How to Not Blow a Big Marketing Budget

When I first became Head of Marketing at Yonder, I had no idea what I was actually supposed to do.

I kept asking our CEO Tim what he thought, and naturally, he’d say that was the reason he hired me. He did share one useful piece of advice though: go speak to people who know what they’re doing.

So I fired up LinkedIn and started messaging other marketing leaders, asking them how they were thinking about budgets, channels, growth, the whole lot.

The answers were… mixed.

One person told me, very confidently, that our little pre-product startup with about £50k in the bank should do TV ads. Great idea. Why didn’t I think of that? I don’t blame them. Most growth advice is useless, as I learned.

Things got interesting when I chatted with another CMO at a fast‑growing startup in the US who said something that stuck with me. Her biggest problem was working out how to spend her $100m marketing budget.

At the time, that sentence didn’t make sense to me. I’d spent my entire career begging managers for a few thousand pounds for anything. The idea that having trouble spending £100m hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Marketers fantasise about bigger numbers. But bigger budgets actually mean you’re being asked to grow the business faster than before. Any idiot can spend £5,000,000. How you acquire 100x more customers, and still make the economics work, is why they pay us the medium bucks.

Since then, my budget at Yonder has grown a lot, and I’ve spent plenty of time thinking about what actually changes when those numbers go up.

The higher your budget gets, the less the job is about finding things to spend money on, and the more it becomes about managing risk, opportunity cost, and buy‑in.

Mo money, mo problems.

If you’re a marketer of any meaningful repute, you will have, at some point in your career, complained to literally anyone who looks at you twice that you don’t have enough money to spend. This is the way.

But when you have no money, you can focus on just a few ways to make an impact – typically through organic social, guerrilla or stunt PR stuff, and through amplifying growth through your own customers and community.

I know it can feel frustrating. But it’s also safe.

When you have almost no money, the downside of being wrong is tiny. You can throw ideas around without asking anyone’s permission and see what happens. And when things don’t work out, it’s never career‑defining. You just wake up the next day and make another TikTok or whatever.

I think this is an important part of any marketer’s development.

You learn a lot at this stage. You get good at making something out of nothing, building the skill of saying “we’ll just try it and see” because the worst‑case scenario is you annoyed ten people on Instagram and wasted your morning.

When you don’t have money, you have to actually think. You have to write better copy. Come up with weirder ideas. Squeeze more out of channels everyone else has written off. A lot of the ambition and craft you admire in other marketers was likely forged when they were skint, not when they had huge budgets to produce big ideas.

You’re not calling the finance team to ask permission for anything. You probably don’t even have a finance team.

Things get more interesting when there are a few extra zeroes added to the end.

When we raised our Series A, the reality set in. I had a budget maybe 20x bigger than the year before, but I needed to use it to acquire 20x more customers. The expectations grow just as fast as the budget does.

Here’s what I noticed when I started managing bigger budgets.

At the small end, a bad decision is an embarrassing Slack message and a lesson for next time. We spent £1,000 on leaflets once and it got us absolutely nowhere. I shared a photo of someone using them as an ashtray. We all had a giggle, then I got back to work.

At the big end, a bad piece of marketing activity ends up on a board slide.

Every piece of marketing activity you ever do will fall somewhere on a scale between TikTok video and Super Bowl ad.

Most of us will never do a Super Bowl ad. But you’ll have your own version of it – a sponsorship, a TV campaign, an out‑of‑home burst – it’ll cost you a lot of money and will likely define how the company feels about marketing for the next year.

Whether we like it or not, these big marketing moments carry huge opportunity and risk in equal measure.

When we ran our first big out‑of‑home campaign at Yonder, it took up a meaningful chunk of our budget. The timing made sense. We could afford it. It was a good opportunity.

But we still sometimes talk about what else we could have done with that money. The opportunity cost of those big marketing moments is just so high. That doesn’t happen when you’re printing leaflets.

When your budget is small, the decisions are more or less “do we do anything at all.” There are plenty of free things to keep you busy. You don’t really have to think in trade‑offs. You’re saying yes to whatever seems vaguely sensible.

At £100,000, the questions change. Ten thousand on a podcast, or ten thousand on an influencer, or ten thousand on Meta? How do you decide between them?

At £1,000,000 or more, every big decision comes with the weight of ten other things you could have done with that money. Spending money in the right way is just so difficult.

Back in 2022 I was about to sponsor the Taste of London food festival. The fee was in budget but would have been one of the big bets of the year.

The brand exposure would have been nice. We literally positioned Yonder as the credit card for foodies so we knew there would be almost perfect alignment with the audience.

But we sat down and thought about what else we could do with that money. Suddenly, it wasn’t “is Taste of London good or bad.” It was “does Taste of London beat the ten other things we could do instead.”

You think bigger budgets give you freedom. They rarely do. There’s probably an important life lesson in there somewhere.

Big budgets change how you think. It’s so easy to solve your problems with money. Instead of working hard to find the best creative idea, you’ll pay an agency to do it or buy your way out of it by forcing reach through coverage.

Money makes you lazy. The creative hustle muscles you built when you had no budget, the ones that made you do interesting work, start to atrophy if you’re not careful.

Bigger budgets come with harder targets.

If your CEO gives you £100,000, they’re not expecting you to acquire the same thousand customers you did on £10,000. They’re expecting you to acquire ten or twenty times as many. It’s bigger numbers, more efficiently.

Every pound still matters at scale. Every line in your budget still has to pull its weight in customers. Ultimately your job is solving the puzzle of finding the optimal way to acquire a lot more customers for less, without blowing the whole thing up.

Early on at Yonder, I don’t remember speaking to the finance team much about our marketing activity. We’d spend a few thousand here or there. My judgement was enough.

By the time we were into seven figures, that changed dramatically. The bigger the number, the more people need to be in the room:

• Finance, because cash flow and payback now matter in a way they didn’t before

• Your CEO, because big swings shape the story they tell to the board and investors

• Sometimes other leaders, because your ability to handle budget affects hiring, operations, and the rest of the business

Compliance wants to know what the legal and regulatory risk is on a big campaign. Ops want to know how a big campaign might drive more inbound to customer support. Finance literally needs to make the cash available.

For our out‑of‑home campaign, we worked through it with everyone. We were explicit about the size of the bet and what we’d be giving up to do it.

And when we later looked back and wondered whether it was the best use of money, it was always through the lens of “we took a big swing together.”

Turns out “I don’t want to be alone in this” is a very healthy instinct when the numbers get big.

Every company is different. These aren’t precise rules. But if I think about the stages we went through at Yonder, it looks roughly like this.

“Budget”, lol.

You’re doing scrappy, obvious things. A bit of content. A few small experiments. You’re trying stuff and seeing what sticks.

You don’t need permission for anything, because there’s nothing serious enough to require it.

If something doesn’t work, your main loss is time.

Now you can afford to do a couple of things properly.

Maybe you put most of it into one performance channel and one brand channel. Maybe you hire a freelancer. Treat yourself and test a small sponsorship.

You’re probably not calling the Head of Finance to ask how they feel about a £20,000 test. But you are starting to notice that if you put, say, fifty thousand into one thing, that leaves less for everything else.

The decisions matter a bit more. They’re still reversible.

This is the first time it really feels like a budget.

You’re making deliberate decisions about:

• how much goes into Growth Now and Growth Later

• whether you try above the line for the first time

• how many creators or sponsorships you can realistically support

• where headcount fits into all of this

You’re having more grown‑up conversations with finance and your CEO. You’re starting to show them what you’re planning rather than telling them afterwards.

If you get something wrong here, people notice.

A single decision at this level of spend can easily be six figures. Get a couple of those wrong in a row and you feel it for a long time.

You’re no longer just asking “does this sound good.” You’re asking:

• how does this affect cash and runway

• what will this do to our CAC this quarter

• what are we giving up to do this one thing

• is everyone comfortable with the risk

You’re spending more time in spreadsheets and in meetings with finance. You’ll need to present ideas multiple times, to multiple stakeholders, and be iterating on their feedback each time.

You’re also starting to think about your own job differently, whether you realise it or not. Because at this level, your ability to handle bigger and bigger budgets is basically the argument for why you should keep running marketing instead of the company hiring a CMO over you.

When your budget goes up and you’re faced with decisions on new ways to spend a lot more money, you can ask yourself these questions to help ground your decisions.

If it’s a few thousand pounds on something that feels fun and on‑brand, and you know you won’t lose sleep if it flops, you don’t need a committee.

I once designed a full page ad for the Sunday Times because we got it for a great price the day before. Who knows if it was the exact right way to spend that money at the time. It doesn’t matter.

The cost was inconsequential and when we posted it on LinkedIn people loved it. You don’t need approval for those kinds of things.

Take the number you’re thinking about spending and come up with three other ways you could use it. More creative production. A series of smaller tests in different channels. Ten micro‑influencers instead of that one big one.

You’ll never get your budget allocation perfect. You just want to make sure you’ve actually looked at the trade‑offs before you fall in love with the shiny thing.

As your budget grows, who decides on how you spend it moves from “me” to “we.”

There’s no exact number, but you might say:

• Anything under five thousand, I’m happy to just do

• Ten to twenty thousand, I’ll at least tell my CEO

• Above that, or anything that takes up more than, say, ten per cent of a monthly budget, we talk it through with finance and the leadership team

The point here isn’t to cover yourself. It’s to turn the big calls into shared decisions.

It’s also just fun to get people excited about what you’re doing. Most people love marketing and seeing their brand out in the world. It’s a great chance for you to educate others on your work.

Big decisions feel scarier when success is fuzzy. I don’t think a sixty‑page deck is appropriate (ever, really), but a rough picture is enough:

• What do we expect this to do over the year

• What early signs would tell us it’s moving in the right direction

• What would make us comfortable saying “this didn’t work, and that’s okay”

Equally important, decide what you’ll learn if it under‑delivers. Maybe you’ll understand a channel better. Maybe you’ll get good creative assets you can reuse elsewhere. Maybe you’ll have proven that a popular idea in the business doesn’t actually move the needle.

Underneath all of this is an important lesson for all marketers.

The thing that gets you into a Head of Marketing role is not the thing that keeps you in that seat, especially as the company grows.

Bigger budgets are a test.

Can you make trade‑offs that hold up under scrutiny? Bring finance and leadership into the right decisions at the right time? Spend more while the target jumps from a thousand customers to a hundred thousand, and still keep CAC under control? And can you do all of that without letting money make you lazy, forgetting your creative edge you had when you needed to make a £100 idea look like £10k?

If you want to remain the most senior marketer in the business – or become the CMO rather than having one parachuted in above you – this is what you have to get right.

My name is Tom. I’ve launched and grown products at some of the UK’s most loved consumer brands and I’m part of the founding team and VP Marketing at Yonder, a modern-day rewards card. Since starting at Yonder, I’ve written about all my marketing learnings along the way.

If you’re a senior marketer at a startup, this Substack is for you. I write about what actually works in startup marketing (and what definitely doesn’t) for marketers on the verge of breakdown.

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