One topic that seems to always fascinate marketing executives, and myself, is "how much should my company spend on marketing?" This of course comes with the implied question, "how can I justify my marketing budget to fellow executives?"
I wrote about this exact topic on the Marketo blog on October 12, 2006, in a post named Benchmarking Marketing Budgets. Check it out for some useful stats. Then on January 21, 2007 I wrote a follow-up, How To Sell Your B2B Marketing Budget To Your CFO. Here, I make an important argument: the best way to justify your marketing budget is to think of it as an investment that incurs costs today but delivers benefits for many years. When we think of the marketing budget as an investment, and not a cost, we not only help convince others that marketing is not a cost center, but we also let the marketing budget to be amortized over the entire “useful life” of the investment. This in turns allows the company to make more strategic but still rational big bets on marketing.
Read the Marketo ebook Selling your Marketing Budget to your CFO for more on this topic.