Rachel Reeves's Budget and Its Impact on Marketers
- Jade Faulconbridge
- Nov 4, 2024
- 3 min read
At the end of October 2024, the Government’s budget was revealed, in a bid to reduce the “black hole” of finances. The budget, as we’re sure you’re aware, will result in £40 billion of increased taxes in the long term, and has been targeted at high wealth individuals and corporations.
National Insurance increases for businesses, and a reduction in the threshold means that the cost of each employee is going to increase. There are already predictions of reductions in bonuses, pay increases, and hiring. What’s also likely to happen, is the business will look to find alternative ways to either increase its income, or decrease its outgoings - something to offset the new costs to ensure there’s minimal impact on EBIDTA (or their bottom line).
So what does this mean for marketers?
Taking a positive spin on this, it means you could end up in a position of power. Being able to demonstrate to the business that investing £x more into marketing will deliver an increase of £y profit. This does rely, however, on you having evidence and a historic track record of delivering, plus a strong relationship with your CFO. Unfortunately, from our experience, very few marketing departments have invested in the operations needed to make these statements.
The next best thing would be to look at how you grow results by using what you’ve already got. This means understanding your current set up, your numbers and your improvement opportunities. Some questions to get you started:
What’s your lead conversion rate? Where’s the biggest drop off in the process?
How engaged are sales with your leads? How can you influence this?
How useful is your data? Any upsell/cross sell opportunities? How about renewals?
What automations have you got in place, what else can be implemented?
What upskilling does your team need to drive extra efficiencies?
Is there anything that’s worked elsewhere you can dust off or “lift and shift”?
When was the last time you renegotiated contracts?
For marketing leaders there’s usually one big factor impacting their ability to do all of the above, and that’s time. Time to manage those stakeholders, manage the team, manage the day to day, build a strategy - sometimes it’s just not possible to get into the minutiae of what’s happening operationally. The issue a lack of time is that it impacts your ability to scale or grow.
How can you overcome this issue?
Naturally a lot of leaders lean into the fact that they need more expertise, more headcount - more people who know what they’re doing, who can be given a problem and they’ll get on with it. The issue is, that’s unlikely to happen in the next year. With increasing employee costs a lot of marketing teams will be lucky to retain headcount, never mind increase it.
The alternatives are to push resources externally, whether that’s to up skill your staff, utilising more from the agencies you’ve already got, or finding specialised individuals. What you’ll want to do is make sure you’re able to have those CFO conversations - to justify every penny that’s spent, and the results of doing so. That can be hard when a lot of marketing takes time to set up, test, and deliver. And a lot of agencies are focused on digital channels, whether that's SEO, PPC, or overall lead generation. Not only do these take time but they tend to be short term focused, rather than long term.
But wouldn't it be great if, within 2 months you had an idea of what's broken, how to fix it, and how to contribute to the extra revenue required in 2025? The best way to do this is by looking at your marketing operations.
If operational understanding or analysis isn’t a skill set in house, or you’re simply looking for a quick audit to be able to prioritise next year, send us an email. We can work alongside your team to understand where there are hidden efficiencies, and provide recommendations and prioritisations. And you can focus on all of the other priorities in the meantime.
