Many marketing budgets are created backwards. Some “standard” is applied, such as the industry average for companies your size, or a fixed percentage of income – then marketing expenses are shoe-horned into that number. But what if you did the opposite? What if you began by defining your goals (sales, customers, retention, etc.), then built a strategic plan designed to offer the best chance of meeting or beating those goals – THEN attached dollar amounts to that plan to arrive at a budget?