Your Financial Planning Firm’s 2027 Marketing Budget Needs More Than One Bucket

The biggest budgeting mistake I see advisors make is keeping one big marketing bucket. The money goes in, the money comes out, and nobody is quite sure which dollars are doing the heavy lifting.

This time of year, our team is in the thick of 2027 budget conversations with clients. Most of them start at a year-end review. Just as often, they start because something needs to change. A firm wants to add services and know exactly what they’re getting. Or we need to move dollars from one channel to another. Or we need to figure out which vendors belong on the team next year.

Here’s how we build marketing budgets with the advisors we work with, plus a few real examples from this quarter. (Client details are blended and anonymized.)

1. Start with what’s already working

A lot of advisors start with a percentage. “I want to spend 5% of gross revenue on marketing” is a perfectly good jumping-off point. For context, the 2026 Kitces marketing study found the average practice grew organic revenue by 8%, and the cost to get there was about 7% of annual revenue.

I like to start somewhere else, though. I want to know where clients are actually coming from today.

Are referrals bringing in most of your new clients?
Did website traffic jump after a Google review campaign?
Is your podcast or blog consistently showing up in search and AI results?

Those answers tell us what to protect first. They also line up with the research. Kitces found that the most successful high-growth firms get there by honing one or two core tactics they’re especially good at.

We reverse engineer the budget from there. The dollars go to what’s converting before they go anywhere new.

2. Split the budget into two buckets

We just went through this with one of our fractional CMO clients. We looked back at everything we did this year and split their calendar and their marketing spend into two groups.

Bucket one keeps the fires burning. These are the channels we know bring people in. For this client, prospects find them through search, AI search, their podcast, and occasionally email marketing. Those get funded first, with enough room to keep growing.

Bucket two is for growth and experiments. This year, that meant paid advertising, in-person events, LinkedIn DM campaigns, and webinars. Once bucket one was covered, we could see exactly what was left for testing.

I also like to set aside a small flex line. Everyone has a new idea come June when things slow down, whether it’s a shiny new tech tool or a project that came up at a conference. A baseline number tells you what you can say yes to without derailing the plan.

That number helps your marketing team, too. From where I sit, it means I’m not guessing or going back to the advisors for approval on every small decision. (For a quick way to spot which of your systems needs the most support, the self-check at the end of The 3 Marketing Systems That Keep Running When You’re Busy is a good place to start.)

3. Know your line items

Every firm’s budget looks a little different, but a few line items show up for almost all of our clients.

Core services and content. This is the work our team provides, like strategy and support, blog ghostwriting, podcast production, social media, and nearly always some form of email marketing.
A marketing lead. Someone needs to steer the ship and adjust the sails as the year goes on. That person can be in-house or fractional, but I think having someone in that seat is critical.
Paid advertising. This might be digital ads, sponsorships, or local print.
Swag and printed materials. Think event giveaways, client gifts, and referral postcards.
Vendors and tech. This covers outside specialists and the software that keeps everything running.

Your strategy should decide which of these you need. For example, we have clients who don’t do a ton of video. Instead, we book a quarterly batch recording session with a provider who edits everything and clips it for social and YouTube. That’s a vendor line item that only makes sense for their plan.

I covered how to pick your first one or two channels in The 30/60/90 Day Marketing Plan for Financial Planners, and the same thinking applies here. Build the line items around the channels you’re committing to.

4. Don’t let a non-fractional vendor build your budget for you

One of our consulting clients really wants to advertise in their local paper. The paper sent over a few packages it thought would be a good fit. That makes sense, since the paper’s job is to sell ad space. None of the options were quite right for our client.

So we flipped the process. We started with how much the client wanted to spend and what share of the budget advertising should realistically take. Then we shaped an offer around that number, pulling from what the paper had available, like sponsored article placement, newsletter banners, and newsletter features.

5. Plan for one-off projects before they show up

We help a lot of clients budget for big projects ahead of time. For example, when we know a fractional CMO client has a website project coming up in Q1, I’m already sourcing quotes for web design and pricing what it will cost our team to handle the copy and SEO research in-house.

The same goes for an SEO or AEO push, or finding the right podcast vendor. Part of our job as a fractional CMO is to interview those options, vet them, and build them into the budget so there are no surprises halfway through the year.

One note on AEO, since it’s on a lot of 2027 wish lists. Kitces found it’s still one of the more expensive tactics per dollar of new revenue, while SEO is one of the most efficient. For most firms, it fits best in the experiment bucket, with a budget you set on purpose. Plus, as a bonus, solid SEO tactics are still helping our clients show up in AI search. I love a marketing budget line item that kills two birds with one stone.

6. Look at what you’re spending across every provider

We recently took on a client who had been piecing together a whole variety pack of help. They had a podcast editor, someone running their organic social media and email marketing, an intern, a website designer, a graphic designer, and our team providing high-level strategy.

When we mapped out their 2027 budget, we found that bringing most of that work under our in-house team and preferred vendors kept the monthly cost slightly lower than what they were already spending. They moved from our Accelerator program up to our fractional CMO program, and they’re getting a lot more mileage out of the same dollars.

Add up every invoice before you decide what next year costs. You may find you’re already paying for a full marketing team, just in pieces. (Here’s what a long-term fractional CMO engagement can look like over seven years.)

7. Count your own time

The line item advisors underestimate most is their own time. The advisor’s or CEO’s time is often the most expensive thing in the entire budget, and it rarely shows up on a spreadsheet.

Kitces put numbers to this. In the 2026 study, advisor time made up roughly 60% of total marketing costs. Hard-dollar costs actually shrink as firms grow, from 4.8% of revenue at the smallest practices to 1.4% at the largest. Meanwhile, the cost of advisor time spent on marketing climbs from 2.5% of revenue to 7.1%.

We saw this play out with an advisor who was DIYing their blogs and podcasts. They were having a whole time of it, and as a result, the content just wasn’t getting done. So we built a system where our team interviews the advisors at the firm on specific topics and creates content from those transcripts. The founder is completely out of the process, the rest of the team gets involved, and the content finally goes out on a schedule. (More on why that consistency pays off in Why Consistency Is Your Practice’s Best Investment.)

When you build your budget, put a real number on your own hours. It changes which projects look affordable.

Four questions to answer before the holidays

Getting a starting point down before Thanksgiving makes January a lot easier. Here are the four questions I’d answer first:

Where did your last ten clients come from, and what will it take to keep that channel growing?
What’s one thing you want to test in 2027, and how much are you willing to spend to find out?
Which one-off projects are coming up next year, and have you gotten real quotes?
Who is steering the ship, and how many of your own hours are going into marketing right now?

The good news from Kitces is that marketing is getting more efficient. The typical practice now spends about 70 cents to bring in each dollar of new annual client revenue, down 36% in two years, which means most firms earn back their marketing costs in under nine months. A budget built around what works helps you land on the right side of that number.