Siebel Marketing User Guide > Planning and Budgeting for Marketing > Creating a Marketing Plan >

Developing and Tracking Budgets for a Marketing Plan

You can use marketing plans to develop budgets. As you implement tactics, you can track the financial status of the marketing plan. A marketing plan contains financial details that provide visibility across your company's marketing spending. The following list includes some of the financial details you might want to use:

• Authors of the plan can add the expected cost of the plan and owners of the budget can allocate money to the plan.
• An associated group of budget requests allows tactic owners to send requests for funding through an approval process.
• A list of tactics, including their requested and allocated budgets, can be associated with the plan.
• Financial summary fields can calculate the forecast and actual revenue and expenses for all the tactics in the plan.

Use the marketing plan to review and approve budgets, to forecast expenses and revenues, and to record actual expenses and revenues for all the programs, campaigns, and events in your organization. The marketing plan provides the following categories of values for managing marketing budgets:

• Requested and Assigned Budget. The Plan Tactics view tab contains two fields that show how much money the plan owner has requested (Requested Budget) and how much money has been approved by the budget owner (Assigned Budget). These fields can be edited.
• Forecast and Actual Expenses. The total forecast and actual expenses across all tactics in the marketing plan.
  • Forecast Expenses. Total forecast expense value for all expense records associated with the tactics (programs, campaigns, and events) in the marketing plan.
  • Actual Expenses. Total actual expense value for all expense records associated with the tactics in the marketing plan.

    Table 4 identifies the location of expense data for each type of tactic.

    Table 4.  Expense Source Fields (Forecast and Actual)

    Tactic Type	Where to find the input data
    Programs	Programs screen > Plan > Expenses Campaigns screen > Plan > Expenses (for campaigns associated to programs)
    Standalone Campaigns	Campaigns screen > Plan > Expenses
    Event Plans	Events screen > Event Plans > Plan > Expenses
    Events	Events screen > Plan > Expenses

• Forecast and Actual Revenue. The total actual expenses and revenues across all tactics in the marketing plan. The Plan Details view tab includes a Financial Summary section summarizing total revenues for all the tactics in the plan.

  Table 5 identifies the location of revenue data for each type of tactic.

  Table 5.  Revenue Goals Source Fields (Forecast and Actual)

  Tactic Type	Where to find the input data
  Programs	Programs screen > Plan view tab > Goals link
  Campaigns	Campaigns screen > Plan view tab > Goals link
  Event Plans	Events screen > Event Plans link > Plans view tab > Revenue link

  • Forecast Revenue. A total of forecast values for revenue goals such as forecast amount for all tactics in the marketing plan.
  • Actual Revenue. The Total Order Revenue for all orders associated with a tactic using values obtained from the Siebel Analytics Server after the Siebel Data Warehouse is populated from the Siebel transactional database. If the value from the Analytics Server is not integrated into your environment, the value is blank.

To assign requested and assigned budgets to marketing plan tactics

1. Navigate to the Marketing Plans screen.
2. In the Marketing Plans list, query for the appropriate marketing plan.
3. Click the Plan Tactics view tab and verify that you have associated your targeted programs, events, and stand-alone campaigns.

   For information on associating plan tactics, see Creating Plan Tactics and Associating Plan Tactics with Marketing Plans.

4. From the Plan Tactics Menu, select Columns Displayed.

   Review the Available Columns list. Depending on your business needs, you might need to add columns to the list. For example, if you developed forecast values, you might want to add columns that contain forecast amounts.

5. In the Columns Displayed dialog box, move Requested Budget and Assigned Budget to the Selected Columns list and click Save.
6. In the appropriate column, type the requested or assigned amount.

   If you developed forecast expenses for the tactic, you can verify the plan is within budget by comparing your assigned budget to the forecast expenses.