Marketing Budget Checklist

Pull the current ICP definition and 2-3 priority personas from the brand book or PMM source. Note any segment shifts since last cycle — geo expansion, new vertical, ACV band changes — that will move budget weight between channels.

Export GA4, Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and HubSpot/Marketo reports for the prior period. Pull spend, CPL, MQL→SQL rate, CAC, ROAS, and payback by channel. Flag channels with deteriorating efficiency for reallocation.

Use Semrush or Ahrefs to pull paid keyword overlap, organic SERP share, and estimated ad spend for the top 3-5 competitors. Note any new entrants bidding on your branded terms — that pressure shows up as rising CPC in the next cycle.

Plot prior 24 months of pipeline and traffic against the calendar — Q4 retail spike, summer B2B slump, conference season, fiscal-year-end procurement. Adjust monthly budget pacing rather than dividing the annual number by 12.

Get the signed-off revenue plan and pipeline-coverage ratio from finance/RevOps. Marketing-sourced pipeline target backs into MQL volume, which backs into channel budget. Skipping this turns the budget into a wishlist instead of a plan.

Express as a percent of revenue and an absolute dollar figure. B2B SaaS typically lands 15-25% of revenue; mature consumer brands closer to 8-12%. Reconcile against finance's bottoms-up before publishing.

Split across paid search, paid social, content/SEO, email/lifecycle, events, ABM, and PR. Anchor each line on prior-period CAC and target MQL volume rather than last-year-plus-10%. Flag any channel taking more than 40% of total — concentration risk.

Hold 5-10% unallocated for in-period opportunities — competitor mistep, viral moment, late-breaking event sponsorship, rising-channel test. Without this line, every new request becomes a reforecast.

List every recurring tool: HubSpot/Marketo, Salesforce, Segment, Ahrefs, Semrush, Litmus, OneTrust, Figma, Asana, DAM. Renewal dates, seat counts, and auto-renew clauses go in the budget as fixed costs. Stack audits routinely surface 15-25% in unused or duplicate seats.

Loaded headcount, contractor budgets, agency retainers (creative, paid media, PR, SEO), and project-based outsourcing. Confirm scope with each agency before committing — last cycle's retainer often doesn't match this cycle's deliverables.

Walk demand-gen, content, brand, and product marketing leads through their channel lines. Capture pushback in writing — a Slack DM is not a record. Adjustments before CFO submission are cheap; adjustments after are reforecasts.

Package: total envelope, channel allocation, headcount/agency, martech, contingency, and the pipeline-coverage math that ties spend to revenue target. Most CFO pushback is on the math, not the categories.

Apply the revisions, re-run the channel math so MQL targets still tie to the revised envelope, and resubmit. Do not silently absorb cuts into the contingency line — that hides the impact and breaks future negotiations.

Enter approved figures into the FP&A tool (Adaptive, Anaplan, Pigment) and tag each line with its GL code. Set up monthly burn-down tracking so variance shows up before it becomes a problem.

For each channel: target CPL, MQL volume, MQL→SQL rate, CAC, ROAS, payback months. Bake these into GA4 and the MAP dashboard before the period starts so weekly reporting is one-click rather than a fire drill.

Plot launches, gated-asset drops, webinars, field events, and email cadences against the seasonality map. Verify no two major campaigns compete for the same audience in the same week — frequency caps and inbox fatigue both bite.

Each owner gets a written budget with monthly pacing, KPI commitments, and the escalation rule for over/under spend. Ad-platform billing alerts (Google Ads, Meta) configured at 80% and 100% of monthly cap.

Compare actual spend and pipeline against plan by channel. Early-cycle overspend with no MQL lift is the leading indicator that targeting or creative is off — not a budget problem.

Reconcile spend, pipeline, CAC, and payback against plan. Rebalance the contingency line and shift dollars between channels based on observed efficiency, not gut feel.

Document the proposed channel shifts, the efficiency data behind them, and the revised KPI targets. Send to finance and department leads; lock the new figures in the planning system once approved.

Final spend vs. plan by channel, CAC and payback by channel, marketing-sourced pipeline and revenue, and lessons-learned for next cycle's planning. Archive in the planning folder so next year's research step starts here.