How to know where to invest your marketing budget when visibility is lacking
Associated Flowdake use case: Founders & CEOs
Deciding where to invest your marketing budget is one of the hardest decisions for a growing company. Not because options are lacking, but because there are too many.
The real problem: lack of clear benchmarks
Most companies don't lack ideas. They lack reliable benchmarks for decision-making.
According to Gartner's CMO Spend Survey 2024, average marketing budgets dropped to 7.7% of revenue, down from 9.1% in 2023.
Decisions are often made by mimicry, intuition, or constraint.
Why 'testing everywhere' isn't a strategy
Many think you need to 'test all channels'. In practice, this leads to scattered budgets and inconsistent messages.
Good marketing allocation starts with one simple question: what's the priority objective short-term?
Return to structured decision-making
Before investing, clarify what you want to achieve, who you're targeting, and your context.
This structure enables comparing options, prioritizing, and iterating quickly.
Each objective calls for radically different channels.
Going back to structured decision-making
Investing your budget shouldn't be a gamble. It's a process. Before reaching for your credit card, you need to clarify the measurable objective, the target audience and the context.
It's this structure that then lets you compare your options objectively and prioritize the channel most likely to meet the objective.