Every channel promises to be the one that changes everything. Here's how we help clients decide what actually earns a line in next year's budget.
Start from the customer, not the channel list
It's tempting to build a budget by listing every channel available and deciding how much each one deserves. That approach almost always produces a spread-too-thin plan, because it starts from supply instead of demand.
We start instead by mapping where a specific customer actually spends attention before they buy — search, a recommendation, a scroll, a referral — and build outward from there. The channel list comes last, not first.
Not every channel needs to do the same job
Search tends to capture demand that already exists. Social and content tend to create it. Email and lifecycle work tend to keep it. Treating all three as competing for the same budget line is where a lot of plans go wrong.
A healthier way to think about allocation is by job, not by channel fashion: how much are we spending to capture existing intent, versus how much to build intent that doesn't exist yet.
Leave room to move mid-year
A budget locked in January and left untouched until December wastes the information the first two quarters give you for free. We build every plan with a deliberate review point, not just a year-end retrospective.
That doesn't mean chasing every fluctuation — it means treating the plan as a starting hypothesis, not a contract.