Forget Reach: What Proportion of Your Marketing Budget Should Be Spent on Market Influence?
Most marketing budgets are built backwards.
The tactical line items are allocated first: the media spread, content production, paid social, events, and the website refresh. What remains, if anything remains, flows toward the activity that actually shapes how the market thinks about the business. Strategy. Positioning. Reputation. Influence.
This is not a budgeting quirk. It is a systematic misunderstanding of what marketing is for.
Reach Is Not Influence
The confusion begins with a conflation that the digital age made worse. Reach – the number of people exposed to a message – became the primary metric of marketing effectiveness because it was measurable, reportable, and easy to present in a dashboard.
Influence — the degree to which that exposure actually changed what people believe, feel, or do — remained stubbornly difficult to quantify and therefore stubbornly easy to deprioritise.
A campaign can reach one million people and influence none of them.
An organisation with genuine market influence can shape buying decisions, attract talent, and command premium pricing without running a single paid campaign.
These are not the same capabilities or decisions, and they do not require the same investment, and conflating them produces budgets that optimise more for visibility while delivering indifference.
Lighthouse PR works with clients to make this distinction operational — because the businesses that understand the difference between being seen and being believed make fundamentally different budget decisions, and consistently outperform those that don't.
Where the Budget Actually Goes
In a typical Romanian mid-market business, the communications and marketing budget allocates the majority of its resources to areas of execution. Video, image, production costs, platform fees, agency retainers for tactical delivery, and paid amplification. The proportion directed toward genuine market influence — thought leadership, reputation building, strategic media relations, and positioning work — is, in most cases, under twenty per cent of the total.
This ratio is inverted from what the evidence supports. The activities that build lasting commercial advantage are the influence-side activities. The execution-side activities are only as effective as the infrastructure beneath them.
Paying to amplify a message that hasn't earned credibility is not marketing. It is expensive repetition.
A More Honest Allocation
“ My view is that there is no accepted, universal percentage that applies to every business in every market. But the principle is consistent: the proportion of the budget directed toward influencing how the market thinks about the business should be equal to the proportion directed toward reaching it”. Steve Gardiner
For businesses in competitive markets, in sectors where reputation drives purchase decisions, or in growth phases where positioning is not yet established, the influence proportion should be higher. Not because tactics don't matter, but because tactics without influence produce diminishing returns at an accelerating rate.
Lighthouse PR's counsel to clients is direct on this point. Before the next campaign budget is finalised, ask a single question: what proportion of this investment is building something that will still be working in three years, and what proportion disappears the moment the spending stops?
The answer to that question tells you everything about whether the budget is built the right way around.
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About the Author
Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.
Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.
About Lighthouse PR
Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners.
We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.
Lighthouse PR: Clear. Concise. Convincing.