135: The Simplest Way to Build (and Justify) a Marketing Budget

In this episode of The Sports Marketing Machine, Jeremy Neisser breaks down a simple, data-driven way to build — and defend — your marketing budget. Forget complicated spreadsheets and vague “awareness goals.” Jeremy shows how using your single game ROI as your north star can turn every budget request into a business case. Learn how to project spend, justify investment, and track your performance with a system built specifically for sports teams.

Key Topics Covered

• The easiest way to calculate single game ROI (and why it’s your strongest budget tool)
• How to project next year’s budget using last year’s data
• Proving efficiency gains to leadership with small, measurable improvements
• The 70-30 rule for smart budget allocation (sales vs. awareness)
• Why simplicity sells: how to make your budget “bulletproof” in one conversation
• Tracking ROI month-by-month like an investor — not a guesser
• Turning your marketing budget into an investment plan

Chapters

00:00 – Building a Marketing Budget Framework
 01:01 – Understanding Single Game ROI
 04:05 – Projecting Future Budgets with Historical Data
 07:53 – Improving Marketing Efficiency
 10:10 – The 70-30 Rule for Budget Allocation
 12:35 – Tracking ROI and Adjusting Strategies
 14:54 – Key Takeaways for Marketing Directors

Call to Action

Want help connecting your ad data to your ticketing results so your next budget meeting is a breeze? Head to SportsMarketingMachine.com
to grab time with Jeremy and build your marketing ROI dashboard.

View Episode age with details

Episodes mentioned: 

Episode 67 – Why Your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is WRONG – Case Study

Episode 111 – Building Your Marketing Budget Like a Funnel: Awareness to Action

Episode 125 – “I Saw Your Ad—But Didn’t Buy”: Fixing the Fan Follow-Up Funnel

Episode 121 – How Video Content Makes Paid Traffic Easier (and Cheaper)

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Transcript

Jeremy Neisser (00:00.552)
Welcome to episode 135 of the Sports Marketing Machine podcast, the show to help you sell more tickets, sell more merchandise, make more revenue and grow your fan base. I'm your host, Jeremy Neiser. Today, we're digging into a topic that every marketing director, every ticket sales leader, every GM, external relations director should love, how to build and justify your marketing budget

using one simple framework. We're using real numbers, not wishful thinking, not things pulled out of the air, real numbers. So if you've ever been in that awkward meeting where your GM looks at you and says, why are you asking for so much money in advertising? This episode is for you. We're not building some complicated spreadsheet and doing all of these different things with data. We're building confidence in your numbers, your ROI, and your plan.

Let's get to it!

Jeremy Neisser (01:13.772)
Let's start with what you can measure. Single game ROI. Your marketing budget actually only starts with one number. Most teams that I've worked with over complicate this process.

They try to justify their full-seasoning marketing budget using vague goals like, we're going to grow awareness, we're going to increase engagement, we're going to drive more website visitors, we're going to do these things. Now all of those are fine, but at the end of the day, your goal is to sell more tickets, more butts in the seats. So the smartest way you can look at your budget is to actually use what you can actually measure.

So focus on what you can actually measure and that's single game ticket sales. Here's why. If you look at your budget in totality, you look at it and you say, well 70 to 80 % of this is actually being spent to single game advertising. We're trying to sell single game tickets. 70 to 80 % of your budget is trying to accomplish that. So that's where your ROI story should begin. ROI is return on investment.

So let's do simple math. Your single game return on investment, what's the formula here? Single game return on investment equals your single game revenue. How much money single game buyers spent with you divided by rather your single game advertising spend. So you're gonna take your single game advertising spend and you're dividing it by single game revenue. So let's give you simple math here. Let's say your season happened last year and you spent

$20,000 on single game advertising, so on ads, and you brought in $120,000 in single game ticket revenue. That's 6 to 1. So you have $120,000 divided by $20,000. That's 6 to 1 ROI. So you're getting $6 back for every $1 that you spend. That's simple, that's clean, and very powerful. So just to go through it again.

Jeremy Neisser (03:19.83)
You brought in $120,000 in single game ticket revenue last year. You spent $20,000 on advertising. That's a six to one ROI. Every dollar that you spent, you made $6 back. That's actually the number that starts your entire budget conversation. It's proof that your marketing doesn't drive clicks, doesn't drive engagement, doesn't just do all these things. It actually drives cashflow. It makes the team

money or the organization money. So if you've listened to episode 67 why your ROAS is wrong, you'll remember this. Clicks don't count, conversions do. So don't brag about CPMs and impressions and click through rates and traffic that you drove to the website. Brag about how much ticket revenue you generated per your marketing dollars. If you can share that number, now you're cooking. So your budget story starts with single game ROI.

If you don't know it, everything else that you're doing is guesswork. So the simplest way you can do this, simplest way, take your single game revenue from last year, whatever it was, take a look at it, put it in one column in a spreadsheet, and in the next column, single game advertising spent. How much money you spent out of your marketing budget to sell single game revenue. Divide the two, and that's your ROI. So if I had 120,000, 20,000,

into $120,000, that's 6 to 1 ROI. The next thing to think about here and to talk through here is use that ROI as your baseline for next year. So how do you project and defend next season's marketing budget? Let's just say historically you've done 6 to 1. So you do the math like I just explained. You did $120,000 in single game ticket sales last year. You did $20,000 in advertising. You had similar numbers the year before and similar numbers the year before, right?

So you're on average right around 6 to 1. So for every dollar that you spent, you made $6 back for the organization. So let's walk through the leadership conversation here. So you're sitting down with the GM. You're sitting down with ownership. You're sitting down with your external relations director. And the external relations director looks you in and says, hey, we need to hit $150,000 in single game revenue. Perfect. Based on the 6 to 1 ROI that we've been

Jeremy Neisser (05:47.95)
consistently doing, we're going to need $25,000 in ad spend to reach that. 150 divided by 6. So you already know the answer to the question when they are bringing it to you. We need to hit 150? Great. I need 25,000 and here's how I justified it. Right? You've gone from, we think this might work too, here's the data that says it will take for me to get to the number you want me to get.

This is the same logic that aligns perfectly what I covered in episode 111, building your marketing budget like a funnel. You're not guessing. You're reverse engineering your goal using data. You're not asking for money. You're justifying the investment that you already know will produce a measurable return and that changes the entire conversation. Let me just recap this because I think this is such a shift for a lot of teams, but because

Oftentimes, I sit down with teams and say, hey, this is our goal for next season. They say it's $150,000 or $180,000, what have you, but they don't tell them the marketing budget number. We're kind of putting all of that into one conversation. So when you're sitting down with leadership and they say, hey, our goal is $150,000 in single-game revenue, perfect. Based on historical data, my 6 to 1 that I've been doing for the last few years,

I need $25,000 to be able to reach that. So you've gone from, here's what I think will work, or here's what I want to try all these new things to, here's what the data says it will take. So this logic of reverse engineering your goal using data, you're not just asking for money, you're justifying the investment that you already know will produce a measurable turn.

changes the entire conversation, you've started with what's going to work and you're going to scale it up. So use your historical ROI as your foundation. It makes your request look analytical, not emotional. Now that you've got your ROI, this becomes the baseline for projecting and defending next year's spend. One thought here, one additional tweak to this though,

Jeremy Neisser (08:07.904)
So if you've been getting 6 to 1, just using the math numbers, the $120,000 in single game revenue, and you took $20,000 in advertising, and you spent that, and that turned to a 6 to 1 ROI, you also have to prove that you're going to get better each year. So you have to layer in a layer of sophistication. You're going to be improving your creative. You're going to be optimizing. You're retargeting. You're going to be adding better video content.

it is fair to assume that you're going to get a little bit more efficient with your marketing this year. Let's just say it's a 5 to 10 percent performance increase. So if last season your ROI was 6 to 1, if you expect modest efficiency gains this season, your new target ROI should be 6 to 3, 6.5 to 1, something like that. So if you do 6.5 to 1, so every dollar that you spent,

you got $6.50 back, man, that's fantastic. That is absolutely marvelous. That shows leadership that you're not just asking for more money, you're improving how efficiently that money performs, and it's not just theory. A great example of this, back in episode 121, I talked about how video content makes paid traffic easier and cheaper, and I talked about how consistent short form video

can lower your cost per in thousand impressions by 20 or 40 percent. That's real world proof that better creative drives more ROI. So if you are looking at it and you're saying, I know we can do six to one, but you also know that you have some efficiency baked in there, you may end up at the end of the season at six point three or six point five. You look like a winner when you do this.

So just know that 6 to 1 ROI is the starting point, but you're going to get better as the year progresses because creative is going to change, you're going to get better at retargeting, you're going to get better at video content. All of these things play into it, So data-driven improvements, like better retargeting that I talked about in episode 125, are what drives these gains. So always

Jeremy Neisser (10:24.45)
bake in small efficiency gains as it demonstrates that your strategy is evolving and that you're improving your marketing returns year over year. One way to look at your marketing budget. So let's just say it's a hundred and fifty thousand is the goal and they gave you twenty five thousand. The simple structure for explaining how you're going to break it down and defend it is that eighty percent of our spend directly drives single game ticket sales with a six to one ROI.

The rest fuels awareness, long-term growth, even lead gen. So it's not just a marketing budget, it's an investment plan. I always recommend to teams when you're just kind of putting this all together, stick with the 70-30 rule. 70 % of your budget, single game ticket sales, single game ticket acquisition, 30 % is awareness, lead gen, community, brand building. So 70-30 rule is very safe. If you wanted to go 80-20 and you've been doing it for a while,

Great, but 70-30 is great because the 70 % bucket is the engine that drives the measurable ROI. The 30 % fuels the long game. That's the stuff that builds reputation, fills the funnel, drives leads for group sales, and strengthens your fan base for the future. The biggest takeaway that I can share with you about this specific segment is that simplicity sells. So when leadership can see where every dollar goes,

the approval process becomes easier. The structure to make your budget is simple and easy to explain even to non-marketers. Keep in mind that your external relations director, your GM, they're busy. They got a thousand things going on. So the simpler you can structure it, the simpler that you can communicate it and lay it out in a way that they get it, the easier it is for you to be able to...

implement it you won't have to argue and fight for it so when you lay it out this way your justification becomes simple and almost bulletproof you can literally say hey 70 % of our budget goes directly to selling single game tickets and that has in the past done a 6 to 1 ROI over the last two years to hit this year's goals $150,000 in ticket revenue will need $25,000 in advertising boom it's crystal clear it's not a wish list this is a

Jeremy Neisser (12:49.474)
business case simple math and simple structure make your budget easy to defend Now of course with all of that and the GM says hey thumbs up. Here's 25 grand We got to get to 150 you have to prove it's working every single month So you have to track it and adjust monthly You've got the budget you can't just set it and forget it It just doesn't happen that way the real magic happens when you track

ROI month by month. You pull your ticketing data, your advertising spanned by homestand, by month, by series, whatever it is, however sport you're in, however you're doing it, you're going to start seeing patterns. Maybe if you're in baseball, April and May consistently drive a higher ROI because it the season and people were excited and baseball's on TV rather than June and July when it dips down.

So if you know that, you're going to have to move your budget dollars to the area to keep your ROI moving at that clip that you need it to get to. So when you find those high efficiency windows, double down a little bit. You may need to reallocate to your best months. Or if you look at it you're like, hey, I'm not spending that much and we're still getting a high ROI, move it to where the conversion dips. But you have to be able to know your numbers.

Just like I had mentioned in episode 125, the retargeting funnels, you optimize based on data, not feelings. Think of it like investing. When a stock performs, you buy more. When it cools off, you kind of reallocate a little bit. Your ad budget should work the same way. That's the discipline of a marketing director who's not just creative, but operationally smart. The big takeaway here is the smartest marketers

act like investors. They double down when they have the opportunity or they back off knowing that it's driving without you doing a lot of heavy lifting and you adjust when you have the opportunity but you have to know your numbers. Alright, lot of things talked about here but the biggest piece is the main takeaways here and I've got five of them for you for this episode all about your marketing budget. Number one, start with your single game ROI.

Jeremy Neisser (15:08.47)
It's your clearest metric and the best proof of performance. So you start there when you're having your conversations with your ownership, your team president, your external relations director, your GM. Use that ROI as your baseline to project and defend next year's budget. If you got historic over the last three years that says, hey, I'm getting a six to one, or I'm getting a seven to one, or whatever that number is, now you can...

Project and defend and there's a reasoning behind your request The second piece of this though, which is our third takeaway is bacon small efficiency bumps So five to ten percent to show improvement so that you can show that hey, we're evolving we're getting better Social media ads are changing display ads are changing TVs change like whatever you're doing You like bacon some efficiency so that you can show that you're evolving

If you're just getting started and you're trying to figure out your budget, stick to that 70-30 split. 70 % focused directly on selling single game tickets. It's ticket acquisition. 20 to 30%. So just 70%, 30%. So 70-30 split here for long-term awareness, community awareness, lead gen. Number five main takeaway, track monthly. I hate it when I look at team's data from a marketing perspective and they're not tracking monthly. They're not trackling.

At all what happens during the season they just track at the end of the year and they are really looking at things in the vacuum to understand what's working and what isn't. They're not. They're just looking at things all at the end of the year and saying, all right, here's what we did. You have the opportunity to improve, to pull back, to increase in some areas as you're tracking as the season progresses. So if you're in baseball or hockey track monthly,

Soccer maybe you're tracking by a few games at a time. Maybe this is my 10 % mark This is my 20 % of my games then you tracking that way that will really keep you honest and understanding What's working and what isn't with your marketing? So if your team is struggling to explain your marketing spend or if your GM keeps asking for proof This framework is actually your cheat code. It's simple data backed and built for sports teams

Jeremy Neisser (17:21.742)
So you've got one spreadsheet, one column is how much money you made for single game revenue. Next column is your advertising spend and you divide the two and that's your ROI. So if you spent $20,000 and the team made $120,000, that's a six to one ROI. This is simple, it's data backed and it's actually built for sports teams. And if you want help building out the marketing ROI dashboard so that you can track these numbers for you,

Head over, let's grab some time, happy to chat for 30 minutes, shoot me a DM, happy to chat with you. Head over to SportsMarketingMachine.com. I'd to help you so that you can prepare this correctly so you're asking for the right dollars amount for your marketing. I can help you connect your ad data to your ticketing results and make your next budget conversation an easier one for you.

If this episode helped you simplify how you think about budgeting, share it with another marketing director or ticket sales leader who's just like you deep in budget season trying to sell more tickets and grow their fan base. Don't forget to pop one over to Spotify or Apple and rate or review. It helps sports marketers just like you find these conversations and help them get better. Until next time, I'm Jeremy Nizer and this is the Sports Marketing Machine Podcast where we help you sell more.

tickets, grow your fan base and make more revenue. Until next time!