Shifting a £3M+ Marketing Budget from Offline to Digital

The situation

The business had grown on traditional marketing. Press ads. Direct mail. Inserts. It worked. But the world was changing.

Digital was an afterthought. Maybe 10% of spend. The team knew it needed to shift, but nobody was sure how fast or how far.

I came in with full ownership for marketing. A £3M+ annual budget. Nine channels. Four people on the team. Agencies to coordinate. And no clear plan for where things were heading.

What I did

Annual planning

Every year I built a proper marketing plan. Not a deck that gets filed away. A working document.

What are we trying to achieve? What does each channel need to deliver? How does it all fit together? What happens if something underperforms?

I broke it down by quarter, by channel, by campaign. Everyone knew what they were doing and why.

Channel strategies

Each channel got its own plan. Email had a strategy. Paid ads had a strategy. Print had a strategy. They weren't separate silos though. They had to work together.

I mapped out how customers moved between channels. Where they first heard about us. What brought them back. What made them buy.

Competitor analysis

I kept an eye on what competitors were doing. Not to copy them. To understand the market. What messages were they using? Where were they advertising? What were they testing?

This helped me spot gaps. Things they weren't doing that we could.

Customer research

I spent time understanding who actually bought from us. What mattered to them. What made them hesitate. What questions they had.

This shaped everything. The messaging. The offers. The channels we prioritised.

Daily forecasting

I built bespoke internal reporting alongside Excel models. Daily visibility across every channel.

Not weekly reports. Not monthly reviews. Daily forecasts.

When you're managing that much spend, you can't wait to course-correct. A bad week in January shows up in March's results. By then it's too late.

Measurement

I developed a code-based attribution system. Every order, every channel, tracked back to source. No guesswork. Real data.

This let me move budget confidently. I knew what was working because I could prove it.

What made it work

Daily discipline. Most marketers review performance weekly at best. I looked at it every morning. Small problems stay small when you catch them early.

Honest attribution. Code-based tracking meant I knew what was actually working. Not what I hoped was working.

Patience. Shifting a marketing mix takes years. Rush it and you break things.

Results

Over several years, digital went from 10% of spend to 50%.

The business grew throughout. Revenue targets hit. The systems I built made each year's planning easier than the last.