How can you balance innovation with proven marketing tactics in your budget and forecast?

Change or die. Keeping abreast, trying and investing in innovative or new marketing strategies is key to ongoing engagement and growth. With the rapid pace of change in marketing, more and more tools have become available to facilitate this, oftentimes within your own staff. Don’t be shy to use tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney to speed up your trial of new marketing tactics and reduce costs. Test, measure, test again, then keep or toss this tactic based on results. Keep in mind, repetition will always be a factor in whatever marketing channels you use, even if non-traditional, so make sure you put in enough effort to really test the new tactic. Some channels, such as social media, need more repetition than others to drive results.

A solid innovation plan starts by grounding your perspective and understanding where you are today. When you look at where you are, don’t just look at today, but also go back and look at trend lines that can help illuminate how you got to where you are. From there, rank the areas of opportunity large and small. I find a matrix helpful for this exercise—on one side is “investment”, on the other “return”. The high/high and low/high opportunities form your prioritization list, with some items from low/low usually coming in as pre-cursor steps. Not all innovations have to be large to be impactful—incremental gains can add up and snowball into big wins, too.

Balancing innovation with proven marketing tactics in a budget and forecast requires strategic planning and smart resource allocation. Understand Your Market: Keep abreast of trends that align with your organisation’s strategic direction. This will help in choosing the right innovative tactics to experiment with.

A good place to start your next innovation cycle is to understand the consumer/customer pain points or frustrations with current market offerings. Oftentimes, breakthrough results lie within 15 degrees of current product or service trajectory. This may be corrections to current service proposition or product performance or a rejigging of the fulfilment process to go from satisfaction to pure delight. Many times when we do not seek deeper insights into our customers' frustrations and aspirations, we risk going into major investment behind innovation that fails to move the needle in terns of market acceptance and response.

Daily Rhythm : Assigning a person - One to One ownership of a KRA with a daily rhythm ?? can help drive focus The authority and responsibility to bring everyone together to drive visibility and sensitivity to a KRA with an organisation on a daily basis would help executives and teams juggling with many tasks or challenges during the day

Innovation should never stop. It's not limited to one department or a time or space. One way to put this in practice is to maintain a cross-functional learning agenda. Working across marketing, sales, product, customer success and design you can find opportunities to intentionally learn and innovate.

To get started, consider combining Old and New: Mix innovative tactics with proven ones. For instance, SEO and content marketing (proven tactics) can be combined with AI-driven personalisation or VR experiences (innovative tactics). Then as more data becomes available, you can adopt a test and learn approach. Start with small-scale tests of innovative ideas and if they yield positive results, incrementally increase your investment.

I couldn't agree more. Not setting SMART targets risks protracted pursuit of a moving target with attendant challenges of budget overshoot, team fatigue and an eventual drift into activity for activity"s sake as there wiil be no definite goal post to show what results have been achieved for all the investment. There is also the risk of diverting resources from the primary task of maintaining the current business as innovation without defined boundaries becomes the business.

Setting innovation goals doesn't need to be complex. You don't know exactly what you're creating when you're attempting to innovate, after all. Use the "attempt" as the way to quantify your innovation goals. Time or budget are easy places to start because they are quantifiable. Steer the attempts towards your desired outcome and don't stop trying new things. Put a certain percentage of all total effort towards new ideas, and allow a healthy portion to leverage what is already working.

When you have a clear assessment of your position, you can more effectively determine your investment in innovation. This may involve reallocating funds from less effective areas, enhancing successful strategies, or earmarking money for experimentation. The aim isn't mere experimentation but ensuring that these advancements align with your organization's mission and objectives, and ultimately improving your customers' lives.

With the moving world - ROI vs Relevance in the new world ?? This one will be a bit exploratory and continuous and connected to the customers and suppliers Nokia to Samsung Kodak to Digital Cameras ROI vs Relevance in the new world

Business building blocks will help here as you plan your budget and activities for the year. The wisdom is as ancient as it is sacrosanct. Determine what aspects of the business will contribute what proportions to the year's target. Once this is done, it is easier to decide how much funds should go to.innovation. also note that ROI on new introductions may have a time lag factor and this should very reflected in your plan. Complementarity is also.very key as diverse innovation projects in same operating period may dissipate resources and create inefficiencies.

Allocate Budget for Innovation: Dedicate a portion of your marketing budget to innovation. This could include new technology, platforms, or creative approaches. This ‘innovation budget’ is essentially an investment in the future.

Spend 80% of your time and resources on channels and tactics that are proven to work, and 20% on trying out new things. Be sure to actually dedicate meaningful resources, or else none of the tests will be successful and you'll never actually innovate.

Cada día es más difícil innovar, pero para conseguir mantener ese factor diferenciador se debe de asignar parte del presupuesto de marketing a esos proyectos, si queremos obtener esa atracción deseada, siendo tan importante su impacto. También en un mercado cada vez más exigente, en el que los valores, la calidad y la imagen tienen mayor importancia que nunca, es crucial incluir dentro de las estrategias de marketing y su presupuesto. De este modo, los proyectos de innovación podrán tener mayores probabilidades de aceptación en el mercado, obteniendo un mayor crecimiento de la compa?ía.

Use Data-Driven Decision Making: Follow the data. Use analytics and metrics to measure the effectiveness of both your traditional and innovative strategies. This will provide insights into what works best and where to allocate resources for maximum ROI.

Progress on innovation delivery, market response and business impact should very checked all through the execution period. A weekly review at department/product group level; monthly review at division level and quarterly review at company level would be excellent. This would ensure negatives are spotted quickly and addressed while also ensuring the business is on track to meet or exceed its targets. P&L owner must sit on the quarterly reviews.

I get the hesitation to fund marketing innovation without forecasted ROI. But we need to take some risks to stay cutting-edge. Carving out a portion of our budget explicitly for experiments, without overanalysing the returns upfront, will give us room to try new things. We can pilot ideas quickly, learn from failures, double down on what clicks. Not every swing will be a home run, but we'll get ahead by stepping up to the plate. I'm open to oversight on spend and results, but let's agree to invest more in innovation today. Go-to-market teams are often bursting with ideas, ideas based on customer insights, that could become the next big thing. Don't be afraid to carve out a bit of budget for R&D.

Innovate wisely. Not everything that works in one area of the business replicates easily in other areas, be that product divisions or geographical markets. Also ensure there is buy in to the innovation drive at all levels of management. One of the greatest sources of innovation sabotage is the leadership of the organisation or its operations. If your people don't believe in innovation, they will sabotage it to prove their point. Sometimes, all that you require is an ideation session to share insights and market understanding. A better understanding of the business and the market helps team members appreciate the need for innovation and embrace it.

Regularly review your budget and forecast to ensure it aligns with changing marketing trends and organisational objectives. Don't leave this to the wind - stay at the helm and follow the data!