Marketing budgets: the most wonderful (any) time of the year!

• Author: Hoders, Jeremy

It happens every year. Often, shortly after Labor Day, when the air begins to turn crisp, marketing professionals all across the country go missing. Suddenly, their friendly open-door policies are transformed and those doors shut. They make calls to accounting, marketing partners, COOs and firm administrators to get information to the marketing team. It's budgeting season, and marketers are scrambling to show results for this year so that they can secure as many dollars for the projects they need to and want to do in the future year or years.

The Problems with Budgeting

Recently, Moire Marketing Partners spoke with several LMA members to find out about their challenges and strategies when it comes to budgeting. Nathalie Daum, director of marketing for Lewis and Roca, pointed to four main difficulties most law firm marketers face when budgeting:

1) Lack of an existing budget and/or little to no institutional knowledge as to how money was allocated to marketing in the past. (Believe it or not, there are many firms out there that still do not have a formal marketing budget.)

2) Younger marketers who come up through the ranks within a firm say they receive little to no mentoring on how to budget or approach the task.

3) Senior marketers who move to a firm find that their new firm approaches budgeting in a far different manner than they are accustomed. As a result, even experienced marketers are faced with spending long hours getting up to speed learning how the firm allocates its budget and what department is responsible for budget line-items.

4) Some marketing professionals who are new to the legal profession are inexperienced with the unique ins and outs of the partnership model and institutional expenditures inherent in most firm's marketing budgets.

Clearly budgets can be extremely frustrating. So, how do you get started? (And if you think February is too early to start, keep reading.)

Develop a Strategy

"CMOs who have developed successful marketing budgets have one thing in common--they base their budgets on a marketing strategy," according to Jonathan Fitzgarrald, director of marketing for Greenberg Glusker. Moire's own examination of the budgeting habits of LMA members reflects Fitzgarrald's belief.

We have found that most CMOs didn't adapt what was done before them, nor did they force their own marketing cultures onto their law firms. They did their best to learn from their predecessors, colleagues and key stakeholders within the firm...