The most effective way to use your remaining budget for insights or analytics

When yearend is approaching, brand and insights managers look into summarising their annual spends.  We frequently found ourselves a remaining budget and rush to use it in order to close the budget in time.  Occasionally, with less time in the last quarter, the project or data commissioned is not aligned to the following year strategy.  Thus, results are disregarded and have little to no impact to the business.  The question is how we can make sure we spend our remaining insights and analytics budget in the most efficient way.  This article offers considerations and tips which can help you spend your budget effectively.

Yearend Budget Considerations

What you can use the leftover budget for depends largely on the amount of the budget itself and your needs.  However, there are things worth considering when it comes to making a small budget work harder at the yearend.

1. Start early

It is always useful to determine early if you are likely to have a remaining budget and how much you would estimate it would be.  This will help you gauge the size of project you can purchase.  If you work for a UK office, a small budget could mean a short quantitative survey or a few follow up calls with HCPs to validate quantitative results.  If your budget stretches further, you may be able to get insights wrap up including analytics, data and market research you have done for the year or assessment / validation of data sources for market performance.

2. Your needs for the brand

If there is an unanswered question that keeps popping up at brand team meetings or you consider to get some insights work done but have been putting it off, list them out.  You may be surprised about what you can get.  More importantly, consider what you will use the results for and when.  Some brands may have planned large internal conferences at the beginning of the next year; thus, completing salesforce optimization could present useful results to discuss with sales team. 

3. Your budget is too small for the needs

This is unsurprisingly common and there are a few options you can do to turn your wishful project into a realistic one.  Firstly, consider cross-checking with insights team if you are a brand manager (and vice versa).  They may be able to support your brand and absorb some of the cost if your project is more than your remaining budget. 

Secondly, get competitive quotes from two to three suppliers.  This is a common practice for large projects but it will definitely be useful if you also do it for small projects.  You are likely to have a successful project if you select a good and reliable supplier.  Once you have selected one, negotiate!  Remember that suppliers have yearend targets and thus are hungry for business.  They know that you are likely to have a small remaining budget and want to close their annual revenue as high as possible.  With a slight flexibility of the project scope and a few rounds of negotiation, you may be able to achieve a good deal. 

Thirdly, consider trying a small agency at this time.  They are often more flexible and willing to negotiate.  Your project is also likely to be managed by directors rather than junior members in the team.  With the small size, there is less risk associated to it.  The chance is that you may have found a new, good and reliable partner that can add much value to your work.

Lastly, you can also extend the duration of the project to the beginning of following year to use part of the new year budget on the same project if necessary.  Most if not all suppliers are willing to support with flexible arrangement of invoices for the work they do so long as it is compliant to your and their standard of practice. 

4. Think out of the box

We usually follow the standard way of doing things because it is familiar to us. However, it is certainly worthy to think out of the box when it comes to yearend budget.  For an analytics project that you do not have an internal capacity for and are thinking of hiring a contractor to come in and work for 2-3 weeks, it may be much more efficient if you get analytics experts from a small agency to complete.   There can be other ways and methodologies to carry out the same task; many of which can save time and deliver results on an agreed budget.

Final considerations

The most important thing in this process is to ensure that what you spend is important and needed for the brand.  However much your remaining budget is, it can only be well spent if it is aligned with brand strategy to make an impact on business performance. Remember there is always an opportunity to create value for the business with a limited budget!

For more information around brand strategy, competitive analytics and business optimisation, please visit: www.andersen-perez.com