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Where to Spend Your 2027 Marketing Dollars

Sep 14, 2026

Last November we wrote about what to do with leftover year-end marketing dollars. It turned out to be one of our most-read posts of the year.

We want to have that conversation earlier this time. If you're already thinking about 2027, you have room to make decisions instead of scrambling in the last few weeks of the year. So let's talk about where next year's dollars should go.

Many budgets are growing, but so are expectations

Marketing investment is going up. Forrester's 2027 planning research found that roughly nine in ten B2B and B2C marketing decision-makers expect their budgets to increase over the next twelve months.

At the same time, more than half of CMOs say they don't have the budget to execute the strategy they've already signed up for. Both can be true at once. Marketers have more places to put their money than ever, and less patience from the people asking for proof of success.

Our take on the AI conversation

AI tools are only as good as the brand they're describing, and that's the part we see getting cut.

Here's what we mean. Your buyer is less likely than they used to be to type a keyword and scan 10 links. They ask ChatGPT or Gemini or Perplexity a question in plain language and get back an answer with two or three recommendations in it. Whether you show up in that answer depends on whether a machine can read your brand and describe it accurately: what you do, who you serve, and why someone would choose you.

Brands used to get by on relationships and a good sales team that could fill in whatever the marketing left vague. That's harder now. If your positioning is fuzzy, AI tools will describe you incorrectly or leave you out of the conversation altogether. A lack of brand clarity is starting to become more costly than ever.

1. Start with brand clarity, and start early

If you haven't taken a hard look at your positioning, messaging, and proof points in the last two or three years, this belongs at the top of your 2027 budget. We'd also get it on the calendar for Q1 instead of fitting it in wherever there's room later.

The reason is simple. Your messaging is the raw material for your website, your sales deck, your ad copy, your social content, your job postings, and now every AI tool your team is prompting. The earlier you start, the more success you’ll see over the course of the year.

Try this exercise in the meantime. Ask five people at your company, including someone in sales and someone who started last month, to describe what you do and who you do it for. If you get five different answers, you'll feel it all year in everything your team produces.

 

2. Make room for AI search

Traditional SEO was built on ranking well and earning a click, and there are fewer clicks to earn now that AI Overviews and conversational search answer plenty of questions before anyone reaches a results page.

Fund the work that actually moves the needle here. Write content that answers real buyer questions directly. Keep your company information consistent everywhere it shows up, from your site to your LinkedIn page. Now is a good time to clean up old directory or blog pages that no longer reflect your brand. Earn mentions and citations on other credible sites, because AI systems lean on them heavily.

None of this means walking away from traditional search. Plenty of buying journeys still run through it. But if your 2027 search budget looks exactly like your 2024 search budget, you're paying for a shrinking pool of clicks.

(We wrote more about this in our post on showing up in AI search and how to build a website that gets found in the AI era.)

3. Treat your website as an ongoing cost

Most companies budget for a website every four or five years, treat it like one big project, then let it sit until it gets dated enough to justify the next big project.

That approach worked when a website functioned as a digital brochure. It works less well now that your site is the main source both buyers and AI systems use to figure out who you are. Old copy and stale pages look dated to a human visitor, and they feed bad information into the tools making recommendations about you.

Put a small, permanent line in your 2027 budget for ongoing website work. Quarterly content reviews, speed and performance, refreshed case studies, FAQs, new pages when you notice buyers asking something you haven't answered. It costs a fraction of a rebuild, and it usually keeps you from needing one.

4. Pay for proof

Every planning conversation we're in this year comes back to accountability. Finance leaders want to know what a campaign, a sponsorship, an event, or an agency relationship produced. If you can't answer that clearly, your budget becomes the easiest one to cut.

So put measurement in the plan from the start. You want attribution you trust, a short list of KPIs tied to business outcomes instead of channel activity, and a way to track brand health that doesn't just credit whatever the customer clicked last. When budget season rolls around again, you'll be glad you did.

What to do with this year's leftover dollars

You may be sitting on Q4 2026 money right now, so we won't skip this.

Our advice is narrower than it was last year. Spend it on the front end of your 2027 plan. A brand audit, messaging work, a photo and video library, real research on where you stand with customers. These are the inputs everything else depends on, and handling them in Q4 means you start January executing instead of figuring things out.

And as we mentioned last year, talk to your tax advisor about timing.

The bottom line

Where the money goes matters more than how much of it there is.

The brands that do well in 2027 will be the ones that are easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to choose, by people and by the AI tools helping those people build a shortlist. All three of those come back to knowing exactly what your brand is and saying it the same way everywhere.

Grab a spot on our calendar for a free 30-minute consultation, or reach out and we'll talk through your 2027 plan together.

 

Sources

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