Allocadia: Build, Track, and Measure your Marketing Plans with Greater Confidence And Control

Growing complexity and mounting pressure to prove impact are just two reasons why marketing is more challenging today than it has ever been before. The combination of more available channels, more informed customers, the proliferation of data, and the constant need to prove contribution to revenue and other goals has resulted in mounting pressure on marketers to become more thoughtful planners and better stewards of their budgets. But as long as they’re still stuck trying to keep track of it all on spreadsheets, they’ll never overcome these challenges. Unfortunately, that’s the status quo for 80% of organizations according to our recent survey.

Allocadia Marketing Performance Management Solution Overview

Enter Allocadia, a software-as-a-service marketing performance management (MPM) solution designed by marketers, for marketers, that offers a better way to build marketing plans, manage investments, and quantify impact on the company. Allocadia eliminates all the planning and budgeting spreadsheets and generates real-time insight into spend status and marketing ROI. By helping marketers Run Marketing more efficiently, Allocadia also helps marketers Do Marketing more effectively.

The Allocadia platform distills down into three core capabilities: Planning, Investing, and Measuring Results.

Planning with Allocadia

Let’s start with your annual planning cycle. Allocadia establishes a standardized structure and taxonomy for how you and your team will go about building your marketing plan. Whether organized by geography, business unit, product, or some combination of the above, Allocadia’s flexible structure will reflect how you want to look at your business. Simply create your desired hierarchy, then assign associated top-down spend targets. This comprises the first half of your plan, and gives clear direction to budget holders on how they should be dividing up their investments from the bottom up (the second half), in a way that fully aligns to both investment and strategic priorities.

With everyone using the same system, following the same naming conventions, and tagging things in relevant ways, you’ll now be able to roll up all the different bottom-up plans into one holistic, cross-organizational view. You’ll be able to see when and where all your programs are scheduled to drop, how much they’re going to cost, and what the expected impact on revenue is going to be.

Investing with Allocadia

Once a given period is underway, marketers have to know where they stand on expenses and available budget so they’ll know how much room they have to adapt and adjust. But if they rely on the accounting team to get them this information, they either risk waiting too long or they won’t get the data they need in the right format. That’s because Finance looks at the world in GL accounts, not programs or activities like marketers do.

Allocadia solves this dilemma by importing and automatically mapping invoice data from Finance to the right budget line items in Allocadia so marketers can instantly see what they’ve spent, what they plan to spend, and what they have left to spend. Now they can be ready for opportunities as they arise, without worrying about going over or under budget. Because once the period ends, carrying unused budget forward is typically off the table.

Measuring Results with Allocadia

The last step in the path to ROI is usually the hardest one. Being able to tie pipeline and revenue to marketing activities and campaigns is an elusive pursuit – before Allocadia. By linking CRM data directly to line items in Allocadia, we make it easy to connect the dots between your investments and the impact they’re driving. Now you can own the conversation on Marketing ROI, and demonstrate to the rest of the company that what you do is driving real, measurable impact on the business. With powerful attribution modeling and details on ROI by objective, you’ll be better informed to decide where to spend your next marketing dollar.

Run Marketing Better So You Can Do Marketing Better

From revenue modeling tools to scenario planning and and configurable tagging, Allocadia includes a wide range of capabilities to help you Run Marketing with more rigor, consistency, and predictability. It will save you time and effort in planning and budgeting so you can focus more energy on devising and executing brilliant marketing campaigns that drive optimal results.

Allocadia by the numbers*:

• Average time saved on planning & budgeting: 40-70%
• Amount of reallocated underperforming investments: 5-15%
• Net improvement on Marketing ROI: 50-150%
• Payback period on Allocadia investment: Under 9 months

*As reported by Allocadia customers

Marketing Performance Management Best Practices

Optimizing your marketing performance is a journey through five stages of maturity. We’ve summarized these stages and carefully outlined how to progress through each stage in our Marketing Performance Maturity Model. In it you will learn to identify where you are today, and what you need to do to progress to the next level.

Here is what the view looks like from the top:

1. Establish a Marketing Center of Excellence that attracts, trains, and retains the best talent in the business, including people with strong data and analytical capabilities.
2. Align your efforts with those in Sales and Finance, to the point where Finance is a trusted advisor and Sales understands how and where Marketing contributes to the top line.
3. Set clear, attainable, SMART objectives at every level of the Marketing organization, and substitute ‘vanity’ metrics like web site visitors and email opens with harder metrics like cost-per-lead, pipeline contribution, and ROI.
4. Eliminate data silos, standardize around a fixed taxonomy and framework, and establish a single source of truth for marketing spend and impact. Harness your data for prescriptive action.
5. Invest in a marketing technology stack that employs the latest value-added tools, with a clear map of where you intend to go with your stack as the business expands. At the core will be your CRM, marketing automation, and MPM solutions.

Allocadia serves B2B companies across a range of sectors including Technology, Finance & Banking, Manufacturing, Business Services, and Travel & Hospitality. The ideal profile customer has a team of 25 or more marketers and/or a complex, multi-channel marketing strategy often spanning several geographies, products, or business units.

Marketing Performance Management Case Study – Allocadia

The financial services business is fast-moving and extremely competitive, especially when you serve the mass market. At Charles Schwab, this translates into a large and fluid marketing budget with frequent reallocations and more than 95 cost centers. To make matters more challenging, the team at Charles Schwab holds itself to a very high spend standard, aiming for a target of -2% to +0.5% of budget.

Allocadia helped this large team of marketers get off spreadsheets and consolidate their marketing spend in a single, unified, standardized system that preserved their need to be flexible and responsive to change. With a simpler, faster budgeting process and better visibility into investments, marketers at Charles Schwab are better stewards of the marketing budget and better storytellers of their impact on the business.

Download the Case Study

Five Steps to Growing Your Marketing Performance