I would like to build a more robust approach for budget measurement and compliance in Marketo by providing a standardized set of custom fields that could provide more detail in budget analysis. While I would expect to have some of these as fully custom, I think others are widely applicable and may make sense to be in the core product. Some examples of these would include:
- Spend Type: Categorizes the primary expense of the campaign (e.g., 'Media Spend', 'Agency Fees', 'Content Creation', 'Sponsorship'). This allows for a more granular analysis of where the budget is going and the ROI on different types of spend.
- Budget Source / Team: Tracks which team's budget is funding the campaign (e.g., 'Corporate Marketing', 'Product Marketing', 'Field Marketing'). This is essential for leaders to see how different teams are performing with their allocated spend.
- Vendor / Payee: A field to specify the vendor who will receive the payment (e.g., 'Google', 'LinkedIn', 'Gartner', 'Acme Agency'). This allows you to run reports on your total spend by vendor across all campaigns, which is invaluable for negotiating contracts.
- Invoice / PO Number: A text field to record the associated invoice or Purchase Order number for the expense. This creates a direct link between your marketing plan and the financial transaction records, making audits and expense verification straightforward.
Implementing these sorts of additional fields would turn Program Costs from a legacy piece of information to one that's more central to Marketo setup and ROI; please consider expanding out the feature in this way or with similar functionality.
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