Baron Belalov walks you through auditing your marketing budget line by line, labeling each spend as defensible, partially defensible, or indefensible. He identifies four common money drains: zombie channels, unaudited retainers, overlapping tools, and relationship-driven spend. For indefensible items, either write a thesis for the expected outcome, pause and test, or kill it and reallocate.
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I want you to do something slightly uncomfortable. Pull up your marketing budget, go line by line, and for each line item, ask what evidence you'd put on the table if somebody made you justify it. Somewhere between 15% and 30% of your marketing budget can't be defended. Not by you, not by your team, not by the agency you're paying to spend it. Almost every time I've started a fractional CMO engagement. There's a chunk of spend that nobody can justify with evidence. Now, before anyone gets defensive, this isn't fraud. Nobody is stealing from you. It's much more boring than that. Here's how it happens. 3 years ago, somebody made a reasonable decision— a channel, a sponsorship, a tool, a retainer. At the time, there was rationale. I'll give you an example. A performance marketing company was brought on board to run Google Ads. Then the person who made the call got too busy with other parts of the business, or the results stopped being reviewed, but the line item just kept going. It renews, it shows up in the budget, and every quarter it gets approved because it was approved last quarter and it seems to be producing good results. But under the hood, and this actually happened, paid search was cannibalizing organic and SEO because branded search terms were being used and targeted in the PMax campaign, and the campaign went for the cheaper conversions rather than capturing non-branded demand. That's a marketing problem, sure, but it's also an organizational one. Let me give you the actual test. Open the budget, every line, 3 columns. First column, the line item itself. Second column, what evidence would you actually put in front of someone if they challenged it? Not what you hope it does, what you could absolutely show. And then the third column, the verdict. Is it defensible, partial, or you can't defend it? Be honest in that second column though. It's important for brand is not evidence. We've always done it is definitely not evidence. When I run this with clients, the same 4 categories come up almost every time. The first is the zombie channel, running since before anybody measured anything, nobody has checked in years. The second is the unaudited retainer. You're paying monthly, you could not tell me what you received last month. The third one is overlapping tools. So 2 pieces of software doing roughly the same job because 2 different people bought them. And then the 4th one, this is the last one, the relationship spend. Could be the sponsorship or the ad in the industry magazine, the thing you do because of who asked or who's paying attention. Now, the objection I get, and it's a fair one, somebody always says, not everything is measurable. Brand takes time. If I only fund what I can prove, I'll cut all the long-term stuff and be left with paid ads. I guess that's mostly true, and it's a real risk. So let me be precise about what I'm actually saying. I'm not saying cut anything you can't attribute to a sale. I'm saying you should be able to state out loud why a line exists and what you expect it to do. Let's say this builds recall with a buyer who takes 18 months to decide, and we're tracking branded search volume as a proxy. Like, that's more defensible than brand awareness. See the difference? One column has a mechanism and a proxy. You know, somebody thought about it. The right column is a shrug with a budget attached. Long-term spend is fine. Unexamined spend is not. And those are different things, and people conflate them to avoid the conversation. And on that 4th category, the relationship spend I talked about, sometimes the honest answer is this exists because the relationship matters to the business in ways that don't show up in a report. That can be a legitimate reason. Say it out loud. Put it in the budget as a relationship line, maybe. Not as marketing. Because the moment you call it marketing, you're pretending it has a return, and then nobody can have an honest conversation about the rest of the budget either. So what do you do with the list? Don't cut everything on Monday. That's how you break something load-bearing that nobody documented. Take the 3 biggest items in the can't defend column. For each one, do one of 3 things. 1, give it a thesis. Write down what it's supposed to do and how you'd know. Now it's defensible, and you review it next quarter. 2, you could pause it 2 weeks, 4 weeks. Watch the total revenue, not that channel's revenue. And if nothing moves, you have your answer. Or 3, you could kill it and redirect the money somewhere with a thesis attached. That's it. 3 options, 3 line items, 1 afternoon. Now, I've done this exercise where the answer came back and the budget was clean. It happens. Not often, but it happens. I've also seen companies take this too far. too far and cut things that were actually working because the measurement wasn't there and they mistook that for the value not being there. Absence of evidence and evidence of absence are not the same thing, and if you get aggressive with this, you will eventually cut something you regret. The point of this exercise isn't to cut, it's to know. Most companies can't answer the question at all. If you found this video helpful, Please subscribe to my channel, give this video a like. I'm just trying to make marketing leadership more accessible to owners. If you are looking for marketing leadership, go to my website to learn more, baronbelalov.com. And if I can't help you, then I probably know somebody who can.
