Orchestrating Your Budget for Demand Gen Success: A Fiscal Year Planning Guide

Summary

Marketing teams: it’s time to plan your 2025 budgets! Follow the 7 steps to create and manage a well-orchestrated marketing budget. Come back to these steps to optimize for flexibility year-round, track metrics, and revisit your budget as needed for holistic, data-driven success.

By Maria Geokezas, Chief Operating Officer at Heinz Marketing 

Halloween has passed and you know what that means. No, not the Christmas decorations popping up in a store near you—although that’s happening. I am referring to the need to tackle marketing financial planning for 2025.

Working on budgets is not necessarily a marketer’s favorite task. Otherwise, we’d be working in the financial department instead, right? But it is a necessary task and can be easier to do with some common-sense advice.

That’s what I will attempt to offer here, with advice on orchestrating your budget for demand gen success in the year ahead with a holistic, flexible and data-driven approach.

Step 1: Align internal resources

The first step is aligning your internal resources to combat collaborations drag. According to Gartner, 84% of marketing leaders and employees experience this drag when working cross-functionally because resources are not aligned.

At Heinz Marketing, we help clients get past this by implementing marketing orchestration. Marketing orchestration is the strategic coordination of resources to ensure they work together harmoniously. It can make sure each budgetary element—content, campaigns, and technology investments—is optimized to work together, driving cohesive demand generation throughout the fiscal year.

Step 2: Review the previous year’s budget and results

Before you start, take a look at your 2024 budget and how well that spending aligned with your demand gen goals. Chances are your 2025 budget will be somewhat similar so take a hard look at where your spending paid off and where it didn’t and use those lessons in your planning for the new year. Although marketing ROI can be tricky to determine, you want to make sure your budget is aligning with actual business growth as much as you are able to.

Step 3: Establish demand gen goals for 2025

It’s important to align budget planning goals with business goals. Otherwise you risk the costs of uncoordinated budgeting such as wasted resources and other inefficiencies. As you’re working on these goals, take a deep dive into channel and funnel performance data to understand what is truly driving revenue creation. What does your data tell you?

Then look at external factors such as industry trends or regulations (if it’s appropriate for your business). What trends do you foresee? Gather as much insight as you can at this stage. For advice on how to do this, see 5 Strategic Methods for Collecting Valuable Insights.

Step 4: Maximize budgeting in these three key areas

Once you’ve reviewed your 2024 budget and results, as well as determined your goals for 2025, it’s time to consider the budget. When designing your budget, focus on these three areas:

• Content: Ensure content creation and distribution are aligned with your demand gen priorities and that your budget will enable this alignment.
• Campaigns: Coordinate campaign budgets across channels to optimize for the most effective platforms. Remember to include additional costs such as creative services and freelancers in this category.
• Technology investments: Ideally, build a budget that will enable you to invest in MarTech tools that align with your demand generation goals.

This task will be easier (and much more accurate) if you have created your marketing calendar for 2025. For tips on creating this calendar, see 5 Steps to Planning Your Marketing Calendar.

Step 5: Optimize for the entire fiscal year

As you’re designing your budget, think through the entire year. Marketing orchestration can help you ensure long-term adaptability in budget allocation. But to prevent budget blowouts or under-utilization, fiscal year planning should account for market fluctuations, seasonality and campaign pacing.

Step 6: Determine the metrics you will track to keep your budget on track

No matter how much work you put into your fiscal year planning, you will probably need to adapt as the year goes along. This is the flexible part. Determine those metrics and key performance indicators you will track to recognize when you need to make changes. Monitor demand generation success and flag areas where budget reallocation might be needed. Data is at the heart of any successful fiscal planning. Keep your focus on the data as you plan and as you move through the year.

Step 7: Keep at it

Don’t think of your marketing budget as a “one and done.” Orchestrating your marketing budget to maximize demand generation is critical to your ROI, and revisiting it throughout the year is crucial. But you’re off to a good start when you embrace an approach that is holistic, flexible and data-driven.

For more help on building your marketing budget, see Master Your Marketing Budget: Essential Steps for Planning Ahead or reach out for a quick brainstorm.

Image by freepix.