As marketers, we often spend a significant amount of our company's money. However, we have our reasons: We need to run paid campaigns, organize events, acquire new customers, and much more. We can only justify these expenses as investments if the spending goes to the right place. To determine that, it's crucial to track all expenses accurately.
How do we track all of them today? Using spreadsheets, in which important details often fall through the cracks.
What if there's a tool you can use to log all your marketing expenses and check them anytime—whether for a specific campaign, a specific region, or your overall marketing budget—all readily available in one place, with just a few clicks? That's exactly why we built Budget Board in Zoho Marketing Plus.
Introducing Budget Board, an exclusive feature of Zoho Marketing Plus
What is Budget Board?
Budget Board is a space where marketing teams can plan their marketing budgets, add and track marketing expenses, and make data-driven decisions.
Marketing teams can plan their budgets strategically for different brands, with a deep look at detailed, time-based allocations for each one, including yearly, quarterly, or monthly plans.
They can also plan marketing budgets based on different marketing projects, such as a mobile app promotion or a new product launch, and manage the spending for various marketing activities like email campaigns, paid ads, and events.
Budget Board's key benefits
Manage your marketing budget more effectively
Set a clear budget for your business to ensure that your marketing team members and stakeholders remain informed and aligned with your budget. There are two different ways you can plan your marketing budget.
Budget by brand: Plan marketing budget for your brand for different time periods such as annual, quarterly, or monthly and ensure that your team members don't spend more than the allocated amounts for each period.
Budget by project: Plan your marketing budget by specifying the budget for each project. For example, you can allocate $10,000 for a mobile app launch project, and the marketing team can then plan and execute activities for the campaign within the designated budget.
Never miss any of your marketing expenses
With Budget Board, you can log all of your marketing expenses, such as amounts spent on events, newspaper ads, campaigns, etc, as well as specify further event expenses incurred, such as venue bookings, catering, and audiovisual arrangements. Include receipts and maintain thorough records for future audits and compliance purposes.
Gain deep insights into your marketing spending
Based on the expenses you log, Budget Board intelligently analyzes and categorizes your marketing expenditures according to activity type, location, and more. Also, you can always get a quick view of your budget versus your actual expenditures via a simple chart to ensure you stay within your budget.
Why do you need Budget Board for your marketing?
Most marketing teams manage their marketing expenses across multiple spreadsheets and often end up losing track of them. While there are budgeting and expense management tools available in the market, they aren't designed specifically to suit the needs of marketers, nor are they connected to the platforms where actual marketing activities are executed—which often results in one or more of the following problems:
The marketing team may end up spending more than the allocated budget.
They may be uncertain about how their marketing money is being used.
They may lack access to deeper insights, such as geographical expenses, objective-based expenses, activity-based expenses, and others—which hinders marketers' abilities to make data-driven decisions.
We built Budget Board to address these problems by helping marketing teams plan their budgets, log all their expenses, and categorize them.
Budget Board explained in detail
Suppose there's an organization called Zylker, which encompasses multiple businesses: Zylker Travels, Zylker Cafe, Zylker Motors, and so on.
The CMO of Zylker allocates a budget for each brand:
Zylker Travels: $40,000
Zylker Cafe: $15,000
Zylker Motors: $50,000
For simplicity, let's focus on just one brand in this example: Zylker Travels. The budget for each brand can be allocated for a year, a quarter, or even a month. In this scenario, let's assume the budget is allocated for Q2. Accordingly, Budget Board displays the budget for April, May, and June as $40,000.
All of Zylker Travels's marketing team members can see the allocated budget and plan their marketing projects accordingly. For instance: Lisa, the Paid Ads Manager, created a project called "Online Trip Booking", where the main activity is search ads, with a budget of $15,000 for the project.
John, the event marketer, creates a project named "Austin Marketing Event" and sets a budget of $10,000 for the project. After John completes the event campaign, he adds all the expenses incurred for the event. Here's the breakdown:
Project Name: Austin Marketing Event
Type: Marketing event
Expense: Venue charges
Amount: $1,500
Expense: Sponsorship charges
Amount: $5,000
Expense: Engagement activities
Amount: $5,000
As you can see, John exceeded his allocated budget by $1,500. Budget Board displays this difference as a variance, which helps ensure that the remaining spending is planned accordingly to stay within the brand's overall budget allocation.
The marketing head of Zylker Travels can quickly review all the expenditures in a single dashboard and to ensure that everything is on the right track.
The Road Ahead
We are continuously working to ease the way you plan and manage your marketing budgets.
We're already working on enhancing the platform with more great features, like ROI and performance tracking, approval workflows, integrations with popular finance platforms, and much more.
We hope this new enhancement helps you manage your marketing expenses effectively.
Please feel free to share any questions, suggestions, or feedback you have in the comments section. Thanks for tuning in!
Try Budget Board in Marketing Plus. 15-day free trial available.
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