How to Allocate Your Marketing Budget for Maximum Impact

The 60/40 Rule and Why It Needs Context

What Binet and Field's research shows about budget allocation.

Les Binet and Peter Field's research on marketing effectiveness, published as The Long and the Short of It, found that optimal allocation typically involves roughly 60% of budget on brand building and 40% on activation. This finding has been widely quoted and frequently misapplied.

The research examined effectiveness data across hundreds of campaigns to identify what produces both short term and long term results. Brand building creates mental availability that drives future sales. Activation captures immediate demand. Both are necessary. The question is ratio, and that ratio varies by context.

Why the ratio changes based on category and business stage

The 60/40 ratio is an average. Categories with longer purchase cycles require more brand investment. Categories with shorter cycles can weight toward activation. New brands building awareness need different allocation than established brands defending share. Online businesses with direct response capability often weight toward activation more heavily.

Growth stage matters significantly. Early stage businesses often need to prove product market fit through direct response before investing in brand. Mature businesses with established share can invest more in brand maintenance. The optimal allocation at one stage can be completely wrong at another.

Adjusting allocation for growth versus mature businesses

Growth businesses face a specific challenge: they need results now to fund continued operation while also building foundations for sustainable future growth. This tension often pushes toward over investment in short term activation at the expense of brand building. The consequence is a customer acquisition cost spiral as performance marketing efficiency degrades without brand support.

We focus on enduring ROI, results that compound over years rather than just this quarter. This means allocation that builds long term brand equity while hitting short term targets. It means measurement frameworks that capture both immediate response and longer term brand effects. It means strategic choices that balance today's needs with tomorrow's positioning.

Channel Selection Based on Your Actual Customer Journey

Channel allocation should follow customer behaviour, not platform sales pitches. Where do your customers actually spend attention? How do they research purchases in your category? What touchpoints influence their decisions? The answers vary dramatically by category and audience. Generic best practices do not substitute for understanding your specific customer journey.

We deliver campaigns across all major paid channels including Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, and emerging platforms. But channel selection comes from strategy, not habit. The right channels for one client are wrong for another. Understanding where your customers are and how they make decisions determines where budget should go.

The Budget That Makes Other Budgets Work Harder

Why measurement investment pays for itself

Measurement infrastructure is often treated as overhead to be minimised. This is backwards. Proper measurement reveals which investments are working and which are wasting money. The insight to reallocate 10% of spend from a failing channel to a successful one often returns multiples of the measurement investment.

We build measurement frameworks around commercial outcomes rather than vanity metrics. Revenue impact, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value, brand metrics, and market share provide genuine business intelligence. This measurement foundation enables confident budget decisions rather than guesswork.

Creative quality as budget multiplier

Creative quality multiplies media effectiveness. Great creative in the same media slot outperforms mediocre creative by significant margins. Research consistently shows that creative is the largest single driver of advertising effectiveness. Yet many businesses treat creative as a cost to minimise rather than an investment to maximise.

David Ogilvy made this point decades ago: what you say in advertising is more important than how you say it. A brilliant media plan cannot save mediocre creative. Investing in creative quality often delivers better returns than simply increasing media spend behind existing creative.

The hidden cost of spreading too thin

Insufficient budget in any single channel often performs worse than no budget at all. Channels require minimum investment to achieve effective reach and frequency. Spreading budget across too many channels means inadequate investment in each. Better to do fewer things well than many things poorly.

Effective performance marketing typically requires minimum media spend to generate statistically significant data for optimisation. We are transparent about budget requirements and will tell you honestly if your investment level is not yet right for the outcomes you want to achieve. Sometimes the right advice is to focus on fewer activities until budget allows expansion.

Building Flexibility Into Annual Planning

Annual budgets that lock in allocation for twelve months ignore the reality that market conditions change. New opportunities emerge. Channels that worked stop working. Competitive dynamics shift. Rigid allocation prevents responding to these changes. Building flexibility into annual planning enables adaptation without requiring new budget approval.

We build roadmaps that adapt as markets change rather than static documents that become obsolete. This includes quarterly review and adaptation frameworks, contingency allocation for emerging opportunities, and clear criteria for when to reallocate between channels. The goal is strategic direction with tactical flexibility.