How to ask for more budget

Updated July 2023

Allocating the right budget for your digital marketing activities is an important task but it isn’t always straightforward. Factors such as your industry, market conditions, business objectives and forecasted revenue all play their part in your budget decisions. But without a sufficient budget, achieving the expected results will be a challenge.

Requesting a budget increase

As a marketing professional, you’ll regularly use persuasion techniques and creativity to position yourself for success. Taking the same approach to getting a larger budget signed off involves the same effort. It’s time to sell your team and what you can achieve to your stakeholders.

Here are seven ways to make the case for a marketing budget increase:

1) Establish the business goals from the start

You can’t develop a strategy or set a budget without context of what the wider business hopes to achieve. What are the revenue targets for the upcoming year? What other key business metrics are stakeholders interested in?

Understanding what your team’s efforts will be contributing to is the beginning of aligning digital marketing priorities with the wider business goals.

2) Get buy-in from the sales team

Before presenting to management, it could be worthwhile running it by your sales team first. This is an opportunity to help them understand how your strategy, efforts and the required budget will help them meet their targets.

If you demonstrate a united proposition to your stakeholders, you’re in a much stronger position to justify the budget you request.

3) Understand how to best justify your marketing budget

Be thorough with your research and have a strong plan of action. This means you won’t be left in an uncomfortable situation when asked to justify your proposed budget.

Before you take your case higher with a proposed budget in mind, make sure you’ve considered how you will justify your proposal. For example:

• Have you conducted competitor research?
• Have you removed strategies that fell short in the past?
• Is your budget still a reasonable and realistic figure?
• Have you outlined your KPIs and what you plan to focus on?
• Have you shown how you what metrics you will measure and how you’ll prove ROI?

4) Put yourself in the shoes of the decision-maker

If you were to receive this budget request, what would your concerns be? There could even be a specific issue stopping stakeholders from making a larger investment in marketing that you’re not aware of.

It’s important to think from the point of view of the decision-makers so you can include the necessary information they will need. This will allow you to enter your meetings armed with a strong case of why a larger budget will benefit the business.

5) Link your budget and the bottom line

Adding to the bottom line should always be your focus as this is likely to be what matters to management. Plus, having the budget available to focus on the activities with the biggest impact, use the newest tools and get the resource you need to succeed will save you time and money.

Don’t be afraid to discuss the business’ future and explain how a bigger marketing budget will help achieve this. Cutting corners to simply save a little money will ultimately cost the business far greater opportunities in the long term.

6) Consider your KPIs

An effective way to prove your ROI is to consider your key performance indicators. Putting measures in place to track whether your efforts are working should be a priority - this is where you prove results and with solid proof comes less reason to question your needs.

To demonstrate the need for a higher budget, show how your KPIs relate to business objectives. This could include discussing metrics such as conversion rates, cost per lead and revenue per lead.

7) Make the pitch

Time to put your work into action, attend your meetings prepared with all of the data and information you foresee needing to support your case for more budget.

When pitching, keep in mind that your mission is to sell your team’s abilities and what you’re capable of delivering with the right investment.

Budgeting for the future

Sometimes your ideal budget simply isn’t an option. But this is still an opportunity to have a conversation and move towards a compromise. When it comes to your marketing budget, the more you know, the better your chances will be of receiving what you want.

If you require a helping hand to establish what marketing budget you need to meet your goals, get in touch with our digital marketing experts. We can advise on specific marketing tactics to help you make the most of your budget.