We've been there: Our formative years were spent in Marketing Finance teams. We know the frustrations you have with most marketing campaigns, from first hand experience, due to the lack of measurability and sometimes accountability.
Our background is in Finance with some pretty big consumer brands. We understand, therefore, that as an FD these are some of the challenges you face with your marketing team:
- Marketing control your biggest cost after payroll and you are never entirely confident that they are spending it on the right things
- It is notoriously difficult to measure the value of marketing spend — and if you had a pound for every time a marketing person had told you this, you wouldn’t be reading this!
- You are under pressure to demonstrate how well the company spends and uses its money. You probably wish that you had more certainty and transparency about whether the marketing department was actually getting its monies worth from its agencies.
- With resources thin on the ground, wouldn’t it be incredibly helpful if you had absolute confidence that your marketing team had secured the best deal possible.
Of course, we can’t stop your marketing department having a new idea every week, or having grand schemes that don’t add up financially.
But we can help you some of your challenges with the marketing department and their usage of the company’s money in these ways:
- We can identify exactly how your agencies are spending your marketing budget. This will put you back in control and allow you to work with your marketing team to help them secure the best deal possible going forward. See how we did this for a global consumer brand →
- We can ensure that the correct briefing and approval processes (on both sides) have been implemented and followed. In our experience this would probably cut down over 75% of all the problems we find.
- We can ensure that reconciliations of cost estimates are being performed regularly and on a timely basis. See how doing this for one client resulted in a £500k refund →
- We can give you peace of mind that the basics are done. For example, both sides have a written, signed and agreed contract (not always the case), various contractual clauses are re-written to provide full financial transparency, you are dealing with an agency that is financially sound and is not relying on you for a large proportion of its income….
Are any of these situations true for you?
- ‘Why is it that whenever I talk numbers with Marketing, everything is so woolly? Why can’t they just give me some some data and fact in a way that I can readily understand?’
- ‘We have been with this agency for a number of years. How do we know we are getting our money’s worth? I keep getting told that we have a great relationship with the agency, but the fees are increasing more quickly than our sales.’
- ‘Procurement tells me they have done a great job in marketing. How can we secure an even better deal next year? Trading is tough and we are losing ground to our main competitor. We need to make sure our money is working ever harder for us and cutting costs cannot be the answer for ever. How can we get extra value from our agencies?’
- ‘We have spent time putting written contracts in place with our agencies, but are they any good? We know what we are doing with raw materials and packaging – so much information is publicly available and our controls are so tight. I’m not so sure we can say the same about marketing services.’
Who is likely to be most successful working with us?
The clients who have had the best results after working with us share many traits:
- Prepared to implement our recommendations, so that when we audit the agency a second time all our findings are new ones
- Forward looking – understanding that only the future can be changed
- It’s not personal, it’s just business – recognising that agencies are trying to make money just like everyone else