Marketing budget planning often means more than allocating dollars. You’re asked to justify priorities, defend forecasts, and show how your plans will translate into real business impact.
Across high-performing teams, similar patterns tend to emerge. Marketers who consistently deliver tangible business results start by stepping back, challenging assumptions, and grounding plans in evidence rather than enthusiasm.
In planning cycles, these teams return to a few core questions.
1. What are we actually trying to achieve?
It sounds basic, but it’s not.
Many teams jump straight into tactics and only later realize their goals weren’t clearly defined. Without clarity on what success truly means, planning often turns into educated guesswork.
Top marketers spend extra time clarifying goals, involving internal stakeholders and outside partners early and often. They define what success looks like, focusing on specific outcomes that matter to the business, like increasing repeat purchases, acquiring high-value customers, or improving retention in a particular segment, rather than broad metrics like “engagement.”
These meetings can be messy. Brainstorms, tangents, whiteboards, and debate are often part of the process. But when plans are anchored in measurable business value, the right tactics become much easier to identify, prioritize, and defend.
2. Would this have happened anyway?
While strong ROAS numbers look great on a report, high-performing teams often go one step further and ask whether those results were actually driven by the campaign.
Increasingly, marketers are using control tests to answer that question. By exposing one group to a campaign while holding out another and measuring the difference in outcomes, teams can see which sales were incremental and which would have happened regardless.
This kind of incremental measurement separates taking credit from creating value. Teams that prioritize long-term growth tend to welcome these insights. They want the truth, even when it challenges a comfortable narrative.
3. What are we not measuring?
Most measurement systems only capture what’s easiest to track: clicks, conversions, ROAS, and other digital breadcrumbs. But marketers know that not everything that matters shows up in a pixel.
What about the brand lift from someone who saw an ad but didn’t click on it? The customer who bought in-store after seeing an ad? The word-of-mouth from a satisfied customer?
To account for this, many leading teams regularly audit their measurement stack to identify blind spots across the customer journey, including offline purchases and harder-to-quantify signals. By broadening what they measure, they avoid cutting channels that appear underperforming on paper but are actually driving meaningful value.
The Bottom Line
Leading marketers don’t accept surface-level answers. They ask hard questions and measure what drives growth.
More than anything, they build teams and cultures where curiosity is encouraged, debate is welcome, and assumptions are regularly tested.
Lauren Price’s team at COS offers a clear example of this approach in practice. They’ve built a culture focused on incrementality and measuring what moves the needle, not just who gets credit. Testing is expected, failure isn’t punished, and the ideas that actually drive outcomes win.
That’s how great marketing plans and great results take shape.
Ask these three questions in your next planning meeting. You might be surprised by what changes.
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