How is marketing time budgeted?

Although outsourced marketing costs might be budgeted and managed, how is in-house time accounted?

When the economy falters it is easy to take a red pen to the marketing budget and make some quick savings. It is more difficult to reduce staffing levels because of all the employment legislation. The marketing team may have to do more with less and in response set about driving down outsource costs. But the marketing budget is not just about the marketing communications costs - but in addition employment costs, facilities the marketing team occupy and of course travel and other expenses. When the complete cost is applied, staff hourly rates and overheads might well be higher than outsource costs. So why does this matter? Well one aspect highlighted in the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from SocialMediaExaminer.com is the "weekly time commitment for social media marketing."

The report found that, "A significant 59% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more and 33% for 11 or more hours weekly." It also seems "those with more years of social media experience spend more time each week conducting social media activities. For example 77% of people with 3 or more years of experience commit more than 6 hours weekly to social media marketing. And 24.5% of this crowd are spending 20 hours or more each week." As social media marketing begins to absorb significant chunks of marketing time it is perhaps appropriate to put a value to this activity so that the comparative  costs versus other marketing activities can be measured as well.

It is easy to think that doing marketing work in-house comes for free - it doesn't. Not only is there the actual cost in terms of time and fully allocated overheads, but also the missed opportunity costs. Presumably before the marketing team became so engrossed in social media they were doing something else. Perhaps that something else is no longer important, in which case it is time to review the complete marketing picture and it might be helpful to understand in-house costs just as well as outsourced costs.