Melnick shared the following recommendations into how marketers should tackle budget planning in 2018, and evaluating tools and tactics to support the process:

Align and balance the budgeting process. Strike a balance between budgeting top-down – aligning plans at the corporate/strategic level – with budgeting bottom-up to guide actual execution. Melnick recommends a hybrid approach that sets top-down targets, then builds a bottom-up activity plan. This gives marketers budget plan autonomy while staying true to the leadership priorities.
Leave room for experimentation. The most successful companies allocate at least 20 percent of the budget to trying new things. 
Spread extra budget money thoughtfully. If marketing gets extra funds, don’t simply spread them equally across business units, activities, or campaigns. Invest them where they best support the business and have the highest growth potential.

Most companies expect to increase their spending on digital marketing in 2018, and say social and content marketing will be the most effective tactics. Check out the details of this research.

We have also worked with marketers and agency leaders to identify where the knowledge and capabilities gaps exist.

1. Do you know all the key technology providers in your marketing and advertising tech stack and the basis on which they are engaged? Do you understand the cost drivers?
2. Have you assessed the technology skills gaps in your organisations and do you have visibility over what skills you are likely to need this time next year that you currently do not possess?
3. Do you know which agencies are responsible for you adtech solutions?
4. Do you know who owns the data if your data is held in a third parties systems?
5. How confident are you that when someone arrives on your website you know who they are?
6. What other non-marketing systems collect personally identifiable information about your customers and are you able to marry these up to data in your marketing tech stack?
7. Do you run programmatic advertising campaigns and who manages the programmatic buying desk, your employees or your agencies?
8. How integrated are your teams when they plan campaigns? For instance does your social desk talk to your search desk, and do they know what display campaigns are running in the market at any given time?
9. Does your direct marketing team have visibility of search, social and display campaigns?
10. Thinking of search, social, display and video do you know how your agency is structured and whether they have an integrated or disjointed approach to managing your campaigns?
11. Is responsibility for search, social and display split across agencies?
12. How sophisticated is your attribution modeling? Are you still relying on first last clicks and are you able attribute across multiple formats and channels? And perhaps more importantly, how quickly can you respond to the insights derived from your models?
If you can answer yes to most of these questions positively you are doing better than many of your peers.

And these challenges are reflected in the findings of this year’s CMO Spend Survey:

CMOs have pulled-back on the proportion of budget allocated to martech, falling from 27% of the marketing budget in 2016 to 22% in 2017.
Marketing analytics investments represent the single biggest area of investment, taking 9.2% of budget in 2017, but questions abound regarding how well aligned analytics efforts are to delivering strategic measures to CMOs.
CMO’s relationships with CFOs are uneasy, not surprising when half CMOs still use basic techniques to build their budgets, rather than modelling the returns that their budget will deliver.

Monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, can be notoriously difficult to calculate accurately. As customers join and cancel, projecting your monthly recurring revenue for two, three or six months into the future can be a serious challenge, even for the most data-focused businesses. Add upgrades, downgrades and discounts into the picture and staying on top of your projected MRR can become a major cost of time for your business.

Luckily, you can accurately calculate and project monthly recurring revenue trends using Net Promoter Score data. By looking at your Promoter, Passive and Detractor numbers, you can gain a reasonably confident view of your company’s MRR trends and trajectory.

In this post, we’ll explain how you can do this, as well as how you can use your NPS data to adjust your business to increase MRR, improve retention and generate more revenue.

"If TAM can be directionally misleading in the early years, how should founders and investors think about weighing the importance of market size? Of course, the eventual size of the market opportunity is paramount. There are several other factors to consider — in addition to the strict measurement of TAM — when trying to assess size of market opportunity:

-TAM expansion
-Credible adjacencies: A startup’s initial product or service is merely an entry wedge into a larger opportunity. 
-Nascent market potential: Successful startups often ride the wave of a new market that is small today, but will be big in the future, with or without that startup. 
-Frequency of use: As a general rule in consumer technology, the frequency with which users interact with a given product or service tends to correlate with the size of the opportunity. "

• "Advertising plan
• Customer acquisition plan
• Email marketing plan
• A retention plan
• A social media marketing plan
• Conversion optimisation plan
• Business plan
  
  • New product development
  • Revenue sources
  • Means of cost management
• Marketing plan
  
  • Geographically based
  • Product based
  • Business unit based
  • Focused on segmentation
• Campaign plan
• Digital marketing plan / Digital transformation plan
• Multichannel marketing plan"

Google reveals its 'secret formula' to how they plan, manage and optimize In August Google launched re:Work, an initiative to share their management tools. Marketing topic(s):Capability and performance review. Advice by Carolanne Mangles.

Proactively planning your marketing campaigns helps you:

• Eliminate jumping into execution without clearly defined goals (or not knowing how you’ll measure success). Planning provides intense focus on growth instead of being distracted by the trivial minutia.
• Avoid the overwhelming nature of marketing. There is so much to do, so solid planning helps you avoid the stress because you’ll become super organized.
• Collaborate more effectively + efficiently. Planning eliminates last-minute fire drills and miscommunication.

Marketing technology has become a fact of life, as new data from digital agency Squiz attests. Roughly two-thirds of senior marketers surveyed in Australia, the UK and the US have invested heavily in marketing technology over the past year, the study shows.

Another third of respondents said they have either invested a little to add to their existing marketing technology stack, or have taken their first steps in marketing technology.

• Content marketing (29% of marketers said content was top priority)—This entails providing educational/entertaining information that “grabs” people and gets them to engage with the brand. Content marketing tactics include webinars, how-to guides, blog posts and infographics, among others.
• Social media engagement (28%)—Shifting demographics and internet usage patterns are the culprit for increased focus on social. More than half (56%) of client-side respondents indicated that they’ll increase their social media marketing investment in 2017.
• Targeting and personalization (25%)—The value of personalization—such as an improved ability to connect customers with the most relevant offer or content for them, which leads to increased engagement and loyalty—is widely recognized. More than half (51%) of respondents plan to increase spend on personalization.

• Prediction 1: Superhero CMOs Emerge - By 2020, the first superhero CMOs will emerge because they received C-Level permission to disrupt traditional go-to-market operations.
• Prediction 2: Boardroom Battle for the Customer - By 2020, 25% of CEO’s will appoint a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) in an attempt to unify the imperative of customer-centricity. 
• Prediction 3: "Free Range" Content Invasion - By 2020, more than 50% of a company's commercial content will be created outside of marketing's direct control. 
• Prediction 4: Journey Budgets get Reshuffled - By 2019, one-third of today's “awareness” budget will be redirected to stages later in the buyer's journey. 
• Prediction 5: "Dark Social" Shines - By 2018, 15% of companies will shift the majority of their social marketing focus out of the public sphere and into private groups and messaging apps. 
• Prediction 6: Events are the Main Event - By 2017, events will surpass advertising as the top marketing program investment in more than 50% of B2B IT vendors. 
• Prediction 7: Marketing GO! - By 2020, 20% of IT Vendors will have augmented reality pilots in place that will serve as the foundation for immersive marketing. 
• Prediction 8: DX Fails without CX-OS - By 2020, 50% of digital transformation (DX) initiatives will fail due to the lack of an end-to-end customer experience orchestration service (CX-OS). 
• Prediction 9: Bots Break Advertising - By 2020, 40% of e-commerce transactions will be enabled by cognitive/AI personal shoppers and conversational commerce.
• Prediction 10: A Message in Every Machine - By 2020, 15% of display advertising will be executed via connected devices such as vehicles, wearables, facilities, and in-home.

DDM investment boosts revenues, execs say

The "B2B Demand Marketing Assessment Guide & Orchestration Workbook" provides demand generation professionals with: 

• An effective tool to assess your current demand marketing efforts and identify needed areas of improvement
• A comprehensive introduction to demand orchestration, an emerging B2B marketing approach used to coordinate top-of-funnel marketing activities to scale pipeline and boost marketing-attributed revenue 
• 12 customizable worksheets to guide you through every aspect of demand orchestration

By monitoring the online activities of companies nationwide over a two year period, to ascertain baseline activity levels, and following this up with a 30-day monitoring period, True Influence was able to recognize the biggest increases in online activity by keyword.

Tool for structuring thinking about one of the crucial 4Ps' of marketing: Promotion McCarthy's 4Ps of the Marketing Mix famously highlights 4 of the most c. Marketing topic(s):Marketing models. Advice by Robert Allen.

Chief Marketer - Winter 2017 - Front Cover - Front Cover

So the question remains…how prepared is your go-to-market organization to meet the needs of today’s B2B buyers? And what are you going to do if they are not? Start by allowing the lines between marketing and sales to blur to better serve your customers. Identify a couple of buyer-centric initiatives like social selling or account-based marketing and align marketing and sales compensation in more meaningful ways. Be open to new profiles and constructs.  Place the buyer at the center of your universe and seed more cohesion between teams.

When you’re in the earliest stages of your business, you need to answer these three big questions about marketing:

• How do you identify your target audience?
• Where can you find them?
• How do you engage them?

See how your martech budget in 2017 compares with others'. Marketing technology spending will increase in 2017, and new technologies will continue to be adopted. Check out the research and stats.