DOWNTURN SEES MARKETING BUDGETS SLASHED BY UP TO 30%
09-03-09
Businesses are funnelling dollars away from traditional marketing and investing in digital marketing
Sydney – 6 March 2008 – The economic downturn is seeing traditional marketing budgets slashed by typically 30% with businesses funnelling their dollars away from branding, advertising and trade shows and investing in digital marketing because it can be measured and tracked said Joseph Payne, Eloqua Corporation CEO who this week visited Australia to chair the CEO Roundtable “Creating and Sustaining Business Growth” at Ernst & Young.
Mr Payne was encouraged to see that Australian CEOs have a more worldly view of the financial crisis than their European counterparts, who until recently did not expect such a severe downturn. He said Australians seem “expectant of the downturn despite the fact that they have not yet felt the same pain that U.S. and European companies are now feeling”.
“When things go bad by far the most obvious cut back we have seen beside jobs is to the marketing and sales budgets with businesses cutting typically 30% to save costs. However, we are seeing a shift of business dollars to online marketing with business purchasing search terms, raw lead sources and technology to generate and manage pipeline leads,” Mr Payne said.
“In these challenging times, CEOs need to stop the blame game between sales and marketing. They need to create a sustained competitive advantage in their business operations and they will do this by focusing on building and managing their lead pipelines across both sales and marketing . We must also recognise that people’s buying habits have changed – both consumer and business ─ and that the marketing and sales functions need to adapt to accommodate this.”
Mr Payne said that companies who are focused on revenue generation during these challenging times are building their pipeline processes and technology as opposed to brand.
Marketing Decisions CEO William McNamara, representing Eloqua in Australia, said marketing solutions like Eloqua are prominent in B2B markets but are increasingly finding applications in B2C markets. The Eloqua demand generation software is used by many of the fastest growing companies in the world today, who continue to thrive despite the downturn. Eloqua itself is forecasting 35% growth in the next 12 months because “marketers are continuing to switch priorities to focus on lead generation”.
Eloqua serves clients across many verticals including IT&T, financial and insurance, and professional services. He said that the Eloqua solution is deployed in approximately 25 companies in Australia such as American Express, IBM, Ernst & Young, VMWare, Seagate, and Schroders.
“These companies recognise that in times like this you would be a brave chief marketing officer reporting on a new branding initiative to the board rather than describing, via numbers, how many new leads you are qualifying for sales to convert, and how many have indeed converted.
“Eloqua provides a solution to capture what it describes as ‘Digital Body Language’ . Prospects today universally conduct their own early vendor evaluation online and so the traditional approach of a sales representative reading body language face to face cannot be leveraged. Instead, Eloqua provides an online digital equivalent by monitoring and tracking prospects as they conduct their buying journey.
“It can track individuals on line, record their responses to campaigns, automate reactions, score and eventually qualify them with a full profile to pass to sales staff. It provides multi-channel communications via email, direct mail, SMS, personalised web pages, RSS, and it fully automates and manages campaigns and interfaces with sales automation systems (CRM) such as Salesforce.com, Oracle, Microsoft.”
Mr McNamara said tough economic times have witnessed a “shift from broad spend on advertising to specific measurable programs that generate leads” . end
About Marketing Decisions
Marketing Decisions is a specialist B2B Marketing Agency established to help business clients to implement their growth and retention strategies. Marketing Decisions staff come from both Sales and Marketing backgrounds and their focus is on binding these disciplines together effectively in a closed loop process to generate and convert quality leads. Marketing Decisions represents Eloqua in Australia and deploys their software for clients to help maintain and grow their revenue. See www.marketingdecisions.com.au
About Eloqua Corporation
Eloqua is the leading provider of demand generation applications and best-practice expertise for business marketers. Eloqua's mission is to make its customers the most effective marketers on Earth. Thousands of customers from businesses like Cognos, Dow Jones, Seagate and Sybase rely on Eloqua's products and services to execute, automate and measure programs that generate revenue. By using Eloqua to integrate key marketing and lead management processes and read their buyers' "Digital Body Language", these customers improve the quality and quantity of sales leads, increase efficiency and accelerate the selling process. Eloqua is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, with offices in Toronto, London, Singapore and throughout North America.
