It’s that time of year again. Time to pull out the spreadsheets and start the painful process of ’08 marketing planning and budgeting. For me, it’s actually not that painful. First of all, I know exactly how many leads it takes to produce the qualified leads that it takes to generate the meetings that it will take to produce a certain amount of revenue. So, with that handy benchmark, I can easily estimate the number of leads I’ll need to generate to meet our ’08 revenue objectives. I also have an average cost per lead in mind so I can calculate the costs, but finding the actual media or events that I need to make my leads goals is another challenge that I typically address with contact discovery services.

Anyway, back to budgeting. I have other business objectives, as well, including brand awareness and support company operations. Unfortunately, those areas are not as well defined, and they don’t come with a formula for success. So, it got me to thinking: how do most B2B Marketers actually create their budget and how often is that budget really reasonable for supporting business objectives? I ran across this very compelling entry by Allen Silveri at The B2B Blog. He writes:

“Start with a clean slate and focus on the important sales and profit drivers for the company now, next year, and the years beyond. First you need to truly understand company goals and the market reality. This requires open and frank conversations with the CEO and President on their vision and objectives (both short-term and long-term) for the company. Next involves in-depth discussions and alignment with sales management and the sales force to determine what the frontline troops are facing and the support they desire to quicken sales cycles and increase their productivity.

Talking to several other department heads for a cross-section perspective of the company situation and goals is also recommended.Now that you have consensus from key players about what your company wants to do, you need to hold that up to the light of inspection based on the reality of what the market understands and will accept. This market-up approach enables you to discover, confirm, and/or reconfirm market conditions that exist and will affect your industries/niches prospects and the customers you serve. All company goals must be tested from a market-up perspective.”

This all makes sense to me. Often, in the planning stages, we all consider our objectives and not what the market will support. It’s a good lesson to remember at this time of year.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t found any great tips on how to budget for activities like building brand awareness without a pricey ad spend. This year, we accomplished a great deal using viral marketing and it was extremely cost effective. Next year, I’ll likely leverage PR, RSS and more on the social media front. Those costs are relatively easy to predict, but you can’t always rely on a viral campaign to catch fire.

If you have advice to share, I encourage you to post and share with the group. In the mean time, I’m back to budgeting for demand generation. We just started using the ReachForce Insight tool recently, so I will be interested to see how it will help me with the planning and budgeting process.