The Simple Test for Your 2026 Marketing Spend

Key Concepts

• Intent Signals: Data points indicating a user’s readiness to make a purchase or engage further with a brand.
• High-Intent Environments: Marketing channels where users demonstrate a strong likelihood of conversion.
• Channel Consolidation: The strategic reduction of marketing spend across multiple channels to focus investment on those delivering the highest return.
• Compounding Returns: Achieving increasingly positive results from marketing efforts through focused investment and optimization.
• B2B Marketing: Business-to-business marketing.
• B2C Marketing: Business-to-consumer marketing.

The AI Implementation Gap & Marketing Spend Inefficiencies

The core issue plaguing current marketing investments is the disparity between using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and realizing tangible results from it. A significant portion of marketing budgets are being inefficiently allocated to widespread experimentation rather than focused optimization and scaling of proven strategies. This is happening despite overall marketing spend increases.

Marketing Budget Trends: Growth & Strategic Cuts

Data reveals a trend of increasing marketing budgets across both B2B and B2C sectors. Specifically, 61% of B2B marketers are increasing their overall spend for the current year, while 57% of B2C marketers are doing the same. A smaller percentage are holding budgets steady, and even fewer are decreasing them.

However, a counterintuitive trend is occurring within these growing budgets: teams are actively and aggressively cutting spend on specific marketing channels. This challenges the traditional “follow the money” approach to identifying successful strategies.

Redefining "Follow the Money": Intent Signals as the Key Metric

The speaker argues that “follow the money” shouldn’t simply mean tracking where budgets are increasing. Instead, it should focus on identifying where confident, high-performing teams are strategically consolidating their dollars – moving funds away from channels yielding weak signals and into high-intent environments.

This shift highlights the importance of intent signals. The central question marketers should ask before allocating any budget is: “Is this channel giving me clearer intent signals than it did last year?”

• A “no” answer indicates a channel for immediate reduction (the “cut list”).
• A “yes” answer identifies a channel deserving concentrated investment (“firepower”).

High-Intent Environments & Channel Consolidation: A Strategic Framework

The presented argument advocates for a strategic framework centered on channel consolidation. This isn’t about reducing overall spend, but about reallocating resources to maximize return. The emphasis is on prioritizing channels that demonstrably provide stronger indicators of user intent – suggesting a higher likelihood of conversion. This approach aims to achieve compounding returns by focusing on what demonstrably works, rather than spreading resources thinly across numerous unproven avenues.

Conclusion

The primary takeaway is that simply increasing marketing budgets, even with AI implementation, doesn’t guarantee success. Effective marketing in the current landscape requires a laser focus on intent signals and a willingness to strategically consolidate spend into high-intent environments. The key to unlocking value from AI isn’t just adoption, but disciplined allocation based on demonstrable performance and a redefinition of how we interpret the principle of “following the money.”