoming more of a holistic business function that is everyone’s job, versus its former status as a standalone, well-defined, tightly controlled business unit.
Organizations which do not have an integrated marketing function tend to play safe during the corporate cutback because no one feels good towards the business return. But for other organizations where marketing objectives are well defined as a vehicle to drive business potential, the marketers of these organizations have been playing smart all the time. In these organizations, we see more often the shift of budget allocation during the economic downturn to explore new source of leads instead of a massive budget cut, which acutely reduces the total marketing exposure.
Recently the marketers of Frontiers Digital are analyzing a result of a B2B trade event buyers promotion campaign. Although the result meets the industry benchmark, I clearly see the change of the event’s visitors (buyers) behavior from the clickstream data. It indicates tier-one markets like US, UK, and EU are leading the clicks. But when we compare the IP locations, buyers’ home bases generate significantly more traffics compare with the event location. Our theory remains: we have more B2B buyers who do online sourcing rather than flying long-haul to visit the trade show in China this year.
Ogilvy China’s digital guru, Kaiser Kuo, in his blog Digitalwatch mentions as they predict, there are some spending cuts in certain categories. But while overall budgets are shrinking, advertisers are shifting into digital.
Okay, when the economy is good, we all feel good towards the media effectiveness metrics. Now with the economy turning bad and we know the media consumption pattern is changing, hmm… let me put it in this way, you should be feeling better off if you can manage to reach your target audiences.
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Thanks for visiting this weblog. I am a digital marketer based in Hong Kong. After founding a marketing consulting company, merged it with a trade show company, and completed my tenure in 2007, I am blogging my insight and commentary for marketing and entrepreneurial experience. Now I am the Managing Director of 
