“We only get a small piece of the pie”, a much heard remark amongst agencies. Especially since a wide range of specialized agencies can contribute to your campaign – SEO specialists, PR, advertising or web design. Agencies tend to complain about the amount of budget assigned to their part of the campaign. But how do we allocate budget and divide it across channels and agencies in digital campaigns? A recurring question for many CMO’s and a hot topic during the Digital Leaders NL roundtable recently held in Amsterdam.
Creative campaigns
Where agencies feel budgets are getting downsized, companies still have room for creative campaigns and bright ideas. The main space to create the ‘Cannes Lions’ of the future seems to be digital media though. As someone during the roundtable put it:
“In digital we are blessed with analytics to prove success in times that budgets are under pressure”
That’s the reason why multiple companies at the table indicated that they put budget aside for cool and creative ideas for digital campaigns. The place where they can prove ROI and focus on emotional values instead of products. Besides, it isn’t a big disaster if something doesn’t work out directly. Since digital campaigns can be evaluated on great analytics it is easy to find reasons for failure and ideas for improvement.
mCommerce
Both agencies and companies agreed that digital campaigns have a big potential, all parties also absolutely believe in the growth of mobile. The effects of responsive design in speed and convenience for the consumer make mobile a great platform for campaigns that (already) results in impressive conversion numbers. Next to that, based on today’s data, the majority of companies believe that mCommerce will have a bigger share in the supply chain strategy. As a result, budgets for mobile campaigns will grow in the years to come. A big contrast to what Forrester recently announced: Marketers Hesitant to Allocate Significant Portion of Budget to Mobile.
Multi channel data
Companies collect data more and more. In a recent post we already mentioned the potential data can have on a PR-campaign. During the roundtable it became clear that data from various digital channels ‘work’ together. Social analytics are being used for CRM purposes and e-mail marketing campaign results provide valuable information for a Facebook campaign. For example, information on local differences in email marketing campaigns provides the community manager of the Facebook page with insights on how to approach fans for different reasons. Data can help various marketing and communication departments with their biggest challenges like localization.
Allocating budget, making strategic decisions and optimizing campaigns in the digital sphere all seems to be a matter of the right data or analytics
