Introduction
Is hiding your marketing budget a smart move, or are you just playing a weak hand?
As marketing leaders, we often guard our budgets like state secrets. But here’s the kicker—is this strategy holding back our agency partnerships from reaching their full potential?
Join host Miguel Swell, founder of Montanazo, in this eye-opening episode of Content Universe as he dives into the hot debate: should clients share their marketing budgets with agencies?
Miguel lays it all out—the pros and cons, the fears of overcharging, and the perks of streamlined proposals. Could budget transparency actually lead to stronger client-agency relationships and boost your ROI?
Get ready for some surprising insights! Tune in now to rethink your approach and discover how sharing your budget might just be the game-changer you need for your marketing strategy!
What You’ll Learn
1. Pros and cons of sharing your marketing budget with agencies.
2. How budget transparency can prevent unnecessary proposal revisions.
3. Avoiding potential agency overcharging with clear budget discussions.
4. Boosting agency collaboration to maximize bang for your buck.
5. Establishing relaxed partnerships with agencies through upfront budgets.
Episode Transcript (AI Generated)
Give your spelling mistakes a try! Hello, and welcome to the content universe. The podcast, where I have a daily or something like that update from something that I experienced today and that might help you in creating your own content or managing your agency well enough so they can create your content. My name is Miguel Swell and I have the marketing agency called Montanazo. That is a content agency. We only actually produce content. That would be podcasts, it would be video, articles, and social media posts. Now today I really want to talk about something that’s been on my mind for a quite long time and it is whether you should share, whether you as a client should share, your marketing budget with your agency. And I think there are some pros and cons to this. And I want to go through three pros and three cons. So let’s take the…should we take the cons first, I think. Now sharing your mark…its marketing budget or sharing your content budget, your production budget, I think the first con would be it just feels like something you shouldn’t do. It’s somehow…your budget somehow feel like a trade secret. It somehow feels like you’re giving away your most important secret, your best card in the deck. You’re giving away you’re, you know, the ace in your hand in that game of getting the most out of your money. It just feels like that. I personally think that’s wrong and I think if it is right, in your case, I think you should find another agency. But, yeah, I guess that it just feels wrong. And that would be the first con and that’s also why people tend not to share their budget with their agencies. Now the other one is something I think many people are nervous about, and that is that giving away your budget may give- or it’s the concern- that it may give the agency an incentive to overcharge because now they know how much money there is, they know how much money is on the table. So now they can basically just take that money, and then try and get away with doing as little as possible. Now I actually often experience the opposite. I often experience that once you know how much money we are talking about, once you know the budget, what you as an agency want to do, you still want to give the client that really luxury product, the luxury service, you want to give them a high level of service, and that actually means that oftentimes, in my experience, sharing your budget means that you will get a better price on the service that you want. But I’m sure, of course, it feels like agencies can overcharge and they can give them an incentive to do so if they know how much money there is to come. And I guess that it gives agencies an incentive to overcharge, but that’s only if it’s not a good agency. Then you should just get a new agency if you feel they do that. The last con I want to share with you in sharing your budget with your agency is, of course, the fact that it may just result in you not getting what you want. It may be the fact that your budget is too small. Maybe you can’t get that video for 2,000 kroner. Maybe you can’t get that, you know, podcast episode for 5,000 dollars or whatever it’s called. That’s a pretty expensive podcast episode. Well, I do abnormally. I’m in I’m from Denmark is the currency is a lot easier. Anyway, the fact is that, of course, if your budget is too low, sometimes you just can’t get what you want if you go down to the store and you want to buy Nike sneaks, but you only have, you know, a penny on your pocket. Well, you’re going to go away empty handed, but I will also say that sharing that budget with your marketing agency is probably may may result in you’re not getting what you want, but it also may result in you getting the next best alternative because your marketing agency, of course, is also business. So they are, of course, interested in getting access to that capital. Of course, but doing so, they would also know that they then need to find something else that is still very high value to you. Now, if we want to go through the pros as well, because I personally believe that you should share your marketing budget with your agency, and that’s not just because, well, it might be, but that’s not just because I represent an agency myself. But actually, it’s something that I do as well too, not just the agencies that I use, but also all sorts of other sub vendors that I use for all kinds of things. I think, first of all, it’s very nice to know how much money we are going to use. It’s very nice to know that, OK, this is the price we have to pay and this is what I’ll get. And I think one of the first pros here in sharing your budget is that he’s going to give you a really big shortcut on, you know, the proposals that can be sent back and forth with small changes, large changes, changes, misunderstandings, all of this. It will simply just shortcut that, you know, that red tape of going through proposals sent back and forth because once you know how much money there is, it’s also so much easier to just for the agency to just say, OK, if this is the budget, this is what we can deliver to give you the maximum value. So I think it’s the short market is quite significant, actually. And the other pro is that you will probably also experience that the marketing agency will kind of stop trying to sell themselves because they already know that there’s no more money to come for. Right. So instead of them always trying to upsell just a little bit of, push a little bit on that or push a little bit on this, you would probably get a more relaxed relationship with your agency because they know that that the money is already spent and they know that they have, you know, they’ve already got the chunk that they can have. So to say. I think that sounds a little bit harsh. But but I think it’s also I think it’s also the truth now. And that, of course, leads to the to the last point. I’ve already mentioned it a couple of times. I think the biggest pro to sharing your marketing budget with your agency is that it makes your agency it makes it very easy for the agency to design a solution where you get the most bang for the buck. You know, in my in my small agency here, I can design my solutions in hundreds of different ways. It all depends on what the client wants and what I would also recommend them doing often. So what I would recommend where they can get the most value for the money. And I think that is something that is really worth considering and is so much easier for the agency to design something that will actually create a lot of value if they know how much money they have to do it with. And I think that is probably the most important reason why why I think you should share your marketing budget with your agency or marketing marketing. But it could be content budget or the budget for the project. But at least share the budget with your agency. All right. That’s it for today. And yeah. See you next time.
