Two decisions outrank every channel choice
Direct answer: Marketing consulting from Search Converts is built on published effectiveness research rather than opinion: we check your budget against Gartner and CMO Survey benchmarks, model the 60:40 brand and activation split from IPA case data, and calculate your share of voice against share of market. You get a written plan with the evidence beside each recommendation.
How much you spend, and how you split it between building demand and harvesting it. Most companies agonize over channels and set those two by habit, which is why marketing consulting firms that only optimize tactics tend to produce a better-run version of the same result.
Three questions, answered against published research
Are you spending enough, are you splitting it well, and are you loud enough to grow? Set your numbers and the model checks all three against the benchmarks underneath them.
The budget and mix model
Built on the Gartner CMO Spend Survey, The CMO Survey, and the IPA Databank work by Binet and Field. Nothing is stored or sent.
Include agency fees, media, tools and marketing salaries.
Work that reaches people who are not buying yet. The rest is activation: capturing demand that already exists.
Rough is fine. In a local market, estimate against the competitors you actually lose to.
Your share of all the marketing noise in your category. If you spend less than rivals of your size, this is below your market share.
The curve is the important part and it takes a second to read. The gold dashed line is short-term effect, which falls as you move money away from activation. The rose dashed line is long-term effect, which rises as you invest in brand. The solid line is what they produce together, and it peaks near 60% brand rather than at either extreme.
That shape is why the answer is a split rather than a side. Pure activation wins this quarter and erodes the base that makes next year's activation cheap. Pure brand building starves the pipeline you need to survive long enough to benefit. Almost every argument between a performance marketer and a brand marketer is two people each describing one of those dashed lines.
Where these numbers come from
Marketing has more genuine research behind it than the industry's output suggests. Three bodies of work carry most of the weight on this page, and it is worth knowing what each one actually claims.
The 60:40 finding
Les Binet and Peter Field published The Long and the Short of It in 2013 for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, drawing on 996 case studies from the IPA Databank. The headline conclusion is that a roughly 60% brand and 40% activation split maximizes combined short and long term profit growth. The work has since prompted a large body of follow-up analysis and remains the most cited effectiveness benchmark in the field.
The nuance people skip: the optimum is not universal. It moves toward brand for new entrants and toward activation for established brands in mature categories, and it shifts by sector and objective. What holds across the dataset is the direction, which is that activation-only budgets underperform on any horizon longer than a quarter.
Excess share of voice
The second idea is older and simpler. Brands whose share of voice exceeds their share of market tend to grow, and brands whose share of voice sits below their market share tend to shrink. The gap between the two is excess share of voice.
Work by Danenberg, Kennedy, Beal and Sharp, published in the Journal of Advertising in 2016, puts the relationship at roughly half a point to seven tenths of a point of market share gained per year for every ten points of excess share of voice, with business-to-business results in the same region. That is a modest annual number that compounds, which is exactly why it is easy to abandon and expensive to have abandoned.
What companies actually spend
Two respected surveys disagree, and the disagreement is informative rather than a problem.
| Source | Budget as share of revenue | Who they survey |
|---|---|---|
| Gartner CMO Spend Survey, 2026 | 7.8% | 401 marketing leaders in North America and Europe, the majority at companies above $1 billion in revenue. Up from 7.7% in 2025 and effectively flat since 2022. |
| The CMO Survey, 2026 | 9.0% | A broader United States sample including many mid-sized firms. Down from 9.4% the previous spring, with total spending growth of 1.7%, the weakest since 2021. |
| Pre-pandemic enterprise norm | 11.0% | The level Gartner recorded before the plateau. Current budgets sit meaningfully below it, which is the context for every conversation about doing more with less. |
The gap between 7.8% and 9.0% is sampling, not error. Gartner surveys large enterprises. The CMO Survey covers a wider mix including smaller, growth-oriented firms, which consistently spend a higher share of revenue. If you are a small business, the higher figure is closer to your peer group, and both are averages that hide enormous variation by business model.
That variation matters more than the average. The CMO Survey's 2025 breakdown put business-to-consumer product companies at 15.5% of revenue against 6.4% for business-to-business product firms and 9.0% for business-to-business services. A single benchmark applied across those is worse than useless, because it will tell a consumer brand it is overspending and a B2B firm it is fine.
Two more numbers worth carrying into a budget meeting
Digital reached 61.1% of total marketing spend in Gartner's 2025 data, the highest share recorded since 2013, while traditional advertising stayed in negative growth. Paid media is the largest and only growing category in the Gartner series, at 31.4% of the marketing budget in 2026.
Meanwhile martech's share has fallen for five consecutive years, from 26.6% in 2021 to 19.4% in 2026, even as 62% of CMOs say they plan to invest more in it. Software is getting cheaper per unit of capability and budgets are being reallocated toward media and labor. If your tool stack has grown every year while your output has not, you are running against the trend for a reason worth examining.
Sources: Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, fielded January to March 2026 among 401 marketing leaders; The CMO Survey, sponsored by Deloitte, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association; Binet and Field, The Long and the Short of It, IPA, 2013, based on 996 IPA Databank case studies; Danenberg, Kennedy, Beal and Sharp, Journal of Advertising, 2016, on excess share of voice. Where sources disagree we show both rather than picking the more flattering one.
Why allocation beats optimization
Improving a channel by 20% is hard, competitive work. Moving 20% of a budget from a weak allocation to a good one takes a decision, and it is usually worth more.
Consider the arithmetic. A team that spends a quarter fighting for a 15% improvement in cost per acquisition has done genuinely skilled work. A company spending nothing on demand creation in a category where buyers take months to decide has a structural problem that no cost-per-acquisition improvement addresses, because the pool of people who recognize the brand is not growing.
The pattern shows up most clearly over time. Activation-heavy budgets look excellent for four to six quarters. Efficiency metrics improve, attribution reports glow, and the case for cutting the unmeasurable work writes itself. Then acquisition costs start climbing, because the audience that already knew you has been harvested and the replacement audience was never built.
By the time that appears in the numbers it is usually diagnosed as a channel problem or a market problem. It is neither. It is an allocation decision made two years earlier, and it takes about as long to reverse as it took to create.
The three questions a plan has to answer
Everything else is implementation detail. Who exactly are you for, and who are you willing to be wrong for. What do you say that a competitor could not say about themselves. And how much are you willing to spend against how long you are willing to wait.
Most marketing plans we are asked to review answer none of those and then specify a posting schedule. The schedule is not the problem. The absence of a decision above it is what makes every subsequent choice arbitrary, which is why those plans feel busy and produce so little.
What a marketing consulting engagement covers
Six areas. We rarely do all of them, because the value is in fixing the one that is actually wrong.
Budget level and split
What you spend against your peer group, and how it divides between building demand and capturing it. The first hour of nearly every engagement, and often the most valuable.
Positioning and message
Who you are for, what you say, and whether a competitor could put their logo on your website without changing a word. Uncomfortable to test and clarifying to fix.
Channel strategy
Which channels suit your buying cycle and margin rather than which are fashionable. We sell all of them, so the recommendation is not predetermined. See PPC management for the paid side.
Measurement that survives a long cycle
What to count, what to ignore, and how to judge work whose payoff arrives after the reporting period ends. Long-cycle attribution is covered in depth on our B2B marketing page.
In-house, agency or hybrid
What to build internally, what to buy, and what to stop doing. Frequently the recommendation is fewer moving parts rather than more capability.
The plan itself
A short written plan with a budget, a split, named channels, a measurement scheme and a review date. Short enough that people read it and specific enough to argue with.
Where the diagnosis lands outside marketing entirely, that becomes business consulting, and if the constraint is the sales conversation it becomes sales training. We would rather move you to the right work than run the engagement you asked for.
If you want to sketch a mix before speaking to anyone, the free marketing plan builder runs a version of this logic in your browser, and the wider picture of how the pieces connect sits on the growth system.
Four steps, and the first one is free
Quoted after the first conversation. A budget and mix review for a small business and a full plan for a company with an internal team are different jobs and should not carry the same number.
The free call
Thirty minutes with your revenue, your spend and a rough sense of your split. We will tell you where you sit against the benchmarks on this page and whether the gap is worth paying anyone to close. Plenty of these end with a suggestion and no proposal.
The review
A paid, time-boxed look at what you spend, what it produces, and what your positioning actually says to someone who has never heard of you. We read your analytics, your last twelve months of spend, and your website as a stranger would.
The plan
A short document: budget level, brand and activation split, named channels with a reason for each, what gets measured, and what we expect to be true in six and twelve months. Specific enough that you could hand it to another agency and they would know what to do.
Execution, if you want it
Either your team runs it, another agency runs it, or we do. All three are fine and we will say which we think is cheapest for you. A plan that only works if we execute it is not a plan, it is a proposal wearing one.
Why us
My name is Zach Wennstedt. I founded Search Converts, I have been building and running marketing since 2012, and I do the consulting work myself rather than routing it through an account team. More about my background and the other things I build sits on my marketing consultant page.
The useful credential here is not a framework. It is that I spend my own money on marketing every month. Alongside the agency I run a home-services business and a large portfolio of web properties, which means I have personally funded brand work that took eighteen months to pay off and personally been tempted to cut it at month nine. When I tell you the activation-heavy budget will look excellent for six quarters, that is not a study I read. It is a mistake I have made.
The second thing worth knowing is that we sell every channel. Search, social, video, connected television, direct mail, radio, email, development. That is deliberate, because a consultant who sells one thing will find that one thing in your business with remarkable consistency. Having no favorite channel is the only structural way to give unbiased channel advice, and it is worth more than any certification.
What I will not do is hand you a document and leave. The failure mode of marketing consulting firms is a beautiful deck nobody implements, and the reason it happens is that the recommendations were never tested against what the client could actually execute. So the plans are short, the first fixes are small, and the measurement scheme has to be something your team can maintain without us.
I will also tell you when the answer is uncomfortable. Sometimes the budget is fine and the positioning is the problem. Sometimes the market is smaller than the plan assumes. Occasionally the honest recommendation is to spend less and fix the offer, which is a bad sales pitch and the right advice, and it comes from the same discipline behind our conversion optimization work: look at what actually happened, not what the plan hoped for.
When to call us, and when not to
Call us if
- Your budget was set by last year's budget and nothing else
- Everything you spend is activation and acquisition costs are climbing
- You cannot say what your marketing is supposed to achieve this year
- Agencies keep recommending the service they happen to sell
- You have an internal team and no plan for them to execute
- Your website says the same thing as your three closest competitors
- You are about to significantly increase spend and want a second opinion first
Do not call us if
- You want a deck rather than a change in what you spend and where
- The budget is already committed and the plan is a formality
- You want validation for a channel decision already made
- You need a large branded consultancy for board or procurement reasons
- Nobody internally can execute or maintain a measurement scheme
- You expect a precise optimal split calculated from published averages
- The answer might be spend less and fix the offer, and that is unacceptable
Marketing consulting questions, answered with sources
They make the decisions that sit above execution: how much to spend, how to split it between building demand and capturing it, who you are targeting, what you say, which channels suit your buying cycle, and how you will judge whether it worked. The distinction from an agency is that a consultant should be indifferent to which channel wins. In practice many firms are not, which is why it is worth asking what a consultant sells before you weigh their channel advice.
Two respected surveys give different answers and both are correct for their samples. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts budgets at 7.8% of company revenue among 401 mostly large enterprises, effectively flat since 2022 and well below the pre-pandemic norm near 11%. The CMO Survey, covering a broader United States sample including smaller firms, reports 9.0%. Business model matters more than the average: its 2025 data put B2C product companies at 15.5% of revenue against 6.4% for B2B product firms. Use the figure for your peer group, then adjust for growth ambition and competitive intensity.
It comes from Les Binet and Peter Field's The Long and the Short of It, published in 2013 for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and based on 996 case studies from the IPA Databank. The finding is that allocating roughly 60% of budget to brand building and 40% to activation maximizes combined short and long term profit growth. It is a benchmark rather than a law: the optimum shifts toward brand for new entrants and toward activation for established brands in mature categories, and it varies by sector. What holds is that activation-only budgets underperform over any horizon longer than a quarter.
Activation reaches people who are ready to buy now and produces a measurable response quickly. Search advertising, retargeting and promotions are typical. Brand building reaches people who are not in the market yet, so that when they enter it they already recognize and prefer you. The effects behave differently over time: activation spikes and decays, while brand accumulates slowly and decays slowly. That difference in timing is the entire reason the two get measured unfairly against each other, because only one of them fits inside a monthly report.
It is the gap between your share of the marketing noise in a category and your share of the sales. Brands whose share of voice exceeds their market share tend to grow, and brands below it tend to shrink. Research by Danenberg, Kennedy, Beal and Sharp in the Journal of Advertising in 2016 puts the relationship at roughly half a point to seven tenths of a point of market share per year for every ten points of excess share of voice, with B2B results in a similar range. It is a small annual number that compounds, which makes it easy to cut and expensive to have cut.
As a direction rather than a target, yes. The common small business pattern is close to 100% activation, which produces good numbers for a year or two and then rising acquisition costs as the audience that already knew you gets exhausted. Excess share of voice also does not require a large absolute budget, only spending more than your current market share implies, which in a local or niche market is achievable at modest sums. In an early launch phase a heavier activation weighting is reasonable, because a brand with no cash flow does not get to have a long term.
Not with last-click attribution, which will always credit the activation touch nearest the conversion. Use different instruments for different jobs: track market-level indicators such as branded search volume, direct traffic, prompted and unprompted awareness, and the share of inbound inquiries that already know your name. Ask buyers directly how they heard about you on forms and calls. Then judge activation on efficiency and brand on those leading indicators. Applying one measurement scheme to both guarantees you cut the half that cannot defend itself in a monthly report.
In theory the consultant decides what should happen and the agency makes it happen. In practice the line blurs, and the honest thing to check is what the adviser sells. A consultant who only sells search will diagnose a search problem, reliably. We are both, which is a real conflict, and the way we handle it is by selling every channel rather than one, so no particular recommendation benefits us more than another. It is also why the plan is written so another agency could execute it.
Send three numbers and we will benchmark you
Revenue, annual marketing spend, and roughly how it splits between building demand and capturing it. That is enough to say where you sit against the research on this page and what we would change first.
Or call and we will run it live:
+1 720-712-8615Your information is never sold or shared. We respond within one business day.
Related pages
Consulting is only useful when it changes what gets built. Related pages:
- Business consulting — Business consulting that starts by finding the real bottleneck.
- Sales training — Corporate sales training built around reinforcement, not a two-day workshop, because skill loss runs 70% in a week.
- About Search Converts — Search Converts has built search and advertising work since 2012.