Imagine you have 45 minutes to prepare a marketing pitch for a $200,000 job. The client has allocated $1,000,000 in funds to a single campaign and your agency desperately wants this job. You put together a highly creative, inventive campaign complete with video, social media, and radio.
Yet in your hurried frenzy of creative inspiration you forgot to consider one crucial aspect—the numbers. The audience looks you in the eye and calmly asks what you have budgeted for each channel. No answer. What’s your expected ROI per channel? No answer. When can we expect to break even with this campaign? No answer. The awful realization sets in that your plan has gone up in smoke.
Never forget that no matter how ingenious the plan is, without numbers, it’s nothing. Marketing is an art, a science—and at the end of the day, a business. If the numbers don’t make sense, there is no plan.