Marketing Budget Savings In A Challenging Economy
When the pressure is on to look for savings in all aspects of marketing, one area that is often overlooked is the cost of sourcing, ordering, storing and delivering your branded gifts and collaterals to the end consumer.
Marketing functions of leading institutions are looking into that area to generate savings that either can be put into better use with higher ROI (such as social and digital marketing) or simply conserves cash in these uncertain times. Most seasoned marketing professionals would know that on average, the marginal savings that can be squeezed out of pure production through a disciplined bidding process ranges from 8-15% sustainably; but the savings that a marketing team can achieve by streamlining the procurement workflow and the management of branded gifts and collaterals is likely to be in the range of 15-25%.
One of the often-overlooked areas in which we have extensive first-hand experience is how a company manages the whole marketing operation surrounding their diverse range of branded gifts. To drive down unit costs, one tends to over-order, especially in good times, which results in inventory and worse still, dated inventory. The cost of managing that inventory or overstock keeps growing and a lot of that goes unaccounted for in the form of space, valuable executive time and write-offs due to loss, damage and obsolescence. In these transformative times where every dollar counts, it is vital for businesses not to just negotiate the best deal at every purchase, but to breakdown the complexity of the workflow by building automated systems that optimise efficiency gains and improve cost-effectiveness. An executive direction to systemise and automate marketing as a function is the primary reason why we at Icicle get called upon to share our experience in developing and implementing proven strategies to keep our clients competitive in this dynamic world.
In addition to significant savings on hard costs, upon a proper implementation of a streamlined workflow for managing branded gifts and collaterals, our clients have benefited from more accurate forecasting in their needs for marketing production through better visibility of consumption level; 24/7 access to a real-time workflow platform on their mobile phones, which is perfect for work-from-home arrangements; significant improvements on team productivity by minimising correspondences, and allowing them to focus on managing customer relationships and creating marketing campaigns, that have direct positive impact on the company’s competitiveness.
For a free consulting session, please get in touch with your relationship manager at ICICLE or info@iciclegroup.com
Daisy Pang is a Director of Enterprise Client at ICICLE Group, with over 8 years of experience managing marketing production campaigns for our enterprise clients. Daisy is experienced in identifying what the client needs and formulating plans and solutions to help the brands develop.