The Marketing Budget is one of the most contested topics in most companies. It tends to be one of the larger buckets of money and has some of the most complex answers as to how effective it is being used.

There is a lot of noise to cut through to make sense of marketing spend - let alone measure it. The impact of branding efforts over time, the value of a keyword strategy, the necessity of a tool to activate a channel, the reality of marginal incremental return on investment.

A few of the more extreme cases I've seen over the years include:

• A fortune 500 company using 3 different DMPs because different teams didn't want to work together - $1.2M/yr in savings by consolidating

• 8-figure media budgets that had media waste as high as 42%

• Paid Search campaigns spending more than 20% of the spend on invalid audience targets that are incapable of converting

• CMS changes or updates that destroyed SEO from 93% to 9% health scores

• Teams who's overhead was as large as the channel budget they owned

• A company with 7 Analytics tools of which 5 were paid for and never used

Finance and Marketing are often at odds with each other. Finance wants to make money. Marketing wants to spend it. And that creates a constant point of friction.

There needs to be mutual respect for the team to be productive but internal measure often boil down to two arguments:

• Finance doesn't understand the nuance of marketing and is too draconian in the way they analyze the performance of the program.

• Marketing has motive for the money they're spending to look good and finance cannot trust them to self report.

This is where a 3rd party Lean Marketing Audit can be incredibly valuable to an organization. Professionals with Marketing and Analytics backgrounds who can come in and review the organization top to bottom with an understanding and respect for the nuance of marketing but the keen sense of what can be cut and returned to the business without negative impact on growth.

Working to find the media spend that is being wasted, the tech that is unnecessary or redundant, and ensuring the team is appropriately aligned to task and channel can free up as much as half the marketing budget in extreme cases.