Great info!

2. Budget season rolls around predictably each year, but it can still cause a huge scramble if you’re
unclear about where your marketing spend has been allotted. Let's face it: grappling with the
administration of marketing budgets can be a tactical nightmare. Balancing regional budgets,
finding funds you can confidently reallocate, and responding to changing business priorities
requires a lot of coordination.
In order for a business to evaluate past marketing results and initiate future planning, it’s
necessary to make accurate, complete budget information available to all stakeholders. While
your staff may be comfortable with old fashioned, static data tools, these just aren’t sufficient for
building a truly functional marketing budget process.

3. problems with
Managing Global
Marketing Budgets
It’s a challenge for businesses of any size to create and maintain
an accurate, responsive marketing budget. This challenge is
magnified for global enterprises. Running dozens of different
marketing campaigns across multiple regions can give rise to
chaos, as geographically scattered teams each try to maintain
their own version of budgeting spreadsheets. Varying currencies
introduce new layers of confusion, as do language barriers and
differing levels of Excel proficiency.
3

4. static spreadsheets in a
real-time marketing world
Spreadsheets remain a common tool for budget management in
many marketing organizations. Especially for global enterprises,
spreadsheests can run into dozens of columns and thousands of
rows. Individual managers in different parts of the world will then
either need to edit the master spreadsheet, or create their own
version and save as static documents. While the actual marketing
world is constantly shifting in real time, these static documents
become archives almost as soon as they’re created.
Example Marketing Budget Document Living in a Static Spreadsheet
Another issue with using static spreadsheets is version control.
Often, a marketer hijacks the master budget document and
reformats it to suit his or her needs. These changes, however,
don’t always get shared with the rest of the marketing
organization. Budget discipline gets hard to enforce because
it is nearly impossible to tie an individual budget back to the
master document.
4

5. potential for errors
A recent study by the Wall Street Journal found that 88%
of spreadsheets contain errors. In that article, Ray Panko, a
professor of IT management and an authority on budgeting
practices, points out: “In large spreadsheets with thousands of
formulas, there will be dozens of undetected errors.”
Furthermore, even when an initial version of a spreadsheet is
shared among managers, each person will make changes as
needed. Without software to integrate these disparate versions,
it becomes nearly impossible to track overall marketing spend
and to establish plans for the future. Most likely, there will be
no audit trail for line item changes, and no accountability for
ultimate accuracy.
Strained relationship between
Marketing and Finance
In order to work together to establish a marketing budget for the
new budget season, the finance department needs to trust the
accuracy and accountability of the marketing team’s reporting.
A lack of visibility across all marketing activities leads to an
erosion of discipline among individual marketing managers as
they become accustomed to changing their strategy on the fly,
entering new numbers without the pressure of accountability. The
relationship between finance and marketing can become strained
if the finance staff has to send out numerous emails, trying to
reconcile figures from different spreadsheet versions.
Furthermore, the entire process of planning, budgeting, and
forecasting becomes foggy as overspending occurs in some
areas, while money is left on the table in other areas.
A 2013 Study of 214 Business By The Aberdeen Group
said that working from
spreadsheets alone created
problems, due to their inability
to respond dynamically to
market volatility.
said that their budgeting and
forecasting process is too time-consuming
and labor-intensive.
said that spreadsheets alone
caused an inability to trace
business success to its key
components.

6. Determining
Goals for Your
Budget process
As a marketer, you wear multiple hats, so you can’t devote
huge chunks of time to budget management. In order to be fast
and efficient, you need a reliable, up-to-the-minute overview of
marketing funds, allocation, and planning details. However, it
is almost impossible to have a complete view of the marketing
budget without a process that is simple and collaborative.
To meet the needs of modern marketers and streamline the
marketing budget process, it’s necessary to replace manual
spreadsheets with a web-based tool that can help you support
your people, process, and reporting needs.
You need a tool like Marketo Financial Management, which
makes it easy for marketing teams across your organization to
collaborate on budgets together.
Let’s dig into the details of how a budgeting tool like Marketo
Financial Management can help you forecast accurately, find and
allocate budget, and spend on plan.
6

7. Technology Selection
overview and Checklist
Managing marketing budgets across teams and regions can
be a tactical nightmare. Technology solutions, like Marketo
Financial Management, help you get an accurate picture of your
marketing spend.
When choosing the right budgeting tool for your organization, here
are some features you should look for:
üü Web-based for easy access
üü Flexible structure and process for ease of use and quick
ramp-up
üü Dashboard view that provides visibility either by the
quarter or by other specified time periods, which gives you
a better handle on the status of the marketing spend.
üü Transparency for executive review. Whether it’s a query
from the C-suite or an ongoing conversation with finance,
a simple dashboard resolves any questions of ROI and
improves the overall credibility of the marketing department.
üü Reconciliation of planning with execution. With
transparency of both past spending and future projects, it’s
possible to measure whether marketing is on-track with its
stated goals.
üü Centralized budgets and roll-ups to organize marketing
investments by team, brand, or location.
üü The ability to map marketing spend to goals and
programs. This enables you to track your marketing
programs against your budget line items and map them to
your organizational goals.
Individual Budgets Fit owners'
Needs and preferences
When you look for a tool to help you manage your budgeting
process, make sure you find a solution that is flexible in both
structure and process, so that individual budget owners can
customize it around their own needs and preferences. The more
your staff can personalize their budgeting system, the more
eagerly they will adopt it. Even if they are reluctant to abandon
spreadsheets, the customizable qualities of a flexible, web-based
tool will win them over.
Luckily, many budgeting tools use an Excel-like format to ease the
transition to a web-based technology. Therefore, your teams will
have an easier time adopting the new format.
Good reporting improves your collaborations with finance, and gives you a clear view of
your budget.
7

8. Marketo Financial Management
Excel-Like Budgeting Dashboard
The beauty of leaving spreadsheets behind is that you can now
develop your own folder hierarchy, organizing subcategories in
ways that are congruent with each team leader’s personal work
style. One team leader may want folders that organize by owners
or regions; another may feel more comfortable with a hierarchy
based on initiatives and messaging.
A robust financial management system allows budget owners and
managers to enter the system via a straightforward dashboard,
and create their own personal display hierarchy – from the top
folder levels, down to individual line items and tags.
With this flexibility, your teams will volunteer more information,
like adding in the data points that are vital to them and to their
stakeholders. A well-designed structure allows for extra data (such
as marketing inquiries) to be integrated, even if those data points
are not directly finance-related.
From planning to reporting
Make sure you find a solution that has solid reporting and
analytics. A dashboard functionality that easily generates reports
allows both better planning and a higher level of budget discipline.
With cross-team and cross-region reporting that enables
stakeholders to view planning in any geographic theater, salient
facts are always available to executives and directors. They can
refresh the report function and consult real-time facts at any time
during the budgeting cycle.
For instance, in Marketo Financial Management, you can
create reports to determine plan vs. actual for your entire team,
plan to objective, budgeting forecast by team, actuals by month,
and more.
8

9. visibility Allows More
Intelligent Management
With greater visibility comes greater awareness. When every
stakeholder is capable of tracking key performance indicators,
the conversation about upcoming issues can begin in a timely
manner. If a change should take place that requires more
expenditure, it will be clear which funds have already been
committed, and where there are some extra dollars that can
be drawn down. Invoices and purchase orders are reconciled
immediately with line items, so there’s no confusion about what
has already been spent. It is possible to seize new opportunities
in a way that is both agile and responsible, because the
consolidated budget remains in the same window of time in
which the marketing actually is taking place.
A budget tool like Marketo Financial Management gives marketers
a platform through which to share their goals and objectives with
the whole organization.
With an ongoing calendar, the budgeting process itself actually
becomes a healthy experience. Budget owners are empowered to
truly own and manage their business, because they can configure
views and goals to align with their own processes.
Marketo Financial Management dashboards and reports screenshot showing centralized Budgets and Roll-ups

10. Conclusion
A flexible, web-based financial management solution allows
finance and marketing to be partners as they work to create a
comprehensive marketing budget. It enables everyone across
regions, teams, and departments to track marketing spend
against corporate goals.
Having an effective budgeting solution empowers individual
budget owners to configure reporting in the way that suits
their unique styles, while providing powerful, pre-structured
dashboards and line item tags that are universally accessible.
Finally, it ties a clear track record of past spending efficiency with
an accurate, real-time window on current commitments, thereby
enabling confident planning and forecasting.
10

11. Marketing Software. Easy, Powerful, Complete.
Marketo, (NASDAQ MKTO) uniquely provides an easy-to-use, powerful
and complete marketing software platform that propels fast-growing small
companies and global enterprises alike. Marketo® marketing automation
and sales effectiveness software streamlines marketing processes, delivers
more campaigns, generates more win-ready leads, and improves sales
performance. With proven technology, comprehensive services and expert
guidance, Marketo helps thousands of companies around the world turn
marketing from a cost center into a revenue driver.
+1.877.260.6586 sales@marketo.com
www.marketo.com blog.marketo.com