Securing approval for a marketing budget is often tough, especially in times of economic uncertainty.
I haven’t been there myself, but my learnings from C-level marketers show the many complexities around marketing budgets.
Budget slicing is a common occurrence. Entire initiatives are sometimes shelved.
But there are also those glorious moments when your strategic budget proposal gets the green light.
In this post I’ll share what I learned about marketing budget approval from experts in the field, industry data, and more.
In this article:
Expert Marketers Featured in this Post
To help you navigate the budget approval process, I talked to three marketers who’ve been in the trenches for 7+ years:
- Johnny Hughes, Co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Avenue Z
- Pamela Bump, Head of Content Innovation & Research at HubSpot
- Sabina Brdnik, Marketing Strategist at Tretton37
Their stories not only shed light on what it takes to secure a budget, but also offer practical tips you can use right away.
When I spoke to Sabina Brdnik, I learned the Tretton37 team follows a 4-step budget approval process, which you can adopt.
- Forecasting
- Budget proposal writing
- Review and revision
- Execution and reporting
Forecasting
Consider this the research, planning, and brainstorming phase. It includes evaluating past performance, analyzing market trends, establishing marketing goals, building your marketing strategy, and estimating associated costs.
Brdnik believes forecasting is the most important step of the budget approval process, and for good reason. If your forecasts aren’t thorough, you’ll struggle to build a compelling case for your budget.
Budget Proposal Writing
Outline the outcome of your forecast in a concise budget proposal. An excellent proposal includes your marketing goals, initiatives, channels, proposed expenses, and, when possible, expected ROI.
For Brdnik’s team, they first “present a detailed plan showing how much money will be invested in individual parts of [the] marketing plan (social media, SEO, influencers, etc).”
Pro tip: Focus your proposal on key points to ensure executives clearly understand the situation. Be concise, as they are likely reviewing proposals from multiple departments.
Review and Revision
Present your budget proposal to the company’s senior management for review and sign-off. Sometimes, they may instantly approve the budget and allocate the required funds. Other times, you may need to provide additional information or make adjustments.
Execution and Reporting
Brdnik says, “During the year, we implement the approved plan and track the actual spent budget versus the forecasted budget.”
Brdnik recommends setting aside 10% of your annual budget as a contingency fund for unexpected circumstances or opportunities, such as a viral trend that could help enhance brand visibility or testing out the new shiny AI tool that will help the team create better and faster articles.
As Johnny Hughes said, “New tools emerge each month, along with new opportunities and risks. We have to be extremely agile and conduct weekly efficacy reports to inform spending.”
Evaluating your budget’s effectiveness and documenting lessons learned helps future budget cycles. “HubSpot — and its endless integrations and dashboards — is our MVP tool that supports this effort,” Hughes adds.
Pro tip: To track your budget, consider using free marketing budget templates. They help you track marketing spend across various channels like content, paid advertising, PR.
Benefits of a Budget Approval Workflow
Below are three primary benefits of a budget approval workflow.
1. Faster Approval Times
Without a budget approval workflow, securing your budget can feel like driving through thick fog. The journey is slow and uncertain. A standardized workflow clears the fog, clarifies the next steps, and lets you move faster.
You can further increase speed by automating your workflow. Business process management software like Jira and Monday.com can help you eliminate hours of manual budgeting activities. For instance, instead of exchanging emails endlessly, an automated workflow can notify assignees to act.
2. Compels You to Set Robust Marketing Goals
Data from CoSchedule's 2022 Trend Report reveals marketers who set goals are 377% more successful than their peers.
Yet, 30% of marketers do not set specific goals. I have seen firsthand how this results in wasteful spending — and worse, makes it difficult to measure success.
But with a marketing strategy required in your budget approval process, setting clear marketing goals becomes a must, leading to better resource management.
3. Democratizes Decision-Making
Top leaders need to delegate decision-making so they can focus on other high-level activities. A budget approval process lets them establish boundaries and set clear guidelines for decision-making. Once the budget is approved, managers can exercise autonomy within established limits.
Marketing Budget Approval
Why Marketing Budgets Are So Hard to Get Approved
When I spoke to Pamela Bump, she told me, “It’s often hard to tie marketing efforts and KPIs (like traffic or reach) to direct ROI (like sales or renewals).” That’s why leadership is sometimes reluctant to allocate funds to marketing.
Marketing attribution helps address this challenge by allowing marketers to analyze the buyer's journey, identify effective touchpoints, and measure the impact of each effort.
However, recent events suggest attribution is dying and becoming increasingly difficult. Apple‘s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework and new privacy laws in New York, California, Canada, and the EU have significantly limited marketers’ ability to track buyers.
Additionally, about one-third of internet users use ad blockers which block tracking scripts.
These developments complicate efforts to measure marketing effectiveness and convince higher-ups that marketing investments will pay off.
How to Get Your Marketing Budget Approved
I asked our marketing experts to share tips to help others secure their marketing budget. Here’s what they said.
Align Marketing Goals with Company Goals
“The key to any successful budget request is knowing what KPIs your upper leaders need to drive,” says Bump. “Spoiler: They’ll likely tie it to company revenue,” Bump adds.
Your budget proposal should show you understand your leadership’s priorities and want to achieve them. Without this, you don’t have a leg to stand on.
Show Path to ROI
Determining marketing ROI can be tricky. Still, it’s important to justify your budget and prove it’s an investment, not a black hole sucking up the company’s profit.
As Bump shared, once you know the KPIs that resonate with your executives, you can show how your investment could drive ROI directly or support those KPIs.
For example, if you pitch for more blog writers, emphasize how the content will generate leads that drive visitors further into the sales pipeline, not just increase traffic or clicks.
Hughes’s team still relies heavily on marketing attribution data to track ROI.
First, Hughes ensures alignment on the key channels driving business growth. He also ensures the attribution data is clean for accurate ROI reporting. They then track returns on a week-over-week basis.
This approach helps Hughes avoid pushback from stakeholders.
Use Data to Justify Your Budget
“Ground your request and any estimates you make in data-backed evidence,” says Bump.
Without data, all you have is an opinion. And an opinion alone might be unconvincing.
Hughes considers data a “fortress of numbers to defend against budget cuts and welcome new investments” and says, “We rely heavily on ROI metrics from previous campaigns, market trend analysis, and competitive benchmarking.”
Similarly, Brdnik says that competitive benchmarking is vital when pitching new ideas without past firsthand data.
“I had an interesting experience getting approval for a new TikTok campaign. We are not active on the platform. So, to strengthen our pitch, we used competitor analysis showing similar brands saw up to a 30% increase in engagement,” Brdnik explains.
Request a Small Budget for New Ideas.
Justifying the budget for similar/past campaigns is pretty straightforward. For instance, if a Cost Per Purchase (CPP) campaign generated $100K in revenue for a $20K spend, it easily justifies a similar budget for future initiatives.
However, as Brdnik shared, “The problem arises when we have to justify more innovative/new ideas and strategies based on no previous data.”
In such situations, be more rigorous and creative in vetting opportunities. Then, run small tests to validate your hypothesis. If successful, securing additional investment becomes easier.
Brdnik said she allocates up to “20% of the annual budget for new/innovative projects.” Data from these tests then guide the next steps.
To improve their chances of success, Brdnik sticks to best practices when testing new ideas, and Hughes recommends implementing a flexible budget model and making real-time adjustments based on performance metrics.
Get Early Support
There's a lot of lead-up work involved in getting marketing budget buy-in. If you’re in a big company, you likely can’t walk up to a busy CMO and ask for $1 million without other leaders supporting you.
So, before investing time in research or proposal writing, casually discuss your idea with your manager.
As Bump shared, “Your manager is human and has also requested, secured, and faced rejections of budgets before. Plus, your manager is likely the most KPI-obsessed person on your team to guide you in the right direction.
So they’ll know more about how to think and talk to the executives above them.
They’ll also know what motivates those executives and the biggest KPIs they desperately want to drive.”
With this early support and guidance, you set your proposal up for success or refine the idea if needed. This saves time on budget revisions or unnecessary proof-of-concept tests.
Here are some messages that Bump shared with me to start conversations with managers.
Example 1:
Hi [Manager],
I [noticed/read/observed] that [evidence] leads to [KPI], and I’d like to pitch an idea/project to test that I think could help us explore/scale this further.
I would love to get your thoughts and see if there’s any budget available for a test like this before I start writing a deeper proposal for you in our next one-on-one.
Example 2:
Hi [Manager],
I would love to pitch a [lean budget or project] to test how [tactic] leads to social media reach. However, I know reach doesn’t directly tie to the KPIs our department ladders up to.
I’d love to get your guidance on how we could connect these KPIs or how we’ve tied reach to revenue in the past before pitching potential tactics around it.
Be Prepared for Pushback and Be Open to Compromise
“It’s important to have concrete arguments about why something is necessary when stakeholders push back,” Brdnik says. Your executives may not have the details you do, so be ready to provide additional information and data to address their objections.
Remember, marketing is just one department, and there are others competing for a share of the company’s fixed budget. So, be open to compromise wherever it is possible.
“If stakeholders think $50K of the budget is excessive for influencer marketing, propose a pilot program for 50% of it and test (and measure) its effectiveness,” Brdnik advises.
The point is to put yourself in the shoes of your higher-ups. Think like a business owner aiming to generate significant returns from marketing spend. This will allow you to be more rigorous in your analysis.
Continue to Earn Trust
If you lock down the budget, spend it responsibly and report on the results, as Bump suggests.
This keeps you accountable for spending your budget based on impact. It’ll also earn you the trust and support of executives who can decrease or increase the budget in future quarters.
Brdnik regularly updates stakeholders, mostly via monthly email reports. Her team also creates quarterly reports that show all relevant KPIs (lead generation, conversion rates, etc.) to illustrate marketing's contribution to overall revenue.
Getting Your Budget Proposal Greenlit
Marketing budgets are among the first to be scrutinized in many companies. I’ve seen several marketers vent about this on LinkedIn, especially when they experience budget cuts.
Sometimes, this scrutiny arises when executives view marketing as less essential than other departments. However, it’s also prevalent because leadership wants efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and solid ROI.
And that’s okay! After all, it’s their job to get value for every dollar spent.
Understanding this lets you embrace the challenge. Lean into it. Anticipate objections from leadership and become more strategic.
Plan thoroughly and prioritize the most impactful initiatives. These ultimately make you more effective in driving results and securing future investments.
Bump, for example, started with $0 per year but now manages an increasing budget, a team of four direct reports, and a part-time contractor.
By applying the tips in this post, you’ll not only secure the funding you need but also strengthen your ability to drive impactful marketing initiatives.