Marketing Budget Planning: Top-Down vs Objective-Based Budgets, CAC Targets, Diminishing Returns, Channel Allocation & Monthly Phasing

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Size next year's marketing budget three top-down ways, express each as a share of planned revenue and test with IF and AND whether the simplest method lands inside a fictional benchmark range.
• Run a reverse funnel from the customer target to the leads needed, round up to whole leads, price them, compare the implied CAC with the target and find the cost per lead the target allows.
• Evaluate fictional power-law response curves with POWER, compare the average CAC with the marginal CAC of the next $1,000 and solve for the spend at which a channel stops being worth it.
• Allocate a budget in $50k blocks to the channels whose next block brings the most customers, find the cut-off with LARGE, count each channel's blocks with COUNTIF and measure the gain over an equal split.
• Split the budget into working and non-working spend with SUMIFS, measure the working share against a target, find how much must move to reach it and price an agency fee on paid media.
• Spread the annual budget over the months by seasonality weights, add a launch burst with IF, shift spend by one month to see when the cash leaves and measure the Q4 share of the year.
• Judge small channel tests on CAC and sample size with IF and AND, total the scale-up that passed tests ask for and release money from the reserve without touching the contingency floor.
• Compare the half-year budget with actual spend per channel, calculate variances in money and %, turn CAC into payback months and chart budget vs actual for the mid-year review.