If you don’t plan to measure, you can’t measure the plan.

This is the time of year when every marketer is focused on budgeting, resourcing, and strategic planning for the year ahead. One of the key questions we’ve been asked by customers is, “How much should I plan to spend on data and analytics?”

There are a handful of answers to this question, but here are a couple of points for consideration.

First, leading firms – those making the most of their data – spend between 20-25% of their marketing budget on data and analytics, based on our in-person conversations with them at the most recent MarTech East conference. That’s a broad bucket that encompasses data collection, processing, and operationalization, but it’s still a decent benchmark for what the market leaders do. If you want to be like the industry leaders on stage, talking about your data wins, that’s what the budget looks like.

For average firms, the CMO Survey compiled a list of spending by industry on data and analytics in the most recent August 2019 CMO Survey. Answers ranged from a low of 4.94% in Retail and Wholesale to a high of 10% in Communications and Media. When asked how much of their marketing budget they plan to spend on analytics in the next 3 years, those same CMOs offered a range from a low of 7% in Mining to a high of 17.5% in Energy.

So where should your spend be? At a bare minimum to avoid falling farther behind, it’s reasonable to say that 10 cents on the dollar of your marketing budget should go to data and analytics.

Want to catch up to the leaders? Plan for 20 cents on the dollar.

Want to seize the advantage and race to the head of the pack? Plan on 25 cents on the dollar.

With correct resourcing, you’ll not only be able to measure the impact of your plan, you’ll also maximize the impact of every dollar you plan to spend.

This week’s Bright Idea is a video version of this week’s podcast episode. Join the Trust Insights team and Albane Flamant from Talkwalker in an on-site conversation about where social media is going in 2020.

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In the rear view this week, we look at some of the basic stats around news releases and press releases from the third quarter. In Q3:

Companies issued 86,126 press releases, an average of 957 releases per day, or one release every 90 seconds
The median impact of a release on the Goldstein Scale was 3 / 10, where 10 is the maximum impact on readers and 0 is the minimum impact
The median number of times a press release was mentioned in any other citation was 8 times.
The median emotional valence (tone) of releases as 2 on a scale of -20 to +20, representing negative and positive emotional writing
The most popular newswires? PR Newswire, with 22.3% of releases, Globe Newswire with 10% of releases, and Press Release Point with 9.3% of releases
Only 49.5% of releases were distributed through a wire service; 50.5% were released directly by companies as content in their newsrooms

Key takeaways: press releases continue to be a high-velocity, low-impact marketing method. When you consider that the average press release’s cost is anywhere from $30 to $1,200 (depending on the service and features), marketers spent a minimum of $860,000 in Q3 on releases. Was that the best use of funds? Only your organization would know, but we’d urge you, if you do use press releases, to be vigilant about tracking with modern analytics software.

Methodology: Trust Insights extracted 86,126 news releases from the Google News database, filtered by 30 terms such as “press release” and “news release”. The study timeframe was July 1, 2019 to September 30, 2019. The date of extraction was October 8, 2019. All metrics such as the Goldstein Scale, tone, and citations were provided by Google.

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week.

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SEO, Google, and Paid Media

Business and Leadership

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