The Battle For Budget: How To Win Over Your CFO With Your 2025 Marketing Plan

Introduction

Securing marketing budget is never easy, especially when every penny is under the CFO’s microscope.

In a landscape often cluttered with ineffective strategies, it's no surprise that marketing is sometimes seen as a cost to cut. But when done right, marketing is the most powerful driver of sustainable business growth. To convince your CFO of this, you need to speak their language and connect your ideas to what matters most to the wider business.

To help you ensure your marketing plan hits all the right notes to gain buy-in, we've put together key takeaways from our recent webinar "The Battle For Budget: How To Win Over Your CFO With Your 2025 Marketing Plan".

From showing the long-term value of brand investment, to using smarter tech and strategies to boost efficiency, we hope the learnings will help you shift the conversation from cost to value.

Contents

1. How can you convince your CFO to invest in marketing initiatives that won’t just pay back in-quarter?

2. How can you use attribution models to inform next year's investments (and not just justify last year's)?

3. How can you measure the long as well as the short term impact of what you're doing?

4. Discover the untapped value in your data.

5. Download our annual planning template for B2B marketers.

Chapter 1

How to convince your CFO to invest in marketing initiatives that won't just pay back in-quarter

Research shows that 80% of buyers already have a shortlist of brands in mind before they start shopping—and 90% of purchases come from that list (Bain & HBR). This means that if potential buyers don’t know your brand before they enter the market, they’re far less likely to choose you. By investing in marketing that increases awareness among those not yet ready to buy, you’re building the pipeline for future growth, ensuring your company is front of mind when buyers are ready to act.

The key is to frame your argument with data and financial impact. Use models to demonstrate how increasing awareness at the early stages of the buyer journey grows the pool of potential future customers, maintaining or improving conversion rates along the way. This approach translates marketing efforts into tangible metrics like pipeline growth and future cash flow—language that resonates with CFOs. 

Our Chief Strategy & Solutions Officer, Alastair Hussain explores this in the below segment from the strategy and planning webinar. 

Chapter 2

How can you use attribution models to inform next year's investments (and not just justify last year's)?

Effective marketing requires not only demonstrating its value but also aligning it with broader business growth objectives. Marketing mix modeling (MMM) offers a data-driven framework to achieve this by quantifying the impact of marketing efforts across all channels, from digital to traditionally harder-to-measure areas like out-of-home advertising. By providing a holistic view of how different activities contribute to business outcomes, MMM elevates marketing from a perceived cost to a strategic investment in growth.

The true power of MMM lies in its ability to guide strategic decisions. By identifying which channels drive the highest returns, businesses can allocate budgets more effectively, ensuring maximum impact. This approach allows you, as a marketer, to confidently demonstrate the value of your efforts to stakeholders, while also informing future plans that align with the company’s goals. In this way, MMM becomes a tool not just for analysis but for transformation—empowering marketing teams to play a central role in driving business success.

Our Associate Director of Analytics, Peter Leighton, explored this topic as part of the webinar.

Chapter 3

How can you measure the long as well as the short term impact of what you're doing?

A solid measurement strategy helps show the immediate results of marketing efforts, like driving sales, but also proves how marketing is contributing to bigger, longer-term goals, like building brand strength or expanding into new markets. This is key for getting the CFO and other stakeholders on board with your budget requests, as they want to see how marketing investments align with overall business objectives.

To really track the health of a brand, you need to focus on a few key areas: awareness, mental availability, positioning, and delivery. These factors give you a clear picture of where your brand stands today and where it needs to go. A good measurement framework allows you to set goals and track progress over time. By keeping an eye on how your brand performs across different audiences and over time, you can make smarter decisions and continuously optimize your strategy for long-term success.

Hear from our VP, Strategy, Tracy Henshaw as she delves into this topic with some examples of how we have helped brands achieve this.