The Digital Marketing Mentor

110: Office Hours | Paid Media Budgeting, Forecasting & Goal-Setting with the Optidge Team

• Danny Gavin • Episode 110

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When ad costs spike and attribution gets messy, even the best marketing budgets can start to feel unreliable. In this episode, Optidge's own Joe Wolf and Alejandro Torres cut through the noise on marketing budget planning and ad spend forecasting: what the models look like, where most plans fall apart, and how to build one that holds up when platforms shift, and results lag.

This episode lights a fire under a candid, lively discussion of the most complex client-facing problems marketers will encounter, using our own experiences as fuel. 


An Optidge Office Hours Episode

Our Office Hours episodes are your go-to for details, case studies, how-to’s, and advice on specific marketing topics. Join our fellow Optidge team members, partners, and sometimes even 1:1 teachings from Danny himself, in these shorter, marketing-focused episodes. Get ready to get marketing!


Episode Highlights: 

  • The Optidge team shares that most clients arrive at budget conversations with a plan already in mind, and reveal that refining it is actually harder than building from scratch.
  • One campaign example shared that a real estate client panicked when overall performance began to drop. Joe and Alejandro affirm that the problem isn't always the channel taking the blame and requires a broader analysis.
  • The team shares insights into Optidge’s cohort-based reporting, noting the changes in how you measure paid media success and how to use it to prevent knee-jerk decisions.
  • Both Joe and Alejandro touch on the halo effect using real examples: store visits, YouTube demand lift, and self-reported attribution from intake forms.
  • The conversation emphasizes that assuming every lead is equal is the most expensive mistake in budget planning, and that building unified dashboards and planning for the whole year helps to keep the big picture top-of-mind.

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Welcome And Sponsor Offer

Danny Gavin (Host)

Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. I'm your host, Danny Gavin, and together with industry leaders and marketing experts, we'll explore the meeting point of mentorship and marketing. We'll discover how these connections have affected careers, marketing strategies, and lives. Now get ready to get human. This episode is sponsored by Odeo Academy. If you've ever thought about breaking into digital marketing, but don't want crushing student loans, a job that drains you, or a career that doesn't align with your values, this might be your sign. Odeo Academy teaches you how to build a real, sustainable career in digital marketing in a way that's practical, ethical, and actually enjoyable. No four-year degree required, no unpaid internships, just real skills you can use right away. Head to Odeoacademy.com forward slash podcast and take two hundred and fifty dollars off Odeo's Digital Fundamentals career course when you enter the code mentor at checkout. That's odeoacademy.com slash podcast. And don't forget to enter code mentor to save two hundred and fifty dollars this spring. Welcome

Why Budget Forecasts Break

Danny Gavin (Host)

to the Digital Marketing Mentor. Today we're talking about something every marketer is wrestling with right now. How to plan your marketing budget and forecast ad spend that actually holds up when platforms shift, costs rise, or attribution changes overnight. This topic is almost always on agendas at the end or beginning of the year, and sometimes even in the middle. So I'm excited to talk about this topic. We're joined by two returning friends of the show, Joseph Wolf, Director of Paid Media, and Alejandro Torres, Paid Media Analyst at Optage. These guys spend all day forecasting budgets, navigating channel volatility, and helping clients build real-world ready marketing plans. How are you guys doing today? Doing great. Awesome. We're not focused on one case study today. Instead, we're using lessons from multiple client experiences to break down what actually works when you're planning your spend. So let's jump right in. When clients come to us asking for help with their annual budgets or any sort of budgeting, what stage are they usually in? What's going on behind the scenes?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

All right. So usually they're they're at a stage where they have come up with a plan internally. They even can have month-by-month budgets that they want to do for their ad spend, what their management fees are going to be, what their creative budgets are going to be. That is usually the best case scenario. Sometimes they're looking for us to kind of map it out with them, but usually most likely they have a general plan in mind. And what we're coming in and doing is either tweaking some of the things or pushing back and saying we need to rethink some of this stuff. So they're usually looking for our expertise to confirm and move forward.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So similarly, I imagine do clients have an idea of how much to spend on each channel? So for example, like I want a specific spend this much on Google Ads, this much on meta ads, or is it usually a blank slate?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

So there's usually a split between the two. Um, and it's usually based on historical data, right? These most of the people that we're working with when we're doing in-depth financial models are existing clients, right? New clients are usually a different story. But for existing clients, it's like, what did we do last year? How are we gonna roll that into this year? And there's a percentage split that we had on average for the year before that we roll into the following year.

Danny Gavin (Host)

All right. And then for those brand new clients, do they usually come with requirements or is it pretty much we tell them where we think we're gonna see the best results?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

We definitely end up telling them where we think the best results are gonna be, but they have a general sense of we want to be on this platform, for example, but they might not have thought about another platform even at all. So if they're coming in and saying they want multiple service lines involved in a campaign, there's usually split that they have in mind. But if

Where Clients Start With Budgets

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

they're coming in with one, we have to kind of push them to understand that they should be on both platforms, for example.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So at Optage, we do some e-commerce, but a lot of it is lead gen. So around that, what are the most common goals you hear? Lead growth revenue targets or cost per acquisition improvements?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

So usually it's gonna be volume targets, right? Like we want to hit this amount. So that can get backtracked into CAC too. If they came to us last year and they said we want to hit this amount of lead volume, and our CAC was say at a point where we couldn't get to that, right? Then we can kind of back in and say, all right, well, our CAC needs to be this in order to hit that volume, right? So it's really a volume and efficiency game there.

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

I I think it also relies on the maturity level of the client in terms of the digital channels, because sometimes they care about the volume at leads or our sales. And if they are a little bit more mature in the digital advertising, they might care more on their returns on investment or ROS. And that is a different challenge depending. Yeah, and it is relying on the maturity level of the client.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Which is so crazy because before this call, we had this exact same issue where the idea is we have a client where last year they were really into, I just want a ton of leads, right? And then this year we've come to a point where, ooh, um, you know, those leads, maybe some of them might not have had such a good lifetime value. And therefore, we really need to be looking at revenue. So it's kind of interesting that sometimes seasonality, like you said, the maturity, what's going on, that can really sway what the goal and what the focus is going to be. I think at the end of the day, we are always trying to look at that end goal of whether it's a qualified lead or an actual customer or what that revenue is. But even when we're pushing in that in that direction, sometimes clients will be like, hey, we just need volume here.

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Yeah. And I would say one thing else to add would be conversion rates, right? So that goes to the quality of whatever we're bringing in. When they're looking at like lead growth volume or like lead volume targets, that's backing into also conversion rates too.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So what tends to create budget confusion? Seasonality, internal pressures, platform noise of a lot going on.

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Yeah. So I would say one of the biggest ones would be goals that don't align with the numbers, right? So if they have goals that are outside of anything that we've gotten before, meaning like a cost per acquisition or a cost per lead, then that can create a lot of confusion because they're saying, like, we have this unrealistic goal that doesn't align with what we have and they don't want to increase spin, for example. So the only way that we have the the to be able to the only lever that we have to pull in that scenario is basically to bring down the cat. And then we end up in a scenario where we're trying to explain how we're gonna do that. But one of the biggest things that has to happen is looking at historical data to inform what is gonna be a realistic scenario and then moving from there. And then other things that I would say is seasonality obviously comes into play. So does attribution, because we need to know which channel is driving overall performance, right? And that can get a little bit hazy nowadays where tracking is a little less clear. So those are some of the things that I'm thinking about.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So

Common Forecasting Mistakes And Misreads

Danny Gavin (Host)

now that we've set the context around the clients and how they're approaching, let's talk about what are the biggest mistakes companies make when forecasting marketing budgets. So, what I want you to do is both talk about situations where a client thought a channel was failing, but it turned out to be something else entirely.

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Okay, so this is the big one that definitely shines a really clear light on this example. So we had a client in real estate, and their overall bookings and their looking for rentals was down in a given period, month over month. So they also tied that with a decline in traffic, um, and directly related that to paid media performance, but they did not take into account that there were other factors involved. Like the this drop could be due to affiliate traffic, right? Or even direct traffic. So we had to dig in and look at how obviously we were doing from a paid media perspective. And when we looked at that, it did not look like there was declines. There was actually improvements in traffic and cost per click and even some quality, you know, conversions that were looking really solid. And what we looked at was the direct traffic and things that we're not directly responsible for, right? Direct traffic and referral traffic is not something that we're going to be looking at, but they were looking at the overall bookings, right? And the overall traffic. So we were able to work with them and determine that it was really their direct traffic and affiliate traffic that was really declining and leading to that lower amount of bookings. Well, the paid media bookings and traffic was pretty much steady month over month.

Danny Gavin (Host)

And when you step back a second, you can't blame them because obviously a paid media investment is a large investment. So naturally, clients are going to hone in on that tremendously. But in scenarios with companies that have lots of different lead sources, there's going to be a lot of other factors that are going to contribute if things are going well or not. And therefore, what we ended up doing was although we really had responsibility to look at the things that we were in control of, right? The paid media campaigns that we're running, but we offered to step in and look at their whole marketing mix and provide a better perspective on how things are going and being able for them to understand that if I pull some levers here, what will happen? If I pull some levers here at the end. So we actually created a larger plan for them than what we initially set out to do.

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Yeah, exactly.

Danny Gavin (Host)

What's

Build Flexibility Into The Plan

Danny Gavin (Host)

the danger of planning budgets without accounting for platform shifts or tracking limitations?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

So the way that I would phrase this is you know, what is the danger of not having flexibility? So you're gonna have a plan a lot of the times that you put in place that is using historical data, but you can't really account for how things are gonna go while you're starting the year, right? Or while you move through the year. One of the biggest dangers is basically being very rigid in that budget through the rest of the year. In order to make sure that you can basically react to the real-time environment, you have to have flexibility and you have to bait that into the mix. So you need to plan appropriately with historical data, but you also need to have check-ins and say, like, okay, well, this platform we originally planned to have this percentage, this platform, this percentage, and we need a shift. But also you need to think about shifting from month to month. So say there's a sale coming up that they didn't have a plan for and they end up introducing it two months earlier than we were kind of planning for. And so we need to make an adjustment and push spin during that sale. So that's kind of an example. All right.

Danny Gavin (Host)

What's your advice to marketers who panic when performance dips for a month? How do you reassure clients who want to pull paid spend immediately upon their first dip?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

What you really need to do is remind them that it's for the entire year. No matter what, any knee-jerk reaction in business is usually not going to turn out well. We do need to have them just kind of step back and look at the bigger picture and say, okay, maybe this month was a little bit slower than we were expecting. What can we do for the upcoming month? And remember and remind them that it's going to be throughout the entire year. And we also want them to be looking at the overall numbers as well, right? They need to be looking at the platform, but we also want to see, even if attribution is something that they're considering as a performance metric, that they're looking at the overall MERF, for example, um, in the back end numbers before they're looking at kind of pulling spin or really using that knee-jerk reaction.

Danny Gavin (Host)

And the logic of looking at the overall is because even if in the platform at certain points you might see that there's some dips, but there may be lagging effects from the campaign earlier that are still working. And therefore, it's important to look at the whole situation, not just within the platform. Exactly.

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

And it's really a communication and education thing that really ends up happening there and is educating them about how to look at the picture for paid media.

Cohort Forecasting With The Wine Analogy

Danny Gavin (Host)

So related to that, Alejandro, at Optage, we talk about forecasting with cohorts, not just calendar months. Can you explain why this is so important?

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

I like to take these like uh the wine analogy. You might think of leads as um vintage wine. If you buy grapes on January, you don't drink the wine on January. You have to wait for the right moment to, you know, to take the wine from the from the grape. It's similar to with leads. You you might end up generating leads on January that converts not in January, but February, March or April, depending on what type of product or service you're offering. So it's important to understand that you cannot rely on always on the sales for today or or this month, because it takes time to seize the results.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Right. And therefore, you know what what happens when companies judge paid search based on the month conversions land instead of the month the leads come in.

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

There are some clients where we have work and this type of uh reports where you can see there's the leads generated on one month and how they've been converting through the throughout the year, and you start noticing uh positive ROS instead of if you focus only on the month that you spend at the budget, you probably see a negative ROS. You you probably see like, oh, we're losing money. Yeah, but in the long term, you're generating a lot of revenue.

Danny Gavin (Host)

You know, for some people when they create reports, it's like, okay, I created the January report and I'm closing it out. I don't have to look at it again. But in our scenario, in what we do, and in with clients that have a revenue that, you know, a lead cycle that might take 30, 60, 90, 120 days, we have to go back to January and say, okay, those leads, that cohort that happened in January, how do they look now, three months later? Did revenue come in or not? And therefore, it really the reporting that we have to do is like a trailing, trailing six months, trailing 12 months, constantly going back and updating things. So it's very clear to see that the investment that you made here and the leads that we got, what did they actually turn out a couple of months or days later? Exactly.

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

So to add on to what Alejandro was saying, one thing that can happen all the time is that they're judging the performance for that given month without waiting for the other conversions to come in. So the way that we report in these cohorts is in the month that the lead comes in, we'll report when that conversion comes in and you'll see an uptick in the revenue in the RAS. They could overreact and say that this month looks really bad. But we know that we have X amount of leads, and we know that the lift that we can look at on average for the last six months, for example, is like 10% or even more, right? So we can expect that lift to go up by that amount, and that's how we kind of report on it. We'll say, like, okay, well, we had X amount come in already for this month, and we're trending way over pace than what we were the previous month at this time, right? And we expect it to go up by 10, 20%, and that usually alleviates some of their concerns, and it helps with that knee-jerk reaction.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So

Social Halo Effect And Hidden Demand

Danny Gavin (Host)

let's move on to a little bit of a another topic, but still related, social media. So social often gets undervalued because attribution undersells it, right? It's usually part of the marketing mix, but it's not gonna be the first thing, it's not gonna be to the last thing. How do you explain the halo effect to clients?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

So the halo effect is such an important thing to educate clients on. Social is really gonna be top of funnel by nature, right? It's people that don't have this product or service already in mind or they're looking at it on Google, for example, right? They're not searching, the intent is different. So when you're getting in front of people on social, it's introducing them to your brand or even the idea of the concept that you're selling. So a lot of the times it takes longer for those people to come into the mix, but you're getting in front of them. So you can go as high as brand awareness, but there are ways that those people end up converting a lot quicker. So you need to kind of educate the client on hey, this might take a little bit more time, but if you don't have this in your marketing mix, you're never gonna get in front of a larger amount of people. You're only gonna be siloed into just the people that are searching for your product, either directly going to your site through word of mouth, which is obviously very important, or through Google search. But top of the funnel, pay social, organic social, is really gonna expand that audience.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Alejandro, do you have any examples where social didn't get last click credit, but clearly drove demand?

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

Especially uh in my case, uh when we run uh search campaigns, uh, there's a specific case when we have a goal of store visits to a client. Google reports are not only on the store visits, uh, they have store visits and view-through store visits. So the difference basically is you can know when an user interacted with it with an ad and ended up visiting the store, but also when a user uh was shown an ad and visited the store. And we have noticed up to 20% of the users that end up visiting the store uh were users that didn't interact with ad, were affected by the ad. They were shown the ad, but didn't interact and end up visiting the store. So this this is also part of the this hail effect that uh we see on on search campaigns or Google campaigns.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Yeah, and similarly, I would add another case that I remember. I think we actually have a podcast episode about it a couple episodes before this, YouTube, which is you know technically a combination of like a search and a social network. But where we've seen is running so YouTube ads, we've seen a very strong correlation in like one campaign where seven days later there's actually an uptick in sales, which is really cool. So you have to find other interesting ways to measure other marketing channels where you're not able to say that this was the one thing. Another example that I've also recently seen is we have an ABA client that they ask the client within the form, how did you hear about us? And actually, a lot of e-commerce companies do this as well. When you get to the actual receipt page, they'll ask you, How did you find us? But often people will say social media or Facebook, and even though we might not have the actual click data or the source data in the UTMs that proves that, okay, this came from social media, but that's what people are seeing. That's how they found you. So you got to get sort of creative in what you're doing. And therefore, when you're thinking about adding social media marketing to your budgets and how you're going to forecast, it's not enough just to focus on those bottom of a funnel areas. You also need to focus on top of funnel. And yes, when you look at those channels on their own, you may not be able to prove directly that because I did this, these are the sales or these are the leads that I got from them. But doing different types of reporting and analyses, like we've mentioned before, will allow you to look at this whole picture. And then the idea is that by having campaigns that focus on top of funnel, campaigns that focus on middle, and campaigns that focus on the bottom of the funnel, all together, these are going to bring the numbers, the number of leads, the number of revenue that you need.

Sponsor Break And Training Plug

Danny Gavin (Host)

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Turning Strategy Into A Spreadsheet Model

Danny Gavin (Host)

that we've dug into some different factors that go into budget planning, we'll move into how to turn strategy into an actual plan. So what does it look like when you actually sit down and build a budget forecast? Usually they will have a plan like I mentioned before.

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Like they will have a month by month amount that they are willing to spend, and will there even be breakdowns for the paid media service lines? Um, what we end up doing when we're refining it is saying, okay, what sales are going to come into mix? Can we get a list of those sales and let's overlay it on your original plan right now? Because they might not be thinking of let's prorate our spin during these sales. So we'll tweak it for that period. And then we'll also go back and look at the performance that we've had for each service line month over month and then key that into things. And also look at their goals. If there's months that they have higher goals than others, we'll actually push more spin to those. So it's really fine-tuning it with them. But they usually come to us with a general plan and we're looking at all these other factors to make sure that that plan is actually going to come into fruition.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So, what tools or models do you use for the scenario planning?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

So, what we're using really is Google Sheets. We're getting into a Google Sheet and we're looking at it month by month. And then when we're kind of pulling data, we're looking at it from a Looker Studio report as well, and even maybe pulling in data slayer or supermetrics into a spreadsheet and doing pivot tables. We do need to kind of cross-reference some data, especially for lead gen clients, where we're looking in backend numbers and seeing which one's converted. We want to see where the conversion rates were better in certain months. So there's a lot of different things that we pull into the mix, but they all kind of come back into a Google Sheet where we're looking at month by month what we can actually do for that.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Yeah, when Joe says back end data, don't forget about CRMs and of course HubSpot, pulling that data in as well, if it's a lead gen type of client that is using a CRM. So, what kinds of insights usually come out once the full forecasting model is built?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Really, the main thing that I'm looking at is where we're gonna have our highest numbers in those requirements and what the lead up to those are. So, what I'm looking at is okay, if we get through the first quarter and we're lagging behind, what are some of the contingency plans that we can come up with? And even on the other side of coin, if we're overproducing at that point, what can we do? So, say we're done with Q1 and we've already hit some of the goals for Q1. Then we know that we have a sale coming up two months later. That month in between, we could actually take it a little bit easy and reallocate some of those funds to push the sales campaign and push it as much as possible because we've already kind of covered our basis for that first quarter. On the other hand, if we're a little bit behind after Q1, then the contingency plan would be all right, we cannot take our foot off the gas in this upcoming month. We really need to kind of make up. We also might have to talk to the client about getting more budget into the mix. Say that the cost per acquisition is just low, like higher than we need it to be, and we're just not able to get it down to the the level that they want. And so the only way to increase volume is to spend more money. So there's some times where we have to make up gaps, and that means that you're gonna have to pivot and act accordingly.

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

Yeah, and adding to that, there's some cases when we have enough time working with the client that that we can not only plan month over month, but if we have working with them more than what More than one year, we can even push instead of having a standard uh same amount of budget every month, we can forecast, okay, this month last year was high the highest entail, so we might end up reshaping budgets to focus on key months uh of the year.

Scenario Planning For Sales And Seasons

Danny Gavin (Host)

Do you have any examples of clients who changed their strategy completely after seeing a forecasting model that we've built?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

It's less about the forecasting model that we built and more of real-time data that was coming in. So we had a client that was um e-com related, and they ended up having a couple sales that they weren't originally planning on doing. But we saw one sale did really well, and then they wanted to push another sale, and that really all fed into us getting massive budget increases for Black Friday Cyber Monday, and even the lead up to that. So we did an early bird sale, we did Black Friday Cyber Monday, and then we did a holiday sale as well. So they basically increased their number of sales and increased the budget around those times.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So when it comes to forecasting, another strategy is to actually create three forecasts. Best case scenario, a worst case scenario, and then an average case scenario. Can you explain why this is so important?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

That worst case scenario, like obviously the best and average, like that's that's what you're looking at to kind of build your forecast on. But the worst case scenario is what is the minimum required lead volume you need, cost for acquisition, cost per lead that we need to be successful, right? To not lose money. So that is a really important thing in the planning process because if you don't know what your bare minimum is, then you could end up going below that and end up losing money very easily because everything is kind of pie in the sky when you're doing a forecast, everyone wants to look at the best case scenario, but nobody really wants to map out what the worst case scenario is.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Yeah, a similar sort of concept, a little bit off key, is that when we had our leadership treat retreat at Optage at the end of the year in this past October, you know, we were starting to create our own forecasting, not necessarily with our ad spend, but just in general with our company. Obviously, we were looking at our forecasting in the best case scenario, but we also had to have the discussion of what's gonna happen if it's the worst case scenario. And it's so tough, especially when things are going so well, it's so difficult to have that open space, create that space to put yourself into like the scenario of like, okay, what if things are gonna go bad? What do we have to do? It's really hard to do it, but it's so important because you'd rather be at that time, you're you're thinking clearer, you know what's going on, and you can have better decision making. You know, if you're only deciding what to do in the bad time when you're in the bad time, more often than not, you're gonna make the wrong decision because you're not thinking clearly. So it's so important when you're doing any sort of forecasting, make sure you create that baseline, that worst case scenario. Hopefully, we'll never get to that point. But if we do, we're prepared and we've got our contingency plans of what to do next. So we've

Lead Quality Beats Lead Volume

Danny Gavin (Host)

spoken about a lot of things, but what's the number one mistake marketers should avoid when planning ad budgets?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

So the number one thing that they need to avoid is assuming that every lead is equal, right? Or every conversion is equal. And in that scenario, if you do that, you're gonna fund the loudest channel instead of the most profitable one. You can look at different attribution models and you could end up seeing that one channel is getting a ton of U-through conversions, and that might be inflating the overall numbers, and you could end up just throwing a bunch of money there. But you do need to look at what is doing driving the biggest bottom line conversions too.

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

So we have a little client. We were running campaigns for them for them for more than a year, and there was some, you can say, performance issues because they were getting leads, but they were not converting. So we started to plan some decisions in terms of which campaigns to turn off and which campaigns to live on. And there was one campaign that has lower volume of leads and one with higher volume of leads. And we thought, okay, if we have to cut uh cut something, let's cut on the lower volume of leads campaign. But when we ran an analysis and suddenly some news came from the client and they told us, hey, we converted these leads, we noticed it noticed that these leads were from the lowest uh volume campaign. So we were about to cut off the arm that was generating the revenue for the client. So it's important not to not rush into rapid decisions without enough data. It's I think that's one big mistake. If you try to make decisions only based on lead volume, you might not end up taking the best decisions. So because not every lead is equal.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Yeah, and that's why it's weird to say that lead volume is a vanity metric, but it really is. When there is so much that happens after that lead comes in, is it qualified? Is it not? Did it become a customer? Did it not? What was the number amount of revenue that was received? All that information is so important. And therefore, just looking at that volume, you could make some really bad mistakes when planning your budgets and doing your forecasting. Exactly.

Lightning Round And Final Takeaways

Danny Gavin (Host)

All right, it's time for a lightning round. I'm gonna ask a quick question and give me a short answer. First question What's one thing marketers should do today to start planning smarter this year?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Plan around things that your product or service is gonna be able to make noise about. So when you're having your budget planning, most likely this is gonna be a sale. So say we have one client that does, you know, DNA testing. So they have uh DNA month, right? And that's gonna be in April. And so they have a big push during that month because it's completely related to that. The one thing I would suggest is that when you have something that's gonna be topical for your product or service, pushing as much swim as you can and creating a point of difference during that time.

Danny Gavin (Host)

How can someone quickly check whether they're relying too heavily on one channel?

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

Having an ashboard where you have all the channels mixed and you can identify which are the sources of your income, which are the sources of your leads, having that information all together, it's definitely the best solution for you.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Yeah, because like if you're going to Google Ads to see some things and meta into other, and you're kind of like living in different worlds, the only way to kind of bring it all together is when you have that unified dashboard. So awesome answer, Alejandra. What's a simple forecasting fix that would make most budgets 10 times more accurate?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

Normalizing for seasonality. So most clients have seasonality in their mind, right, when they're forecasting, but you need to normalize performance for that and include that in your budget forecasting too.

Danny Gavin (Host)

So the idea is you can't just create your budget for one month and copy and paste for the other 12. You really have to think about where are you spending more, where are you spending less? Where do we feel like people are gonna have more attention, less attention, and converger rates might change? You got to bake that in properly ahead of time. So if someone remembers only one thing from this episode, what should it be?

Joseph Wolf (Guest)

The biggest thing is planning the entire year out. It ends up being like easier said than done, but you can't just do quarter at a time, you can't just do a month at a time. You need to think about the ups and downs in an entire year and those events and sales and seasonality that's involved in it, right? So really thinking through the whole year, really using historical data in the mix is gonna be super crucial to making it work.

Alejandro Torres (Guest)

I will say that just remember remember the wine analogy. Remember that you can generate leads and you might see uh not the greatest results on one specific date, one specific month. But when you see the big picture, as Joe mentioned, when you see the whole year, that's a better perspective. So just remember that. You will harvest the grapes today, but you will have the winding in the long term. So just remember that.

Danny Gavin (Host)

Awesome.

Closing And Where To Follow

Danny Gavin (Host)

Well, Joe and Alejandro, it's been a pleasure, and I'm excited for our listeners to get a peek behind the curtain, some of the lessons we've learned that have shaped our approach to paid media budgets and forecasting. Thank you, listeners, for joining another office hours episode of the Digital Marketing Mentor. We'll speak with you next time. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast. Be sure to check us out online at thedmentor.com and at the DM Mentor on Instagram. And don't forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts for more marketing mentor magic. See you next time.

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Danny Gavin

Host