It's that time of year again. One of optimism and anxiety. If you work for a modern, aggressively-minded, technologically-savvy company, it's a time to dream. Visions of the new Marketing programs, software, and gizmos that can be put together over the course of the next year to generate interest and buzz in your company's offerings are surely sailing through your mind, along with the most advanced mechanisms for tracking and measuring the success of each of them. If you're like the rest of us, especially in an uncertain economic climate, budgeting can be a scary time indeed.
Of course Marketing budgets are not one-size-fits-all, and your proposal needs to be right for your company's goals, maturity, etc. However, getting budget approval is undeniably tricky business, and you'll need all of the ammunition that you can get your hands on to convince (ahem... beg & plead) "the powers that be" that you should have X number of dollars to achieve Y set of objectives. Published industry metrics have always helped in this cause as most CEOs don't want to be left behind what others are doing. Here are a few recent data points that I've come across that might help:
1. IDC's 2011 Marketing Investment Planner (thanks to Microsoft for making this publicly available)
2. Marketing Sherpa's 2011 B2B Marketing BenchMark Report. You can download a very useful excerpt and buy the report for ~$400.
3. Ad Age Insights Whitepaper: What SBO's Need to Know about Marketing
If anyone has any, I would love to see additional data points for my own "convincing" efforts!!!