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How Can Marketers and Accountants Work Together

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Michael Deane
How Can Marketers and Accountants Work Together

There is an inherent tension between marketing teams and a company’s accounting department; marketing is an expensive process which is based on creativity, whereas accountants are tasked with saving the company money and making sure all investments are sound and commercially viable.

Accounting is a source of financial accountability, whereas marketers attempt to scale up business operations through exciting changes and connecting with a company’s audience. Despite this tension, accounting and marketing departments can work harmoniously if they put aside their differences and try to achieve financially viable solutions which best benefit the company.

There are plenty of ways to do this, and through setting a viable marketing budget and looking at the long-term benefits, marketing and accounting professionals can work constructively to help the business succeed in the long-term.

Setting a Marketing Budget

It is probably the accounting team which has ultimate control over the marketing department’s budget. This budget will have been set with the company’s overall financial situation in mind, and will include a financially viable amount of money which can be utilized for marketing campaigns. The accounting team will also be the one to settle on the bank account type – and some of the money marketing so desperately wants may not be readily available.

If your marketing budget is a little smaller than you might have hoped, it is probably for a reason; the accounting department are not trying to curb your creativity! You should work closely with the accounting department in the long-term, so that the marketing budget they set best reflects both the needs of the company and the desires of the marketing department.

Produce Marketing Reports

It can be hard for the accounting department to set a proper budget if you do not provide them with reports. If the accountants only have data about the firm as a whole to work with, how can they possibly produce a tailored marketing budget which has taken into account marketing data?

Marketing reports may include gross sales per campaign or website traffic coming from a particular marketing campaign. Producing these reports is not a difficult task, many online marketing platforms produce this data for you, so you should make these readily available to the accounting department.

Consider the Long-Term Benefits

As an accounting department, you should be thinking about the long-term benefits of setting a marketing budget which gives plenty of opportunity for strong, compelling and engaging marketing campaigns to be produced which reach a widespread audience.

If you are not allocating enough money or are erring too much on the side of caution when it comes to the marketing budget, you could prevent the production of some truly amazing marketing campaigns which could produce a massive return on the initial investment. It is a balancing act, but do not be afraid to allocate a little extra cash if this will not harm the company.

Produce Realistic Projections

A marketing department can easily get carried away with their claims of unrealistic marketing campaigns and make overly optimistic statements about how much revenue or return on investment an advertising campaign will make. In contrast, an accounting department is responsible for producing forecasts on company revenue and for creating projections to anticipate profit.

The marketing department can help the accounting department by not making unrealistic claims and work together to produce realistic projections which are both financially viable and realistic. Sure, it is easy to get carried away when your job is particularly creative, but marketing departments should take a few moments to ask themselves whether spending X amount of money on project Y is a realistic prospect and whether this will produce a strong return in reality.

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Michael Deane
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