How to allocate a marketing budget when you genuinely do not know yet
A practical framework for splitting spend between proven channels, promising bets and pure exploration.
Neeraj Kumar, Founder & Principal Strategist · 2026-04-17 · 6 min read
Early-stage allocation is a portfolio problem, not a forecasting problem. You are buying information as much as you are buying customers.
We use a seventy-twenty-ten split: seventy percent to channels with proven unit economics, twenty percent to promising channels that need more data, and ten percent to genuine experiments with asymmetric upside.
Reassess quarterly, and be strict about promotion and demotion criteria. A channel graduates from twenty to seventy only when it has cleared a target cost per acquisition across a statistically meaningful volume.
The discipline matters more than the exact percentages. Teams that write down their allocation rules make faster, calmer decisions when a channel has a bad month.
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- #Planning
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