Finance Is Questioning Your Marketing Value: Can You Prove Your Worth?

Marketers today are facing an overwhelming number of challenges. Too many channels, each claiming to be the key to driving performance. Finance teams are questioning whether marketing investments are truly profitable.

As a result of this pressure, many brands have shifted their budgets toward performance-driven digital channels, prioritizing conversion metrics that validate their short-term decision-making. But this myopic approach is coming at a cost, one that threatens long-term brand equity, profitability, and sustainable growth.

The Shift to Short-Term Thinking

Marketers are enamored with data-driven decision-making. The rise of digital advertising platforms has provided seemingly endless opportunities to track and measure consumer interactions, leading to an overreliance on bottom-funnel tactics like paid search, programmatic display, and social media retargeting. These channels promise immediate, tangible returns, making them easy to justify in front of skeptical finance teams.

However, just because the numbers look good doesn’t mean the strategy is sound. In fact, many brands are abandoning the very channels that built their businesses in the first place: top-of-the-funnel investments in brand awareness, storytelling, and broad reach advertising. The result? An erosion of the base business, forcing brands to work harder (and spend more) to maintain the same level of revenue.

The Consequences of an Unbalanced Funnel

When brands cut upper-funnel spend, they undermine the long-term value of their marketing investments. Why? First, without brand-building efforts, companies lose consumer affinity and differentiation, making price the primary driver of purchase decisions. Secondly, with a shrinking organic base, brands must pay more to acquire customers, increasing CAC and squeezing profit margins. And finally, while bottom-funnel tactics deliver quick wins, they fail to build sustainable growth, making brands overly reliant on ongoing (and increasingly expensive) paid efforts.

Marketing as an Investment, Not an Expense

It’s time for marketers to start thinking like investment bankers. Marketing investments, like financial investments, compound over time. When done correctly, marketing spend doesn’t just generate short-term conversions–it builds long-term brand equity and delivers incremental returns year-over-year.

This mindset shift is critical: Instead of viewing marketing as an expense that needs justification, marketers must think of it as an investment portfolio where each dollar should be optimized for maximum return. This means understanding the compounding impact of marketing investments over time, recognizing that brand-building activities today fuel profitability tomorrow, and making strategic investment decisions that mirror financial portfolio management.

This is a new way of thinking for many marketers. It requires unlearning the idea that every marketing dollar needs an immediate return and instead embracing a model where investments work harder over time to deliver sustainable growth.

The Perfect Storm: Inflation, Cost Pressures, and Skepticism from Finance

The economic landscape has only intensified these challenges. Inflation and rising media costs have driven up CPMs and CPCs, making bottom-funnel investments even more expensive. At the same time, finance teams, who are already skeptical of marketing’s ability to drive revenue, increasingly question the value of these escalating costs.

This has created a vicious cycle: marketers are spending more on channels that are becoming less efficient, while struggling to prove marketing’s long-term value in a transactional-driven economy. The result? Job losses, budget cuts, and a growing divide between marketing and finance teams.

The Time to Act is Now

The marketing industry is at an inflection point. Brands that continue to overinvest in bottom-funnel tactics at the expense of long-term brand-building will see declining profitability, rising customer acquisition costs, and increasing skepticism from finance leaders. To reverse the trend, marketers must embrace a balanced, data-driven approach to marketing mix optimization–one that prioritizes planning, forecasting, and profitability over short-term performance metrics.

This means reinvesting in top-of-funnel efforts like TV, streaming, influencer marketing, and digital video to build brand equity and reduce long-term CAC, validating digital performance using independent measurement tools rather than relying on self-reported platform data, and aligning marketing and finance departments to prove marketing’s role as a profit center, not just a cost center.

The future of marketing isn’t about defending past performance, it’s about planning for sustainable, profitable growth. It’s time for marketers to rethink their budgets like an investment banker and maximize the compounding power of their marketing spend.