Would you choose this marketing expense again?

Some marketing expenses become part of the routine so gradually that nobody remembers the original decision to make them.

The annual sponsorship renews. The company keeps producing a newsletter because it has always produced one. A podcast, conference, paid campaign, or software subscription stays in the budget because someone worked hard to get it started. Meanwhile, the business has changed. Maybe the ideal customer is different, the sales process has shifted, or the team has less capacity than it did a year ago.

A useful question for a business owner is: If this wasn’t already in the plan, would we choose to fund it today?

That doesn’t mean every activity needs to produce a lead this month. It means the time and money behind it should still connect to a business priority you can explain.

A full calendar can hide an outdated strategy

It’s possible to be very busy with marketing and still have too little room for the work that matters most now. Teams maintain channels, produce assets, and keep longstanding commitments moving. New priorities get added on top because nothing old has been taken off.

Bigger marketing organizations are feeling pressure to make trade-offs, too. In Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, average marketing budgets were 7.8% of company revenue, little changed from 7.7% the prior year. Fifty-six percent of the surveyed leaders said they lacked the budget required to deliver their strategy. Those respondents were mostly from companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, so I wouldn’t use their spending percentages as benchmarks for a smaller B2B firm. The relevant point is that budget pressure makes prioritization unavoidable.

For a small business, the constraint is often even more tangible. Every standing commitment takes money, but it also takes someone’s time to plan, prepare, review, and follow through. A channel can be inexpensive on paper and very expensive in attention.

Ask what job the activity is supposed to do

Before you debate whether something is “working,” get clear on its role.

A local industry event might build relationships with referral partners. A useful monthly email may keep the company visible to people who aren’t ready to buy. A strong service page could help qualified prospects understand the offer before they call. A targeted paid campaign might test whether a specific message reaches a new audience.

Those activities shouldn’t be judged by identical criteria. If you treat everything as a lead-generation channel, you may cut work that supports referrals, retention, credibility, or a long sales cycle. If you call everything “brand awareness,” you make it too easy to keep activity going indefinitely without examining its value.

Try finishing this sentence for each major commitment: We do this to help [specific audience] [take a useful step or form a useful impression], and we expect to see [reasonable evidence] over [reasonable period].

The evidence doesn’t have to be a perfectly attributed deal. For a partner event, it might be better conversations with the right people and follow-up meetings that actually happen. For a newsletter, it might be whether the intended audience stays engaged and whether sales has a reason to share it. The test should be suited to the job.

Count the cost of keeping it alive

The invoice rarely tells the whole story. A quarterly event might require research, speaker coordination, slides, registration, promotion, follow-up, and several rounds of revisions. A low-cost tool can take hours to maintain if it doesn’t work with the rest of the process. A leadership podcast may require more executive time than anyone included in the budget.

None of those are automatically poor investments. The point is to count the capacity they consume. When a team says it doesn’t have time to improve its website or develop a targeted campaign, it is worth checking whether existing commitments are absorbing that time.

This is where opportunity cost becomes concrete. What would you do with the same hours and dollars if you freed them up? If you can’t name a better use, cutting may solve very little. If an important service has almost no supporting content while low-priority recurring work fills the calendar, the trade-off deserves attention.

Give channels three possible outcomes

I like a straightforward review: keep it, fix it, or stop it for now.

Keep it when the activity has a clear job, the right audience is showing up, and the level of investment still makes sense. That can be true even when the payoff takes time. Strong organic content, reputation-building, and referral relationships don’t always show up neatly in a monthly pipeline report.

Fix it when the strategic role makes sense but execution is weak. Maybe the event attracts the right people but nobody follows up. Maybe the newsletter has useful expertise buried under company announcements. Maybe paid ads are getting clicks but the landing page doesn’t explain the offer. Those are reasons to redesign the work before deciding the channel has failed.

Stop or pause it when the audience is wrong, the business no longer needs what the activity was built to accomplish, the burden consistently outweighs the value, or there is no credible plan to improve it. A pause can be an intentional decision, with a date to revisit it, rather than a permanent verdict on the channel.

You don’t need a complicated scoring model. You do need someone willing to make the choice.

Be careful what looks easiest to measure

Short-term campaign results can appear more concrete than work that helps a buyer trust you over time. That can skew investment decisions.

Gartner’s June 2026 analysis of CMO media budgets found that awareness and conversion accounted for 62.6% of media spend, while loyalty and retention represented less than 15%. Gartner cautioned against overinvesting in the things that are easiest to optimize. Again, that’s large-company research, not a spending formula for a smaller firm. But the caution is relevant.

The right response is neither to dismiss attribution nor to accept every soft explanation for why an activity matters. Pair the numbers you do have with what the sales team is hearing, who is engaging, whether the work is being used, and how it supports the current business priorities. When the evidence is thin, decide what a fair test would look like and how long you’d run it.

Reallocate before you add

At the start of a quarter, take your recurring marketing commitments and spend an hour reviewing the ones that use the most money or time. For each, write down its purpose, who it serves, the full effort involved, the evidence available, and the decision to keep, adjust, or pause it. Give the decision an owner and a review date.

Then make the second half of the exercise just as specific: where will the freed-up capacity go? It could fund a better service page, an outreach program for a priority market, a long-overdue customer story, or a simpler way to support existing clients. Choose something you can actually execute, not a vague promise to “do more strategy.”

I would also leave some room for experiments. An unfamiliar channel isn’t automatically worse than an established one, and a new idea shouldn’t have to beat a mature program on its first month of results. Just define what you’re trying to learn before you commit to keeping it forever.

Current references: Gartner: 2026 CMO Spend Survey; Gartner: Awareness and conversion account for 62.6% of total media spend.