In Marketing - Go Big or Cut Big

Every marketing dollar counts and should be spent wisely.  Return on marketing investment should always be measured.  Cutting a marketing campaign's budget by some small sliver, say 10%, makes no sense at all.  Any campaign not working should be cut all together.  Any campaign delivering the desired return on investment -- should be increased.  

Here are a two thoughts and one exception you might consider when evaluating marketing spend:

Go Big:  Double anything that is returning above your baseline performance threshold.  Graduate from measuring overall ROI to ROI from incremental new spend.  Grow systematically until the ROI curve flattens.

Fail Fast:  It should only take a few weeks to know if a campaign is never going to get to the baseline.  As soon as you know a project is failing -- kill it off.  The key is to make sure people know that good people can have failing ideas, and separate the campaign failure from person failure.  A list of new ideas to try with whatever budget is left often helps here.

One Exception:  When building a platform, some of the foundational levels may be necessary for the future performance of the platform.  An investment in certifications may enable bigger deals or higher margin deals.  All of the warning flags should go off when you find yourself justifying poor current performance in the hope of greater future performance -- but some campaigns should survive if they are necessary steps into the future.

So the next time you sit down with your budget, resist the urge to trim around the edges.  Go big or cut big.