Allocate your next marketing budget increase by weighing retention and conversion fixes against more paid search, then stage funding around research.

After a good quarter, the question I hear most from CEOs is some version of “We have another $100,000. Where should it go?”

Most of them already have an answer. It’s usually more of whatever worked last quarter, which tends to mean paid search, because paid search has the cleanest dashboard.

Sometimes that’s the right call. More often the money lands on the part of the business that’s already working, and the thing holding growth back goes unfunded because it doesn’t belong to any one channel.

So, I run the same process every time. It takes two to three weeks, and the first step has nothing to do with channels. To show how it works, I’ll use a hypothetical company built from patterns I see across B2B SaaS clients. The company is made up. The process is the one I run with real ones.

Fieldline is a Series A B2B SaaS company with about $8 million in ARR. It sells scheduling software to home services businesses with 20 to 200 employees. Average contract value is $24,000 a year.

Marketing spends $90,000 a month: $45,000 on paid search, $20,000 on content and SEO, $10,000 on events, and $15,000 on tools and contractors.

The board just approved an extra $100,000 for next quarter. The VP of Marketing wants $60,000 for paid search and $40,000 for content.

Source link