Introducing Budget Board in Zoho Marketing Plus

Introducing Budget Board in Zoho Marketing Plus

Hey everyone,

Marketing Plus enables marketers to collaborate more effectively and manage their marketing efforts, from campaign planning to execution to performance measurement—all on one platform.

One of the most challenging yet critical tasks for marketing teams is to plan their marketing budget and accurately track all their expenditures. Maintaining proper records of all these marketing expenses in a centralized place is itself a challenge. But what if there were a better way to manage all the marketing expenses in one place?


What is Budget Board? 

Budget Board is a space for marketing teams to plan their marketing budgets, add and track marketing expenditures, and make data-driven decisions.

Marketing teams can strategize budget planning for their different brands and delve into detailed time-based allocations, including yearly, quarterly, or monthly plans for different brands.

They can also plan marketing budgets based on different marketing projects, such as a mobile app promotion or a new product launch, and manage the spending for various marketing activities like email campaigns, paid ads, and events.

Why is a marketing budget planning tool important? 

Most marketing teams manage their marketing expenses across multiple spreadsheets and often end up losing track of them. While there are budgeting and expense management tools available in the market, they aren't designed specifically to suit the needs of marketers, nor are they connected to the platforms where actual marketing activities are executed. This often results in one or more of the following problems:
  • The marketing team may end up spending more than the allocated budget.
  • They may be uncertain about how their marketing money is being used.
  • They may lack access to deeper insights, such as geographical marketing expenses, objective-based marketing expenses, activity-based expenses, and others, which hinders marketers' abilities to make data-driven decisions. 
We built Budget Board to address this problem and to help marketing teams plan their budgets, log all their expenses, and categorize them. Budget Board also provides a warning when spending exceeds the allocated budget, ensuring you always stay on track.

How does Budget Board work? 

Let's look at a detailed example:

Step 1: The marketing head determines and allocates a budget for the brand and its different marketing projects.

Step 2: Aware of their allocated budgets, team members can then strategize their marketing activities accordingly.

For instance, if the marketing head has allocated a net budget of $50,000 for a mobile app promotion project and the marketing team conducts multiple activities, such as event marketing and running paid advertisements online, the expenses could be added to the system as follows:

Project: Mobile app promotion
  • Activity 1: Trade show
  • Expense Name: Venue rental
  • Expenses: $15,000

  • Activity 2: Paid ads
  • Expense Name: Adwords
  • Expenses: $2,000


The system stores the data and automatically categorizes all the added expenses.

Additionally, marketers can also upload documents such as invoices or receipts for each expense.

Step 4: At any given time, you can access a comprehensive view of your marketing expenditures through various views and gain all the information you need in few clicks.



We hope this has significant benefits for marketing teams who are looking to manage their marketing expenses more effectively. 

Please read the help document for more information on how you can use budget board for your business. 

Feel free to share any questions, suggestions, or feedback in the comments.