Budget Planning: Fall Into More Money

With today’s consumers digesting content at a rate like never before, organizations are struggling to keep up. Marketers are challenged to create more content, more often — yet have stagnant (or decreasing) budgets. So, how do you overcome the challenge of doing more with less? During this “budgeting season” we wanted to share a few ways you can approach “finding” more money in your budget. Check out three real-life examples:

Refine Your Content Production Strategy

This can help drive creative synergies, increase speed to market, and lead to significant cost efficiencies — especially for advertisers looking to globalize advertising development and production. So, where do you begin?

• Tap an internal or external production expert to analyze current processes, creative outputs, staffing, technology tools, content needs, and spending across brands and geographies to identify opportunities, barriers, and challenges.
• Develop an annual planning protocol — and stick to it
• Determine the optimal production approach(es) based on your content needs for the next year
• Analyze historical benchmarks and develop a methodology for tracking success

MRA was tapped to lead this process for a global advertiser. The results? 44% savings in production costs versus historical benchmarks for comparable scopes. Click here to request the full case study.

Establish Targeted Production Investment Levels

Whether you’re investing broadcast and digital video, creating target investment levels based on deliverable type and complexity can have a significant and positive impact for your organization.

Start by building standard cost ranges (based on historical benchmarks) for the various components of production. A few examples of these “components” include:

• Video style (presenter, single storyline, testimonial, vignette, etc.)
• Testing (boardomatic, 2D animatic, 3D cinematic, etc.)
• Number of locations
• Number of shoot days
• Music (licensed, stock, custom, etc.)

 Once all components have been considered, develop categorizations based complexity and deliverable type to be used as “building blocks” for budgeting.

Next, create a budgeting tool which factors in additional elements which may increase/decrease the investment level. A few examples of these additional elements include:

• Heavy CGI or special effects
• Multiple casts
• Shooting in a low-cost location
• Repurposing existing assets

By right-sizing your budgets based on historical benchmarks, deliverable type, and complexity you have the opportunity to drive efficiencies all year long. In fact, one of our clients tapped us for help and captured $1.5M in efficiencies within the first year alone!

Create a Strategy for Scaling Social Media

These days, marketers are struggling with the need to produce more and more content for social channels — with flat budgets. Many organizations are finding themselves with unsustainable year-over-year expenditures in social media and are looking for new approaches to be able to scale their program. If you find yourself in this situation, here’s something to consider:

• Leverage an internal or external expert to evaluate optimal content for driving the best interaction across channels
  • Look at social media posts over the last 12 months and analyze interaction rates
  • Identify trends in interaction rates by content types and posting cadence

MRA was recently tapped by a global advertiser who needed help in scaling their social media program. By partnering with our client’s marketing team and agency, MRA was able to analyze engagement trends and identify multiple opportunities to stretch budgets and drive efficiency. The results? Our client stretched their social content production budget by more than 35%. Click here to request the full case study.

In Summary

As you can see, falling into more money comes in all shapes and sizes. Understand the strategies currently accepted by your company and what strategies might improve your approach based on the culture and tolerance for change.

Check out our upcoming article as we’ll provide steps on enhancing your 2018 budgeting processes.

Written in collaboration with Angela Saferite.