In the media, we read that recession is coming. With this news, many companies will revert to form and cut their marketing budgets. Why might you ask?  The answer is simple: Without a success metric that unifies marketing activity with the bottom line, justifying budgets is next to impossible. 

Put yourself in the shoes of a CEO or CFO.  In a recession, they need to know that every penny spent is a penny spent wisely.  Providing a success metric correlated to the bottom line shows the value to the business and, therefore, the necessity to retain marketing budgets. 

Professor Mark Ritson wrote an article in Marketing Week, Ritson's recession playbook: 9 steps marketers should take to survive the dark times ahead.  In this, I disagree with him. I believe it is easier than 9 steps.  It actually only requires 1 thing; Defend future budgets by putting in place a metric that measures marketing success linked to the bottom line. 

To put this into context, would you invest your pension money in a fund that does not report growth?  No, I didn't think so!  So why expect to get budgets for something we don't measure.  As Peter Drucker has said, "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it".  So my only advice is to start measuring the effects of your marketing investments, both the short and long-term effects.  Defend your budgets with a success metric created by My Telescope using search data analytics, whose results can be correlated to market share and the bottom line.

Happy Summer!

Rodrigo Pozo Graviz CEO/ Founder My Telescope