How to spend it!
Four impactful ways to use your remaining 2026 marketing budget.
It happens at around this point every year. Having diligently held the budget reins for nine months, marketing leaders look at the numbers and realise they have only one quarter left, and they have underspent.
On paper, this sounds like a nice problem to have. In reality, it can create an uncomfortable choice: come in significantly under budget and next year’s allocation may be reduced. Spend it quickly on disconnected activity and you risk wasting money, distracting the team, and ending the year with plenty of outputs but very little impact.
Neither represents a particularly healthy way to run a marketing function.
The answer is not to invent a late flurry of campaigns simply to clear the balance. It is to treat the remaining budget as one final opportunity to land 2026 well and put the business in a stronger position for 2027.
In Pink Mingo’s the Future CMO research, senior marketing leaders were asked where they would invest an additional £1 million over five years. Customer insight, data and analytics came first, chosen by 36 of the 51 respondents. Brand and reputation came next, followed by agency and specialist partners. AI and automation ranked further down the list.
Despite all the noise around new technology, experienced marketing leaders still place the greatest value on understanding customers properly.
So, if you have budget left, here are four ways to spend it without resorting to a December lucky dip.
1. Get closer to your customers
Customer expectations change. Buying committees shift. Competitors reposition. Sales teams hear objections that never make it back to marketing. Existing customers use products and services in ways nobody anticipated.
A focused customer-intelligence sprint can uncover what has changed and give you stronger foundations for almost every marketing decision you make next year.
That might include:
Interviews with current, former and prospective customers
Win-and-loss analysis
A review of sales conversations, CRM data and customer enquiries
Customer-journey mapping
Testing your positioning, proposition or messaging
Identifying unmet needs and emerging buying triggers
ChatGPT, Geminia and Claude can help you make better use of the customer information you already hold. With the right data protection and governance in place, they can analyse anonymised interview transcripts, survey comments, call notes, customer-service enquiries and lost-deal feedback at a scale that would be difficult to manage manually.
They can help cluster recurring themes, compare the needs of different customer groups, identify patterns in objections and surface language customers use to describe their problems. They can also help turn those findings into hypotheses for further interviews or testing.
The value still depends on the quality of the source material and the judgement applied to it. AI-generated summaries should be checked against the original evidence, and commercially sensitive or personal data should only be used through approved, secure systems. An LLM can help interrogate customer evidence, but it cannot replace speaking to customers.
Spend here could cover primary research, specialist interviewers, transcription, an approved AI environment, data analysis and the external expertise needed to turn the findings into commercial decisions.
The result should be more than an interesting research deck. It should give you clear implications for your proposition, product roadmap, customer experience, sales conversations and 2027 marketing priorities.
2. Build a 2027 plan people will actually use
Planning often becomes an exercise in rolling this year’s activity into a new spreadsheet, adding a few ambitions and hoping the budget survives.
A better approach is to create enough distance from day-to-day delivery to examine what is really happening.
A focused planning session should bring the right people together to:
Review what worked, what did not and what you learned
Reconnect marketing activity to the organisation’s commercial goals
Agree the audiences, markets and opportunities that matter most
Generate and assess ideas rather than defaulting to familiar tactics
Set clear objectives and measures for 2027
Decide what should stop as well as what should start
Turn the choices into a practical roadmap, budget and ownership plan
This is something I facilitate with clients, ideally away from the usual meeting room and daily interruptions.
You leave with the bones of a clear 2027 strategy in your own brand, rather than a wall covered in Post-it notes that everyone photographs and nobody looks at again.
It is also a useful way to create alignment before annual plans harden, budgets become immovable and January activity starts running ahead of the strategy.
3. Fund a marketing-effectiveness sprint
If the same problems keep appearing across different campaigns, spending more on campaigns will not resolve them.
A short marketing-effectiveness sprint uses independent senior expertise to examine how the function operates, identify what is getting in the way and make practical improvements before the new year begins.
The budget might pay for:
An independent review of strategy, activity, spend and performance
Interviews with marketing, sales, product and senior stakeholders
A team workshop to resolve priorities, responsibilities and handovers
An assessment of structure, capability gaps and agency relationships
A review of reporting and marketing’s connection to pipeline and revenue
An audit of current AI use, risks and opportunities
Targeted training or coaching in the areas where the team needs greater capability
Short-term implementation support to put the recommendations into practice
The sprint should result in clearer priorities, defined ownership, practical process changes and a focused improvement plan that the team can begin implementing immediately.
This may include removing duplicated activity, improving briefs and approvals, resetting agency scopes, building a more useful reporting framework or creating clear rules for AI use.
It may not produce the most glamorous end-of-year photographs. It can release capacity, improve accountability and help the existing budget work considerably harder next year. Contact me to learn more.
4. Get one commercially important piece of work over the line
Most marketing teams have at least one strategically important project that has remained almost finished for months.
The new proposition still needs testing. The launch plan lacks alignment. The website says too much without making the offer clear. The customer evidence is not strong enough. The campaign idea exists, but nobody has had the time or headspace to turn it into something that will land.
Rather than spreading the remaining budget across a collection of small activities, choose one important initiative and finish it properly.
That could mean:
Sharpening your positioning and messaging
Preparing a major product or service launch
Creating customer evidence and case studies
Building a focused account-based marketing pilot
Developing a research-led campaign
Improving sales enablement for a priority offer
Fixing a weak part of the customer journey
If you need help with how to spend it, take a look at what other marketing leaders are thinking about or get in touch.
I’m used to joining organisations quickly, getting to grips with a complex brief and creating clarity around what needs to happen next. I can lead the work, bring stakeholders together, sharpen the strategy and help deliver the finished output, without the delay or overhead of making a permanent senior hire.
One meaningful piece of work, completed properly, will usually create more momentum than ten last-minute tactics.
A final sense check
Before releasing any remaining budget, assess the proposed investment against whether its addresses a genuine business or customer need, whether its value will continue beyond the end of the financial year and whether your organisation has the capacity to use the output properly.
This is your final push to make 2026 count and begin 2027 with greater clarity, confidence and momentum.
If you have budget remaining but are not yet clear where it could create the greatest impact, a clarity call is a useful place to start.
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