It Worked in 2026. Will It Work Again?
Every year-end review has a winner, such as a campaign that brought in leads or a channel that finally paid back. The pull is to copy it into the 2027 plan and move on.
That is how a one-time result turns into next year’s wasted budget. A win tells you something happened, but it doesn’t tell you why, or whether it will happen again.
Why does a flat marketing budget make keeping a tactic a choice?
Gartner puts the average marketing budget at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026, up from 7.7% in 2025. Gartner’s own guidance to CMOs is to pressure-test every investment and eliminate low-value legacy spend.
That survey covered 401 marketing leaders, most at companies with more than $1 billion in revenue, so read it as a signal about pressure, not a benchmark for your business.
When the total stays fixed, every dollar you keep spending on last year’s winner is a dollar you do not spend on something else. (Psst - we’ve written before about validating spend before you scale it!)
Four Questions to Determine a Repeatable Marketing Result from a ‘Lucky’ One.
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Start with the calendar. When did the leads start arriving, and what else changed that month: a trade show, or a referral partner who finally made an introduction?
Patterns in your numbers show what happened, but they cannot prove why. The Pedowitz Group puts it plainly: “They reveal patterns but don’t prove cause,” and it recommends A/B or geo tests to confirm a lift is not an artifact of mix or seasonality.
A small B2B team can run a version of that test. Pause one activity in one segment or region, keep it running elsewhere, and compare.
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Compare October to October and the same stage of your sales cycle, not this month to last month.
Pedowitz’s guidance is to keep like-with-like comparisons “to avoid false signals from demand cycles or pricing changes.”
A strong September means little to a business that is always busy in September.
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One spike is an anecdote. Look for the same result in a second month or with a second audience.
We are working through this ourselves:
In August, TACT’s monthly reports for DISHER’s four brands showed the same pattern in every report: the best-performing LinkedIn posts were swipeable formats such as carousels and document posts. One DISHER Engineering carousel reached a 43.7% engagement rate against the brand’s 15.3% August average, as we reported in Four Brands, One Company, and What We Are Learning Along the Way.
We called those results early when we published them. One month across four audiences is a promising pattern, not a proven one. The next few months of data decide whether it holds.
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A result that repeats can still be the wrong keeper.
Count the hours your team spent and the money on top, then set that against what the result returned.
Gartner’s test is to evaluate programs “against current market realities and expected return.” A campaign that eats a month of senior time to produce a modest lead can lose to a quieter one that runs on its own.
How to check your best 2026 result this week:
Pick your best 2026 result and run it through the four questions.
Write the answers down.
Every result earns one of two outcomes: keep funding it, or cut it.
Muddy answers are common, especially when credit for a sale is spread across a website and a sales team.
Untangling them is the work a TACT Marketing Audit does. We pull apart what is working and what is noise, then deliver you a strategic vision/plan for your Sales & Marketing departments - one you can defend in a budget meeting.
Not sure your marketing needs one?
Start with our post on the seven signs your marketing needs an audit. Then, book a free Discovery Call, and we will go through your 2026 results together.
