The CMO’s Guide to Smarter Budget Planning
Summary
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It’s a particularly difficult moment to plan a marketing budget, when so much of what you’re planning around could look different six months from now.
AI continues to reshape expectations of what a marketing team can do and what it costs to do it, while new search and buying behaviors challenge established playbooks. At the same time, economic uncertainty increases the pressure on CMOs to deliver more impact without more spend.
That changes the job of budget planning. CMOs need to make clear choices about where to invest, what to deprioritize, and what to protect, while preserving the flexibility to test, learn, and adapt.
The approach requires a budget grounded in today’s priorities without locking the organization into assumptions that may not be relevant tomorrow.
1. Start With ROI, Not Last Year’s Spend
Last year’s budget is a reference point, not a rationale for this year’s investment. With greater scrutiny on spend, the more useful question is where the next dollar can create the most value.
That means looking beyond aggregate ROI and asking harder questions about where the next dollar should go:
Where would more investment materially change the outcome and where are you already hitting diminishing returns?
What’s actually holding growth back: budget, demand, or the team’s ability to execute?
If you were allocating this budget from scratch today, where would you spend differently?
Then connect those answers to the company’s priorities ahead. The goal is to show not simply that marketing created value, but where additional investment can create more of it and why.
If you don’t have enough visibility to make those calls with confidence, better measurement may itself be one of the highest-leverage investments to make in the budget.
2. Give Leadership Choices, Not One Big Ask
A budget built around one number can create a false sense of certainty. It’s smarter to develop a few investment scenarios, each reflecting different levels of ambition, risk, and return. And, bring the CFO into that thinking early, especially around less-proven bets.
Baseline: With a flat or constrained budget, focus resources on the highest-confidence growth drivers and be clear about what won’t be prioritized.
Grow: With moderate incremental investment, expand proven opportunities while selectively funding capabilities or channels that could create the next source of growth.
Accelerate: With more significant investment, pursue larger opportunities where the potential upside warrants greater risk or a longer payback period.
Make the trade-offs clear. What needs to be true for each scenario to pay off? Where will more investment actually move the needle, and what opportunities disappear without it? Account for AI, too, especially where it changes the cost, capacity, or potential return of the work.
3. Protect the Investments That Compound
Some of marketing’s most valuable assets are also the easiest to undervalue in an annual budget cycle.
Brand, content, organic search, and community don’t always fit neatly into a quarterly ROI calculation. Cutting them can improve the near-term P&L while slowly weakening assets that took years to build: brand awareness, category authority, organic demand, and the ability to acquire customers without paying for every interaction.
The way people search is changing quickly as more buyers turn to AI tools to research, compare, and discover brands. This shift affects B2B and B2C companies alike, making it increasingly urgent to build authority across the sources LLMs rely on. As we explored in our AEO post, content, reviews, third-party mentions, and other signals can all influence which brands surface in AI recommendations.
As a result, brand and content increasingly shape discoverability beyond the traffic or leads they generate directly. And unlike a paid campaign you can switch back on, authority takes time to build and maintain and can be expensive to rebuild once it’s lost.
4. Match the Resource Model to the Strategy
The question is no longer simply whether to hire or outsource. CMOs need to think more deliberately about which capabilities benefit from deep internal ownership, and where flexible talent can give the team access to expertise or capacity without adding permanent headcount.
That may lead to a different mix of:
FTEs for capabilities requiring sustained ownership and institutional context
Fractional leaders for senior expertise that may not require a full-time role
Agencies and contractors for specialized expertise or variable needs
AI adds another dimension to those decisions. As it changes how much work teams can accomplish and how that work gets done, it also creates opportunities to uncover better insights, test ideas faster, and make smarter decisions. But, importantly, CMOs should revisit the assumptions behind their resource model rather than treat AI as a substitute for people.
Build a Budget Designed to Adjust
With AI moving quickly and economic and geopolitical conditions difficult to predict, the assumptions behind today’s budget will inevitably change. That’s why it’s critical to build enough flexibility in the plan to move dollars as you learn – rather than clinging to earlier decisions.
That requires an active learning agenda: Identify the bets that still need to be proven, test them, and set regular check-ins to assess what’s working. Scale when the evidence gets stronger, pull back when it doesn’t, and reallocate as better opportunities emerge.
The goal is a budget with clear priorities, but enough room to adapt as the year unfolds.
Rethinking your marketing investments for 2027? 621 Consulting can help you make the right bets and build a plan that’s ready to adapt. Talk to our team.
