IB Marketing Budget Planning

Most startups waste 40% of their marketing budget. (Proxima, Part of Bain) After auditing hundreds of start ups, I consistently find the same pattern - money being thrown at new channels before optimising what is already in motion. Here's how the best founders make their marketing budgets work harder: 1. Fix what you have before buying what you don't Common pitfalls: • Chasing shiny new channels • Adding more campaigns when current ones underperform • Focusing only on acquisition, ignoring retention What works: → Audit existing campaigns daily/weekly → Look for conversion leaks in your funnel → Test improvements to what you already own first 2. Reallocate ruthlessly Easy traps: • Setting budgets monthly or quarterly • Spreading spend evenly across channels • Slow decision-making on budget shifts What works: → Move money to winners immediately  → Kill underperforming channels completely → Create a "test and learn" budget separate from core channels 3. Simplify your message Typical challenges: • Clever, complex messaging • Different value props across channels • Feature-focused communication What works: → One clear message that solves one clear problem → Consistent value proposition everywhere → Benefits-first language that speaks to pain points The most successful startups I work with don't have bigger budgets. They just refuse to waste a single pound on marketing that isn't working. What's your best tip for stretching a startup marketing budget? Share below 👇 ♻️ Found this helpful? Repost to share with your network. ⚡ Want more content like this? Hit follow Maya Moufarek.

Budgeting season starts and someone says "let's just add 3% across the board." Then someone else pushes back: "no, this year we justify every line from scratch." Both are about to make the process harder than it needs to be. The problem is rarely Excel skills. It's using one technique for every line item, when different costs call for different methods. I've led 11 annual budgeting processes at P&G, Unilever, and Squarespace. Here's how I decide which technique goes where. 📌 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗮𝗱𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 (use sparingly) Best for stable, predictable costs like rent, insurance, and utilities. Take last year's number, adjust for inflation or any known change, and move on. It's fast. But the trap is using it everywhere. It's shallow, takes historicals for granted, and it rewards sandbagging. People spend money on unnecessary things at year-end so their baseline stays high for next year. 📌 𝗭𝗲𝗿𝗼-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 (use selectively) Best for discretionary spend like marketing, consulting, and T&E. You justify every dollar from zero. That's how you find the 20% of activities driving 80% of the results. The cost is time. Run it on stable line items, and you'll burn hundreds of hours for almost no payoff, so save it for the spend that's actually worth interrogating. 📌 𝗗𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 (use wherever you can) Best for revenue and any variable cost tied to a business driver. You link inputs to outputs. When your model says 10% more site visitors means X more revenue, you're ready when actuals come in differently. And they always do. You already know which lever to pull. What it needs is data. You have to know the real relationship between the driver and the outcome. That's what brings you closer to the business and strategic decisions. So the call is simple, even if the work isn't. Match the technique to the cost. Stable costs only need a percentage bump. Use zero-based scrutiny for discretionary spend where you know there is fat to trim. And anything that moves with a business driver should be modeled as one. Which technique does your company overuse? Tell me below 👇 -Christian Wattig 📌 P.S. A forecasting method I haven't mentioned: 𝗨𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗜. I'll cover that in-depth at my upcoming free live training. You'll walk away with a step-by-step process not only to create a forecast with AI, but also to test its validity. Register here for "From ERP Data to AI-Ready Forecasts" (free): https://lnkd.in/gN_HyMqJ

We're spending $3.3M on marketing in 2026 at Storylane (up 10% from 2025). I've always believed in being transparent with what we do, so here's the full breakup: → $1.2M - Paid Ads Same as last year. LinkedIn $500K, Google/Bing $500K, Meta $200K (new). LinkedIn CPMs up 30-40%. Testing B2C channels to reach B2B audiences at lower cost. → $250K - Influencer Program Cut from $500K. Used only $200K last year. Working great but scaling profitably is hard. Maintaining core LinkedIn portfolio, testing B2B creators on TikTok/Instagram for virality. → $550K - Conferences & Events Up from $400K. Betting big on IRL. Sponsoring, speaking, recording customer content, hosting side events. Good pre/post-event ops. Flywheel is real - brand grows, booth traffic increases, meetings get better. → $250K - Community Sponsorships Down from $300K. Still supporting CMO, pre-sales, product marketing communities. Investing $350K to build our own community instead. Forward bet on owned community. → $200K - SEO Same as last year. Most efficient PLG channel. Used 1/4 last year (LLM SEO uncertainty). Clear on plan now. Goal: 2x traffic, 2x PLG revenue. → $200K - Brand + Product Marketing 2x from last year. Highest organic ROI. Product marketing creates content - new use cases, demo automation progress, multi-product future. Brand handles distribution through pattern interrupt experiments, campaigns, AI-led visual campaigns. Building recall, loyalty, education. Building brand for RepX (our newest product). → $250K - Outbound Up from $200K. Took two years to figure out. Last year break-even, end of year very profitable. 2 full time SDRs focused on expansions + 1 SDR agency for net new. Big quota targets. → $50K - Partnerships ⭐ NEW Integration partners - identifying mutual customers and prospects. Groundwork done, partnerships in place. Getting revenue from channel, possibly hiring if revenue grows. → $350K - Customer Marketing ⭐ NEW My big bet. Building our own community through Finer Demos Club and user conference. Customers learning from customers to drive referrals, move deals faster, expand accounts, reduce churn. Expansion is one of fastest-growing segments. Plus 10% flexibility buffer. I'm confident this budget will help us get past $20M+ ARR. Three big strategic shifts: 1. Investing ~$1M (1/3 of budget) on IRL events. Shows how impactful in-person was last year and why we're bullish on it. 2. Building our own community. We've supported communities for years and will continue, but with our large customer base, there's strong need for our own. 3. Brand has unlimited ceiling - it's also something what we're good at. Our brand is now bigger than the demo automation category itself. We'll continue leading with brand. For other CMOs: where are you increasing spend? What are you cutting? What's your biggest bet? Curious how your budgets compare.

Every marketing team I know is deep in budgeting right now. And every year, the same pattern shows up: There’s bad budgeting, a painful, check-the-box exercise. And there’s good budgeting, a strategic decision-making exercise. The best CFOs and CMOs push for the latter. At its core, strategy is a set of choices about what to do and what not to do within the constraints you have. Budget is one of the most important constraints we operate within. When budgeting is done well, it surfaces the real trade-offs (not the fictional tradeoffs where resources aren't actually transferable from one piece of work to another). Here’s what I see work well in teams that turn budgeting into a strategic exercise: 1️⃣ Frame the playing field clearly. Whether you organize by audience, product, business unit, objective, or something else, the framing determines which trade-offs are visible. The wrong frame often leads to circular debates. The right one reveals real choices. 2️⃣ Use budgeting as a mechanism to drive explicit prioritization. What are you strategic priorities? How do your proposed efforts ladder up to them... and to keeping the lights on? What is the balance between driving revenue today, building brand to drive revenue in the future, and experimentation? Good budgeting forces this clarity up front. 3️⃣ Ask for structured prep before the meeting. When people show up with data and reasoned assumptions, the conversation typically becomes strategic and focused on the business. When they show up with in-the-moment reactions, the discussion often becomes emotional and then turns political. 4️⃣ Use disagreement as a diagnostic tool. Divergence isn’t a problem. It’s a map to reveal differences in hidden assumptions, differences in plan details, and mismatched definitions of success. In talking with hundreds of CMOs, this is one of the most consistent patterns: teams that treat budgeting as strategy tend to build more alignment, ship better work, and move faster during the year... and that results in happier teams and better business outcomes. How are you framing budgeting this year?

When I define the budget I need for an Influencer Marketing campaign, I need to consider a few things: 1. How many influencers assets do I want? and, what type of asset? 2. How many influencers do I want to work with? 3. How many assets do I want each influencer to produce and publish? 4. What are the KPIs (for examples, number of views or target engagement) 5. Is this an organic first campaign or will I be boosting some/all content? 6. Target Influencers by following, views and engagement 7. Focus social channels 8. Type of brief and complexity level required by the Influencers All these will affect my budget. Even when calculating this based on many previous campaigns and benchmarks, Influencer pricing will still differ, even when approaching the same tier influencers with the same brief. Here is a real example from one of our many 2024 campaigns. Same brief, same number of deliverables per deal, 20 different price quotes. The differences in pricing does make budget planning challenging; however, in some cases, it can allow you to work with more influencers than you originally thought you could. It's like putting a puzzle together, one deal at a time, until your campaign is complete and budget is met. This is also why, I prefer to evaluate the entire campaign as one, rather than selecting one deal and analyzing it alone.

If you weren't in you current job, what would you do? My answer has always been the same: teach. Because great marketing is about education. We educate customers on why our solution deserves their attention. We educate many stakeholders (investors, CFO, colleagues, the board) on why brand deserves budget and investment. In most cases, we're using evidence to change minds and build confidence in a better future. But every now and then, the teacher becomes the student. That's exactly how I felt reading this one-page Brand Investment Plan from Tracksuit University. James Hurman lays out a useful seven-part framework for getting a brand investment plan approved and, just as importantly, protected. Seven Steps: 1. Objectives: Replace vague ambitions with measurable business outcomes and a clear timeline. 2. Budget: Base investment on what it takes to compete, using benchmarks such as Excess Share of Voice (ESOV), not simply what the company thinks it can afford. 3. Quarterly mix: Protect a consistent level of brand investment while flexing performance spend to capture seasonal demand. 4. Brand asset rules: Define the non-negotiables. Distinctive colors, taglines, characters, and visual assets create memory. As Hurman reminds us, ads wear in, not out. 5. KPIs: Measure both current demand and future demand. Performance tells you what's happening today. Brand metrics tell you what's likely to happen tomorrow. 6. Decision gates: Agree in advance on the triggers that justify increasing or decreasing investment. Good decisions shouldn't depend on who shouts the loudest in the boardroom. 7. Review cadence: Schedule a focused 30-minute monthly review to keep everyone aligned and avoid reactive decisions. What I especially like is the discipline of fitting the entire plan onto a single page. It forces clarity, surfaces trade-offs, and makes conversations with your CFO and finance team far more productive. TIP: SAVE this post for future reference. ⬇️ If you are having these conversations with finance or working on your marketing budget, you'll find the Tracksuit University course on brand building very useful. Enrollment is now open. I'll share the link in the comments. And I'd love to know: ❓What's one marketing lesson you find yourself teaching over and over again? 🔔 Follow me, Margaret Molloy. I simplify. Please hit the double bell on my profile. #Brand #simplicity #Tracksuitpartner #budget

I did a 30-min speech at INBOUND. Here’s the 3-min TL;DR. My talk: How to build a data-driven marketing budget. The problem: Last year, we spent $300K on marketing. 80% of it did… nothing. We were running 18 GTM channels (paid ads, SEO, events, influencers, AI experiments) but couldn’t answer: “What’s actually working for us?” The turning point: As a CFO-turned-founder, watching thousands disappear with no return physically hurt. So we did what finance people do best — built a system. Step 1️⃣ — Track every experiment 300+ experiments in a year. For each, we tracked: - Cost - Time to see results - Payback period - Impact on leads Every week: - Kill - Iterate - Scale Step 2️⃣ — Know your limits We built a calculator to set the max we should spend per lead or customer (comment & I'll send you my slides with the link). Step 3️⃣ — Build visibility An internal dashboard tracking: - ROI by channel - LTV/CAC - Payback period - Cost per lead - Revenue vs expenses (All in real time) Step 4️⃣ — Track the “unmeasurables” Not perfect, but good enough to act: PR → web traffic Podcasts → demo signups The mistake we almost repeated: On the way to $5M ARR, we kept acting like we were still in the $0–1M phase — too many experiments, too little focus. ROI down, GTM expenses up. The solution — 70-20-10 rule: 70% → Proven channels 20% → Controlled experiments 10% → Big, bold bets * Sometimes that 10% bet becomes your new 70%. Key takeaways if you want a high-ROI budget: 1. Burn money to find what works. 2. Track → kill/iterate/scale weekly. 3. Know your cost limits. 4. Past $1M — use the 70-20-10 rule to stay focused. If you want my slides, drop a comment and I’ll share a PDF.