Marketing Budget Allocation

budget allocation marketing

Marketing Budget Allocation Best Practices

A common struggle for marketers is the art of budget allocation – what to spend your money on for your marketing strategy to work. In this blog, we review marketing budget allocation, what’s typically included in a marketing budget, and allocation best practices to keep in mind.

There are a lot of factors that can affect the level of success of a marketing plan. To have a great marketing plan, you need to spend your marketing budget on campaigns and platforms that will bring you a good return on investment.

That’s where marketing budget allocation comes into play. Marketers that strategically spend budgets can execute your plan and bring the ROI you expect to see. In this blog, we highlight marketing budget allocation best practices to help guide you on how to spend your budget to see a great marketing return on investment (MROI).

Article Contents

What is marketing budget allocation, the importance of budget allocation in organizations.

  • What’s Included in a Marketing Budget?

How to Allocate Marketing Budget

In closing: marketing budget allocation.

The definition of marketing budget allocation is the amount of budget an organization allocates to each item of expenditure in a marketing plan. Essentially, it is a limit of money that employees cannot exceed when charging expenses in a specified amount of time.

For marketers, budget allocation is the maximum amount to spend on a marketing plan. Marketers need to optimize marketing spend on efforts needed to reach their audience online and offline to see leads, sales, form fills, and other KPIs calculated into an ROI.

There’s no question that budget allocation is a critical part of a marketing plan. Marketing budget allocation is a needed skill for businesses and typically combines input from many C-level CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs. It also affects marketing, sales, and accounting teams and departments.

What's Included in a Marketing Budget?

As previously mentioned, marketing budget allocation includes everything needed for marketers to reach their target audience and increase their ROI. This means all expenses, including advertising budgets, employee salaries, and the tools and software needed to aid marketers in this endeavor.

Several categories are included in a marketing budget. Here is a breakdown of what’s included when allocating spend for your marketing budget:

  • Software/Tools
  • In-House Marketing Employee’s Salaries
  • Vendors & Consultants
  • Advertising (Digital & Print)
  • Public Relations
  • Events/Trade-show cost
  • Training & Conferences
  • Additional Revenue Generation Tactics

Not only should these categories of expenses be included in your budget, but many of these are used to help marketers reach their goals.

So how can marketers allocate their budget to spend on things that will give you the best return?

Here are the steps to follow on how to allocate your marketing budget to get the best ROI on your marketing plan:

  • Set marketing goals
  • Determine budgets

Outline your marketing plan

  • Allocate budget toward channels, platforms, and campaigns
  • Track the progress
  • Measure return on investment

Set your marketing goals

Regarding your marketing strategy vs. marketing goals, it’s a great idea to establish your goals first, then set a strategy, including budget allocation, to reach those goals. This will help you determine what budget you need to achieve your desired goals

What do your company stakeholders wish to accomplish? What does a marketer need to do to show the true business value of their marketing efforts?

Determine the marketing plan length, and set SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based).

Determine your budget

Once you determine your goals, you need to determine your budget for a marketing plan. Budgets cover a specified period, whether monthly, quarterly, or yearly.

Knowing how much you should spend on marketing can help determine the budget of a marketing plan. Budgets can be set based on past data but should consider the goals you’re looking to achieve.

Planning and budgeting are very closely related. Creating a marketing plan will determine how you get there to achieve your goals. Use data to determine your marketing plan.

The plan should outline campaigns and expenses to allocate your marketing budget. You can use Planful’s online marketing plan builder to streamline the process.

Today, marketing plans break down into many channels or facets of digital marketing:

  • Advertising/SEM
  • Email marketing
  • Social media
  • Public relations

More importantly, how will you use these campaigns to reach your goals?

Allocate marketing budgets 

What do you need to spend to reach your goals for certain campaigns? More importantly, what else do you need to get you there? This is where marketing budget allocation best practices come into play.

Deciding how much to spend for different channels, platforms, and campaigns will get you the results needed to hit your goals. Employees, software, trainings, freelancers, and consultants hired should be factored into your campaign-specific tracking.

Track your progress

Are you hitting your goals? You can use a marketing budget tracker to see how your marketing plan is progressing. Tracking your progress and measuring that against your goals will help you determine the plan’s level of success.

For certain marketing channels and platforms, you’ll likely use data from specific platforms. For example, Facebook advertising has data on clicks, conversions, and spend.

In addition to your ad spend, including the costs that come with manpower, tools, and other costs needed. You can track your success on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or even yearly basis – whatever is appropriate for the length of time your marketing plan is.

Planful’s marketing operations dashboard is a great way to track progress and measure marketing performance.

We break down some best practices to help you spend your marketing budget seeing a great MROI.

5 Best Practices for Marketing Budget Allocation That Will Set You Up For Success

Now that you know how to navigate the bourgeois allocation process, we want to fully prepare you for what to expect. Here are some of our best practices for allocating marketing budgets.

Now that you know how to navigate the bourgeois allocation process, we want to fully prepare you for what to expect. Here are some of our best practices for allocating marketing budgets. 

Best Practice #1: Allocate your budget based on where your audience is

Invest in platforms and channels to reach your ideal target audience. This seems simple, but it’s true for any successful marketing plan.

Knowing your audience inside and out will help you choose marketing channels to reach your audience. Persona research and the buyer’s journey will help you best understand how to allocate your marketing budget to reach your target audience.

Best Practice #2: Diversify Your Strategy

Omni-channel campaigns are extremely important in marketing. Yes, you should invest in campaigns and strategies that bring success, but you should not put all of your eggs in one basket.

For example, if you spend too heavily on one campaign or channel, and suddenly, something happens to negatively affect that, it can greatly hurt your performance. Instead, invest in multiple integrated campaigns to see which ones work and which do not.

Best Practice #3: Sync with Sales Team

Marketing budget allocation isn’t just for marketing teams. Sales teams should be included in a digital marketing plan to help you reach your goals. When marketing and sales collaborate on budget allocation, they can create a plan that puts both teams in the best position to succeed and reach their goals.

Best Practice #4: Leverage Data

When approaching marketing budget allocations, data should be used throughout the process. When you create your marketing plan and allocate budgets, data will provide the insights to decide what to spend on and how to formulate the plan. Not only can data help with marketing planning, but it can be used to track your progress.

Over time, you may find that some campaigns and strategies are more successful than others. For those campaigns that are not effective, don’t be afraid to call it a loss and end the campaign.

Changing your plan and reallocating your marketing budget to be more successful across all channels and campaigns can help you reach your goals more quickly.

Best Practice #5: Practice Bottom-Of-The Funnel Marketing

Take a bottom-up approach to your marketing, and invest more in marketing that targets the bottom of the conversion funnel. Invest in lead generation (for example, SEO, or Google Ads) to maximize bottom-of-funnel marketing. Investing in those close to converting online minimizes your risk and increases your potential marketing ROI.

Allocating your marketing budget for the right things can be tricky, but with historical data and established goals, you can create a marketing plan to spend money that will bring the best ROI.

Best Practices Summary

To summarize our list of best practices for marketing budget allocation:

  • Allocate your marketing budget based on your audience
  • Diversify your strategy
  • Sync with your sales team
  • Leverage data
  • Practice bottom-of-the-funnel marketing

While these tips aim to help you, marketing budget allocation is something that you will learn with experience creating marketing plans. As you move forward with future marketing plans, we hope these tips provide some good insight into marketing budget allocation best practices.

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How to reallocate marketing budgets to drive growth

With budgets under increasing pressure, marketers must allocate every dollar with precision and purpose.

Often, however, budget managers feel tied down by expectations from marketing managers, commitments to sponsorships, and upfront media buys. With little latitude for significant changes to their budgets, they carve up spending by business-unit size or simply tweak last year’s plan.

When allocating budget dollars, most marketers use three factors: spend criteria (e.g., sales, profit, market share, competitive intensity); weights and guardrails (e.g. minimum/maximum thresholds, weighting of criteria); and allocation unit (e.g. market, product, brand, etc.).

The problem is that budgeting criteria are often retrospective and are not aligned within the organization. The CEO may be focused on recent sales growth or how to increase EBITDA, for example, while the CMO is looking to boost brand-health scores and market share. A lack of alignment on allocation metrics usually leads to a mindset of “Let’s stick to what we’ve done before.”

Meanwhile, guardrails for spending and the weight given to any one criterion (sales, market share, etc.) are often determined by instinct rather than by a detailed understanding of business drivers. Added to this, allocation units are often broad, and budget managers don’t drill down to uncover pockets of prospective growth at, for example, the sub-brand or micro-geography level. What companies need is an analytical, forward-looking approach that allocates marketing dollars to customer segments as well as products or geographies that have the highest growth potential rather than to those that have traditionally performed well.

Here are three ways to improve allocation logic:

Blend corporate finance and marketing thinking. Instead of looking at inputs like market share or competitive pressure (share of voice) to inform budget allocations, look down the road to ROI drivers.

One auto OEM (original equipment manufacturer) that we worked with used corporate-finance principles— market growth, competition, and internal economics—to project future profit pools for brands and geographies and made a base allocation for each of its regional markets. It then tweaked the budget according to its business goals in a given region and its related marketing needs, such as the launch of a new product or the need to increase brand share. Allocations were further refined to reflect the profit feedback loop or factors specific to a given region, such as the ratio of share of voice to share of market.

The result? About a quarter of the overall marketing budget was allocated to a few key regions in order to meet business goals. The marketing team got better support from management for future budget allocations, and the marketing budget as a whole was much better aligned with the organization’s strategic direction.

Similarly, a global consumer-electronics company used discounted cash-flow techniques to estimate the value of each of its businesses and make initial allocations of marketing spend. The company then adjusted these allocations for business objectives, such as revenue or margin goals for a particular region. As a result, it reallocated about 20 percent of its marketing funds, compared with an average of 12–15 percent it would have reallocated using traditional models.

Engage the organization around facts, not feelings. When it comes to judging how to weight a given criterion or set guardrails for spending, sophisticated regression models beat gut feeling every time.

Here’s one example: A telecom company looking for a fact-based method for allocating  discretionary spending to particular regions recently tested 60 drivers of business performance, including brand-specific characteristics, external drivers, and competitive intensity. It then applied linear regressions to test model accuracy and the relative influence and statistical significance of each driver. It found that it could fine-tune its marketing allocations by using a combination of internal and external drivers, and as a result, ended up shifting about 30 percent of its marketing dollars from large, saturated markets to small markets with greater opportunities for growth. Moreover, by using the regression-based model, it was able to increase customer acquisitions by 3 percent.

In another instance, a European retailer that frequently had to increase local media advertising in order to maintain sales decided to adopt a granular approach. It enlarged its focus from 200 cells to about 2.4 million, each including household data (socio-demographics, income, and amount and frequency of customer purchases by retail category). The organization then matched these cells to a broad media database to identify the best marketing vehicles for each.

As a result, the organization reallocated the entire advertising budget from roughly defined regions to a micro-cell level and put sales growth back on track. In addition, the match with target-group criteria rose 150 percent, and spending on leaflet distribution dropped 30 percent.

Stage the implementation. Don’t go cold turkey. A drastic budget shift in one year could complicate vendor relationships and marketing activities. Your organization may have product-launches or campaigns it cannot alter. Budgeting shifts can and should be phased in through pilot programs that offer early evidence of success and learnings along the way.

One option is to set caps on budget reallocation. One consumer-electronics company, for example, made sure that no business unit's budget was reallocated by more than 30 percent in the first year. You can also earmark a percentage of funds for marketers to use in response to marketplace developments. Select a handful of brands or markets for a pilot, set clear ROI goals—for example, a lift in sales or margins for Brand A—and establish a feedback loop from markets to the management, where budgeting decisions are made. Measure performance against those goals. And if the pilot works, scale up.

Traditional budgeting approaches have been stretched to their limits. Organizations must migrate toward more granular, analytical, and forward-looking approaches if they want to make their dollars work for them.

Marketing Budget: How Much Should Your Team Spend in 2023? [By Industry]

Caroline Forsey

Published: November 28, 2022

As a marketer, you’re always pitching new ideas to your team. And you’ve also faced a consistent follow-up question, “How much from our marketing budget do we need to execute?”

marketing budget planning for 2023, person making notes on a budget draft

Ultimately, being a successful marketer isn't just about thinking strategically. It's also about adhering to a strict budget, achieving new levels of growth, and choosing the most cost-effective options for your company.

We’ll explore how you can do these and determine how your budget matches up against competitors. Here’s what we’ll cover:

Why You Need a Marketing Budget

Inside a typical marketing budget, marketing budget as a percentage of revenue, marketing budgets by industry, 6 expert tips for making the most out of your marketing budget.

Read the full piece for more. You can also learn how HubSpot’s SVP of Marketing will spend a $10 million marketing budget in the podcast below.

Today’s marketing landscape is complicated. With recession looming, budget cuts have become common and underperforming marketers quickly fall under the axe. Creating a comprehensive marketing budget is your silver bullet for avoiding these outcomes and having cash to execute your marketing strategy.

Developing a marketing budget also helps you:

  • Prioritize projects to invest in.
  • Allocate funds for software purchases.
  • Compare your year-over-year progress.
  • Allocate funds for projects in advance.
  • Justify the importance of specific projects.
  • Calculate the ROI from your marketing projects.
  • Show the value of proposed marketing projects to your higher-ups.
  • Show positive ROI, which can help you get a better budget in the future.
  • Allocate funds for freelancers and full-time hires who’ll execute your strategy.

budget allocation marketing

8 Free Marketing Budget Templates

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Marketing will comprise roughly 13.6% of a company’s total budget in 2023, according to Deloitte's Annual CMO Survey . That’s up 3.9% from the two previous years.

how much to spend on marketing, Deloitte marketing budget chart by year and percentage

Even with a recession looming, many marketers expect their annual budgets to increase in 2023.

In a HubSpot survey of 1,000 marketers, 47% of respondents reported that their budget would increase. Another 45% expect their budgets to stay about the same in the new year.

how much to spend on marketing, how do marketers expect their budgets to change in 2023

Prioritization of marketing channels is also shifting. Traditional advertising will make up less of 2023’s marketing budget, Deloitte reports , shrinking by 0.7%. Instead, marketers plan on spending more money on social media and new media platforms.

For instance, marketers plan to invest the most in Facebook marketing in 2023. While many marketers already have a robust Facebook strategy, 25% of marketers surveyed by HubSpot will invest in the platform for the first time next year.

how much to spend on marketing, what platforms marketers plan to invest the most in next year

Further, video will be a bigger investment in many marketers’ budgets. HubSpot found that 91% of markets plan to increase or maintain their investment in YouTube next year.

Meanwhile, on TikTok, 56% plan on increasing their TikTok investment in 2023 — the highest increase of any social media app. Another 34% plan to maintain their current TikTok budget.

Influencer marketing is another lead-generation tactic worthy of investment. According to our State of Marketing Report , 68% of marketers worked with influencers in 2022 and 88% have a dedicated influencer marketing budget.

This trend will continue in 2023. In fact, 89% of marketers plan to increase or maintain their investment in influencer marketing next year. An additional 17% will invest in this marketing tactic for the first time.

We’ve explored how companies intend to spend next year's budget. Next, you’ll learn how marketing spend relates to a brand's revenue. Let’s dive in.

The amount of revenue businesses allocate to marketing has grown over the past 12 years, with the average at 8.7% of overall company revenue in 2022 . That’s over 5% growth since 2011.

B2B product industries allocate, on average, roughly 7.8% of revenue to marketing . This is similar to B2C services (6.5%) and B2B services (5.9%). B2C Product allocates the highest amount at 15.1% of total revenue.

Small businesses are also spending. In a survey of 85 small business owners and marketers , 52% said they’re spending $5–$15,000 per month on marketing.

what percentage of revenue should be spent on marketing, chart of marketing budget spending for small businesses

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Decisions related to marketing budget allocation remain largely industry specific. To determine more accurate insights for your business, let's explore marketing budgets by industry.

Deloitte recently did a survey showing the percentage of revenue industries should spend on marketing . Here’s the data.

As a marketer, it’s important you use these percentages as benchmarks, especially for industries allocating low marketing budgets.

If your industry is reluctant to spend on marketing initiatives, that’s an opportunity for your team to shine.

Once you convince the higher-ups about what you need to execute your top strategies, you’ll easily outshine others in your industry and make your company a reference for how other teams should do marketing.

1. Understand your customer journey.

A customer journey is not as straightforward as Googling a term, jumping on an email list, and then converting. The journey is full of twists and turns.

Figuring out how your customers go from product awareness to purchase varies among industries. What works for B2B brands may not work for B2C, or for small businesses.

This is why David Hoos, B2B performance marketing manager at The Outloud Group , says you should take time to understand your customer journey before spending a dime of your marketing budget. If you invest in this research first, you'll uncover:

  • What channels to spend your budget on.
  • What platforms to reach your target audience.
  • What messages will resonate with them.
  • What creative will entertain and educate them.
  • What solution will convert them.

Understanding your customer journey is key to unlocking the highest ROI efforts. Done right, this guarantees the best use of your marketing budget.

2. Hire a marketing agency where needed.

It may be difficult to oversee multiple marketing projects without help — even when you have an in-house marketing team.

Besides the time required to hire, train, and onboard a team, you’ll pay salaries and offer some benefits. All this might be a stretch if your budget can’t cater to a huge team or if you don’t have the time to supervise them. This is where marketing agencies come in.

While agencies aren’t cheap, they eliminate some of these challenges and they can function as an extended arm of your team. Partnering with marketing agencies also gives you access to a team of specialists who may help you hit your goals faster and won’t waste your marketing budget.

3. Get an in-house marketing team.

Relying on an agency to run all of your projects isn’t the wisest use of your marketing budget. Marla Malkin, vice president of marketing and strategic partnerships at Attivo ERP , agrees.

4. Invest in content repurposing and updating.

Charlie Southwell, marketing director and SEO specialist at Let's Talk Talent , notes that creating unique and valuable content is expensive. For this reason, Charlie’s team tries to repurpose everything they create.

Their first step is to produce evergreen content that’ll remain valuable for at least two years. After creating these assets, the team repurposes and promotes them in multiple content formats .

If you have published some evergreen assets a while back, consider updating them. Besides providing current info for your audience, a content update may make your pieces move up the SERPs.

The best part about content repurposing and updating is the leeway to re-promote your assets multiple times a year. In Charlie’s words, “Not doing this is a missed opportunity that prevents content from getting enough mileage and maximizing value from your marketing budget.”

5. De-prioritize underperforming channels.

Understanding the channels that drive the most revenue for your business is critical to marketing budget optimization.

Businesses should constantly assess their campaigns to uncover those that underperform, As says Sidharth Kumar, director of product marketing at Exoprise Systems . Doing so will help optimize spending in the right direction and phase out campaigns that don’t generate any ROI.

If you have data suggesting some underperforming channels might still work, use those channels for experimentation and apply the 70-20-10 rule when budgeting for them.

Here, 70% of your marketing budget goes to proven strategies, 20% goes to new strategies, and 10% goes to experimental strategies, which could highlight opportunities for future growth.

6. Constantly re-evaluate your marketing strategy.

A marketing strategy that’s done right will have objectives and key results, which follow the SMART framework . This is important for budget optimization, as SMART goals and metrics help you track progress and identify channels and campaigns that work.

“Constantly reviewing and re-evaluating your marketing strategy helps you know when to stay the course or pivot,” says Thomas Simon, marketing manager at Monitask . “It also lets you use effective tactics and not blindly follow a particular plan without the data or results to back your decision.”

But how often should you do a review?

Corey Haines, co-founder of SwipeWell , recommends marketers do a biweekly or monthly review of budget allocation. “Regular reviews help you cut unnecessary spending, reallocate to high-performing campaigns, and decide when to increase or decrease variable costs like ad spend,” Corey says.

Manage Your Marketing Budget the Right Way

Now that you know the typical percentage of a marketing budget by percentage and revenue the next step is to learn how to manage your marketing budget.

Check out our guide to managing your marketing budget to refine your strategic plan for 2023.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in March 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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budget allocation marketing

Precision in Planning: Strategies For Marketing Budget Allocation

budget allocation marketing

Allocating marketing budgets is not merely an administrative task. It's a strategic move with the potential to steer a company toward its goals or away from them.

The current state of the market makes marketing budget allocation even more challenging:

  • According to Gartner , the 2023 marketing budget as a percent of total revenue is declining. 
  • As a result, 75% of CMOs have reported a rising trend of 'doing more with less' and the need to reconsider commitments to marketing channels, resources, and technologies.

This guide reviews the integral principles of budget allocation and provides a roadmap to making effective and lucrative marketing investment decisions. It highlights the importance of data analytics in these decisions and the need for a flexible approach to optimize returns.

Marketing Budget 

A marketing budget is simply the money set aside to promote a company's products or services. It encompasses various elements including advertising, public relations, direct marketing, digital marketing, events, market research, and more. Marketing budget changes based on what the company wants to achieve, who it wants to reach, and what its competitors are doing. It's also influenced by trends and changes in the market.

What Does a Business Need to Consider When Developing a Marketing Budget?

When it comes to developing a marketing budget, businesses must adopt a thorough and all-encompassing approach. For large enterprises to achieve favorable outcomes, they should carefully consider several critical factors, including.

Business Goals

The foundation of a successful marketing budget lies in aligning marketing objectives with the broader business goals. By ensuring that every marketing effort is geared towards achieving these objectives, companies can optimize their resources and witness tangible results.

  • If the primary goal is to attract new customers , a significant portion of the marketing budget might be allocated to advertising campaigns designed to reach a broad audience. This could include investing in PPC, social media ads, and SEM. 
  • If a company approaches a product launch , the budget could be allocated to promotional events, influencer partnerships, and product placement in media.
  • For a goal focused on retaining current customers , the budget may be allocated more toward CRM systems, email marketing campaigns, and loyalty programs. 

Industry and Market Trends

Operating in a vacuum can be detrimental to a company's marketing effectiveness. Current trends and shifts in the market, if acknowledged and incorporated into the marketing strategy and marketing budget allocation, can significantly amplify the impact of marketing campaigns.

For instance, if the average marketing spend in the consumer product industry is 10.9% of revenue, and a corporation is currently only allocating 5%, it might prompt a reassessment of the budget to remain competitive.

Target Audience

Understanding the target audience is the bedrock of any successful marketing strategy. It influences not just the messaging and the branding, but also where and how the marketing budget is spent. 

Target audience insight empowers businesses to allocate their resources efficiently, directing their marketing efforts to the right channels and reaching the right people at the right time.

Competitive Landscape

Understanding what competitors are doing in the marketing space can provide valuable insights:

  • Competitor Spending Patterns: Identifying where competitors allocate their marketing budget can hint at potentially lucrative marketing channels. 
  • Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Differentiating from the competition is key. If competitors are overlooking a certain marketing channel that aligns with the corporation's USP, it might make sense to allocate a budget there. For instance, if a business prides itself on its exceptional customer service, investing in marketing initiatives that showcase this, such as testimonial videos or case studies, could set it apart from competitors.

Historical Performance

The evaluation of past marketing performance is an indispensable step in the marketing budget planning process. Analyses of previous campaigns and their return on investment (ROI) offer invaluable insights to guide current budget decisions.

By studying past campaigns, it's possible to identify which strategies worked and which fell short. If a specific digital marketing campaign delivered high ROI in the past, it may be wise to allocate a higher portion of the budget to similar initiatives. Conversely, underperforming campaigns might signal a need to reevaluate the allocated budget for similar future endeavors.

What Is a Typical Marketing Budget Allocation?

When it comes to marketing budget allocation, there's no one-size-fits-all approach, as it varies depending on factors like industry, company objectives, and business maturity. However, a typical breakdown often follows these guidelines.

Digital Marketing: 40-50%

A significant chunk, around 40-50% of the budget, is allocated to digital marketing efforts . This category covers various online initiatives, including website development, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), paid advertising campaigns, and engaging with audiences on social media platforms. As more consumers turn to the internet for information and shopping, investing in digital marketing is crucial for reaching and engaging target audiences effectively.

Traditional Marketing: 20-30%

While digital marketing is on the rise, traditional marketing still holds its ground, typically accounting for 20-30% of the budget. This allocation covers traditional advertising channels such as television and radio commercials, print advertisements, and direct mail campaigns. Traditional marketing methods, when combined with a strong digital presence, can reinforce brand visibility and cater to audiences who might prefer more conventional media channels.

Events and Sponsorships: 10-20%

Participating in events and sponsorships is an important aspect of marketing strategy, often taking up 10-20% of the budget. Events offer unique opportunities for face-to-face interactions with potential customers, fostering brand loyalty and networking with industry peers. Sponsorships, whether of events or organizations, enhance brand visibility and association with relevant causes, creating a positive brand image.

Research and Analytics: 5-10%

To optimize marketing performance, dedicating around 5-10% of the budget to research and analytics is crucial. This investment includes utilizing sophisticated marketing analytics platforms like Improvado , which enable businesses to measure the impact of their campaigns, gain valuable insights into consumer behavior, make data-driven decisions, and thus optimize marketing spend and operational costs. 

Integration of advanced marketing analytics solutions can yield 140-400% 3-year ROI, depending on the company's analytics maturity. Take a short quiz to assess the analytics maturity of your organization and analytics ROI potential. 

By following this typical budget allocation breakdown, businesses can strike a balance between traditional and digital marketing, leverage the power of events and sponsorships, and harness the potential of data-driven decision-making . Tailoring the allocation based on individual circumstances ensures that marketing efforts align with company objectives and resonate with target audiences, ultimately driving growth and success.

What Is the 70/20/10 Rule for Marketing Budget?

The 70/20/10 rule is a highly regarded and widely implemented approach when it comes to allocating marketing budgets. This rule provides a clear breakdown for dividing the budget into three key categories, each serving a unique purpose.

70% for Proven Tactics

A significant portion, 70% precisely, should be allocated to time-tested and proven marketing strategies. These are the reliable and established methods that consistently deliver positive outcomes. By investing the majority of the budget in these tactics, businesses can capitalize on their track record of success, driving steady growth and ensuring a strong foundation for their marketing efforts.

20% for Innovative Strategies

To remain at the forefront of the market, setting aside 20% of the budget for innovative strategies is essential. This allocation allows businesses to explore and experiment with fresh and cutting-edge marketing approaches. By embracing new ideas and tactics, companies can differentiate themselves from competitors and potentially discover innovative methods that yield significant rewards.

10% for Experimental Initiatives

Embracing a certain degree of risk can lead to great rewards. With 10% of the budget earmarked for experimental initiatives, businesses have the opportunity to undertake daring and untested marketing campaigns. While these endeavors carry higher risks, they also have the potential for substantial returns. By exploring uncharted territory, companies can uncover hidden opportunities and make breakthroughs in their marketing efforts.

The 70/20/10 rule offers a framework that balances the need for stability and reliable returns with the desire for growth and innovation. However, it's important to note that this rule is just a guideline. Depending on their unique circumstances, businesses may need to adjust these percentages to align better with their specific goals, market dynamics, and risk tolerance. It's also essential to continually evaluate the effectiveness of each category and adjust the allocations over time as results dictate.

Different Strategies to Develop Marketing Budgets

Developing a marketing budget involves making informed decisions tailored to your business's unique circumstances. Here are additional insights into different strategies businesses can use to determine their marketing budgets.

Percentage of Revenue

One prevalent method is to allocate a fixed percentage of the company's total revenue towards marketing efforts. By setting aside a specific portion of the income, businesses ensure that their marketing budget scales with their financial performance. This approach provides a level of stability, as marketing investments align with the company's overall financial health.

Competitive Parity

Another approach involves matching your marketing spending to that of key competitors in the industry. By closely monitoring what your competitors are investing in marketing, you can gain valuable insights into industry norms and trends. This strategy helps you stay competitive and ensures that your brand remains visible and relevant within the market landscape.

Objective-Based Budgeting

Objective-based budgeting revolves around aligning the marketing budget with the specific goals of each marketing campaign. Rather than relying on a fixed percentage or competitive benchmark, this strategy prioritizes the achievement of targeted objectives. For instance, if the goal is to increase brand awareness, a larger portion of the budget might be allocated to content marketing and social media campaigns . Conversely, if the aim is to drive immediate sales, more funds could be allocated to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

ROI-Based Budgeting

An increasingly popular approach involves determining the marketing budget based on expected return on investment (ROI). In this strategy, businesses evaluate the potential return generated by each marketing initiative and allocate resources accordingly. By investing in campaigns with a high ROI potential, companies can maximize their marketing effectiveness and efficiently utilize their budget.

Zero-Based Budgeting

Zero-based budgeting requires businesses to start from scratch each budget cycle. Instead of basing the new budget on previous spending, all expenses must be justified and approved, as if starting with a clean slate. This method encourages a thorough assessment of each marketing initiative's worth, promoting efficiency and eliminating unnecessary expenditures.

Seasonal Budgeting

For businesses with seasonal variations in demand, seasonal budgeting comes into play. This strategy involves adjusting the marketing budget to align with the fluctuations in customer interest throughout the year. By ramping up marketing efforts during peak seasons and scaling back during slower periods, companies can optimize their spending and maintain a consistent brand presence.

Long-Term Budgeting

Long-term budgeting involves planning marketing investments over an extended period, such as a fiscal year or multiple years. This approach allows businesses to set overarching marketing strategies and make well-informed decisions for sustained growth. Long-term budgeting also facilitates resource allocation for large-scale initiatives, such as product launches or international expansions.

By considering these various strategies when developing their marketing budgets, businesses can create a customized approach that aligns with their unique goals, market position, and resources. Remember, an adaptable and well-considered budgeting strategy is key to maximizing marketing ROI and driving long-term success.

Perfecting Your Marketing Budget Allocation

Developing a well-considered marketing budget is a vital aspect of achieving marketing success for large businesses. By leveraging the 70/20/10 rule, adopting effective budgeting strategies, and avoiding common mistakes, budget allocation can be optimized and drive significant results. With the aid of innovative marketing analytics platforms like Improvado, tracking and optimizing marketing budgets becomes more accessible than ever before.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should businesses consider when developing a marketing budget.

Large enterprises must take a thorough approach, aligning marketing objectives with broader business goals, staying updated on industry trends, understanding the target audience, and analyzing competitors' strategies.

How is a typical marketing budget allocated?

The budget allocation varies based on industry, company objectives, and maturity. Typically, around 40-50% goes to digital marketing, 20-30% to traditional marketing, 10-20% to events and sponsorships, and 5-10% to research and analytics.

What is the 70/20/10 rule for marketing budget?

The 70/20/10 rule divides the budget into three categories: 70% for proven tactics, 20% for innovative strategies, and 10% for experimental initiatives, striking a balance for growth and stability.

What strategies can businesses use to develop marketing budgets?

Businesses can consider percentage of revenue, competitive parity, objective-based budgeting, ROI-based budgeting, zero-based budgeting, seasonal budgeting, and long-term budgeting for effective budget development.

How do business goals impact marketing budget allocation?

Aligning marketing efforts with broader business goals is crucial, optimizing resources for tangible results and sustainable growth.

Why is staying updated on industry and market trends essential for budget allocation?

Staying informed on industry benchmarks and market dynamics enables businesses to make strategic decisions and maximize the impact of marketing campaigns.

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16 Ways for Creating a Marketing Budget (and How to Spend It)

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There’s no such thing as a perfect marketing budget. The right allocation of resources hinges heavily on your business, your customers, and more.

If you’re just getting started with marketing (or even if you’ve been in the game a while), that can make budget allocation a prickly subject to tackle—how do you even approach it? But when your business depends on solid marketing to grow and thrive, solving the riddle of marketing budget allocation falls to you.

So why create a marketing budget? How do you find the right distribution of tactics and budget for you?

While there’s no right answer, we asked 52 marketers to share their best tips for allocating marketing budget. Here’s what they had to say.

What is a Marketing Budget?

  • Why is it Important to Have a Marketing Budget?

What is Included in a Marketing Budget?

16 tips for creating a marketing budget.

google-analytics-kpi-dashboard-template-databox

A marketing budget can be best described as an estimation of a business’ revenue and expenses for specific marketing related projects  (promotion of its products and services) over a specified period of time (monthly, quarterly or yearly).

Marketing budgets are usually drawn up to cover expenses such as payment for new marketing software, website maintenance, speaking engagements, paid advertising, and so on.

Why Is It Important to Have a Marketing Budget?

Regardless of the size of your business, the benefits of setting money aside for driving awareness, boosting sales and revenue through your marketing efforts cannot be overstated.

So below, we’ve put together a few reasons why having a marketing budget for your company is important.

1. It allows you allocate your resources effectively

Having a marketing budget allows you to keep track of all your expenses, cut down on unnecessary costs and allocate your resources only to marketing projects that support your marketing goals and are likely to generate good results both short term and long term.

2. Easily track your ROI

When it comes to creating a marketing budget for the new fiscal year, one way to assess how marketing contributed to generating revenue, as well as the ROI for your marketing efforts is to dive deep into your marketing budget. How much did you spend? How much profit did you make? Does it make sense to focus on certain projects next month, quarter or year if they’re not resulting in more leads, sales, etc?

Related: Best Tips for Calculating Marketing ROI

3. It encourages long-term planning

A marketing budget does not only cater to your current marketing needs but also covers future projects. A great practice would be to have your marketing budget closely aligned with your marketing or business goals/plan. So, for example, if you plan to publish 20 blog posts in a quarter, ideally, you would also want to ensure your marketing budget covers expenses such as the cost of hiring freelancers, paying for an SEO tool to help with keyword research, etc

4. Keeps everyone motivated

Team members will be better motivated to put their best foot forward when they know that the company prioritizes funding tools, marketing reporting software , and resources that will help them do better work. Hence, why having a marketing budget is important. It communicates the company’s goals, priorities and involves team members by asking for their opinions on what the company should be spending on.

Before we get into the details for effectively creating your marketing budget, it’s important to quickly review the things you should include in yours in order to create an accurate and realistic budget.

Typically, the following should be included in your marketing budget:

  • Software/Tools: Think your email service provider (ESP), any automation tools, analytics tools, web conferencing software, etc. You can include web hosting and domain renewals in here, too.
  • Salaries:  The salary of those on your marketing team should be included in your overall budget, too.
  • Outsourcing: Does your team hire freelancers, temps, or paid interns for specific projects? It’s important to work that into your budget.
  • Advertising Spend: Whether you’re advertising in search engines, social media, video, podcast, or even print.
  • PR Costs: Using a paid service to distribute your press releases? Include that in your marketing budget.
  • Events/Trade-show costs:  These tend to eat up a lot of marketing resources, so plan accordingly.
  • Swag: T-shirts, stickers, hats, etc. 
  • Training: Does your company help employees level-up with relevant training courses? That could fall under your marketing budget, too.
  • Gear: Cameras, microphones, lighting, and other equipment to help your team create multi-media content.

So how should you organize and prioritize these channels for your marketing budget? Here are 16 tips we gathered from our respondents on how to develop a marketing budget.

  • Have an Attribution Model in Place to Measure Performance
  • Consider Your Overall Marketing Goals
  • Remember That Marketing Channels Interact
  • Align With Your Sales Team
  • Don’t Rule Anything Out
  • Start Where Your Team’s Expertise Lies
  • Choose Channels Based on Your Audience
  • Allocate More to Efforts With Proven Results
  • Don’t Be Afraid to Cut Your Losses
  • Follow the 70/20/10 Rule
  • Research How Competitors Invest Their Marketing Dollars
  • Test What Works for Yourself
  • Avoid Putting Your Eggs in One Basket
  • Spend More on Customers Deeper Into the Funnel
  • Don’t Overlook the Top of the Funnel
  • Be Flexible and Adaptable

PRO TIP: How Are Users Engaging on My Site? Which Content Drives the Most Online Activity?

If you want to discover how visitors engage with your website, and which content drives the most engagement and conversions, there are several on-page events and metrics you can track from Google Analytics 4 that will get you started:

  • Sessions by channel. Which channels are driving the most traffic to your website? 
  • Average session duration. How long do visitors spend on your website on average? 
  • Pageviews and pageviews by page . Which pages on your website are viewed the most? 
  • Total number of users . How many users engaged with your website? 
  • Engagement rate . Which percentage of your website visitors have interacted with a piece of content and spent a significant amount of time on the site?
  • Sessions conversion rate . How many of your website visitors have completed the desired or expected action(s) and what percentage of them completed the goals you’ve set in Google Analytics 4?

And more…

Now you can benefit from the experience of our Google Analytics 4 experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing the most important KPIs for monitoring visitor engagement on your website. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in marketing reports, and best of all, it’s free!

GA4 KPI dashboard template

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Google Analytics account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

1. Have an Attribution Model in Place to Measure Performance

“Unless you know which campaigns and efforts are generating actual revenue, you’re resourcing your business blindly,” said Martin Shirvington of Plus Your Business .

Many of the responses we heard centered around tracking performance and adjusting your allocation accordingly. But long before you spend a dime, you need to have systems and tools in place to measure that performance.

“Trying to determine where to spend money without knowing how each channel is performing is like playing darts blindfolded,” said Quincy Smith of Ampjar . “Define and set up tracking for your marketing channels, so you know where the best ROI lies— before dumping any money.”

Kelley Wrede of Revenue River pointed out that, until you test and measure marketing campaigns, you really have no idea what will work.

“You may not know how things are going to work out the first time you invest in them, but if you collect data and can attribute dollars spent with dollars earned for each channel, the allocation process will become much more intelligent and successful for your organization over time.”

Gazelle Interactive ’s Ryan Walker suggested using an analytics tool that employs the same attribution model across all of your marketing channels—so you get the most holistic view of the real value of each.

Shervington and team use HubSpot Pro because it connects marketing channels (like AdWords and Facebook Ads) and allows you to attribute “at the most granular level.”

Additionally, you can leverage a great tool like our marketing dashboard software to monitor, assess and report on your most important marketing KPIs and metrics.

Editor’s note: Want a more visual way to report and analyze how your marketing channels generate leads and turn them into customers? Download this free HubSpot Sources Report dashboard to view sessions, MQLs, SQLs, customers, and more—all broken down by source.

Download this free HubSpot Sources Report dashboard

2. Consider Your Overall Marketing Goals

One of the big questions we wanted answers to was what drives marketing budget allocation? We asked the marketers we spoke with to share the most important factors that help them determine marketing budgets.

Most important factors for determining your marketing budget

Around 40% of respondents told us that alignment with overall company goals was the single most important factor in driving their marketing budgets.

“With objectives and strategy written,” said Daleep Chhabria of Growth Forte , “you might, for example, narrow down to PR, website, SEO/content-writing, social media for amplification, promotions, and a few marketing technologies.”

“Are your goals reach-related or revenue-related?” John Donnachie of ClydeBank Media asked. “Are you trying to increase awareness for a new product or are you trying to increase sales for an existing product?”

Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers added, “Does your company want more visibility? Do you want more sales? Do you want more downloads? Once you know your company’s goals, you can put more marketing dollars on the channels that will help you move the needle.”

See also : 13 Tips for Setting (and Achieving) Your Marketing Goals

3. Remember That Marketing Channels Interact

One unique tip we heard was to avoid taking a zero-sum approach to marketing channels—because they all work together and affect one another.

Adding to Perreault’s comment, CodeCrew ’s Alexandra Marin explained, “Successful marketing is a fine combination of multiple factors.”

“If any of them is left behind,” Marin added, “the long-term resolve of your efforts may be disappointing—even if short-term results look good. ”

4. Align With Your Sales Team

Marketing budget allocation isn’t just about the marketing team. It requires input from throughout the organization, and that includes the sales team. Collaboration between the sales and marketing team is an excellent practice to strive towards—so G2 ’s Deirdre O’Donoghue told us you should define those goals together, before you worry about allocating spend.

5. Don’t Rule Anything Out

“It’s easy to make some assumptions and guesses about how certain channels will perform, but you won’t actually know until you experiment,” explained Corey Haines of Hey Marketers .

Vivek Kumar of Qlicket agreed, adding that “any good marketing team must first all of their options first, before executing on any tactics.”

Kumar says their team followed the process set forth in Traction , a book written by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. The book outlines nineteen “traction channels” for marketers to test, weighing the costs and benefits as they go.

“From there,” Kumar said, “we were able to draft a marketing plan with the security of knowing that we considered all of our options.”

6. Start Where Your Team’s Expertise Lies

We’ve heard tips about setting up attribution models and drawing allocation from your goals… but you always have to start somewhere. Chane Steiner of Crediful recommends that very first somewhere is wherever your in-house team has some level of expertise.

“Start with one marketing channel at a time, and begin with wherever you have in-house expertise,” Steiner said. “Of course, you can’t stop there. Expand one channel at a time, continuing to A/B test your way into a position that generates ROI. From there, you can experiment with optimizing your ROI.”

7. Choose Channels Based on Your Audience

John Donnachie of ClydeBank Media asked, “Where do your customers spend their time online? What channel makes the most sense to reach them?”

“Understand your customers and their buyer’s journey before allocating budget to marketing activities,” suggested Kyle Turk of Keynote Search. “Don’t waste your budget on marketing initiatives that don’t directly impact your core customer group. If your target audience isn’t on Instagram, for example, don’t allocate money to Instagram ads.”

8. Allocate More to Efforts With Proven Results

“After a few months to a year of promoting the business, you should check the ROI of each marketing medium using a marketing dashboard , and allocate your budget based on that number,” said Hassan Alnassir of Premium Joy .

Once your marketing program is rolling and set up to track performance across channels, allocation becomes as simple as doubling-down wherever you see positive results—and cutting your losses where you don’t.

Stacy Caprio of Conversiono recommends starting small, with budget spread relatively evenly across channels. “Once you have data that shows which channels are converting to paid customers in the most profitable way, you can start funneling more money into those channels.”

Hill Gaming Company ’s Casey Hill outlined the two-step process they use with clients:

  • Identify which platforms work for the client’s audience and where there are initial indicators of engagement
  • Test and iterate to refine the allocation

Hill also recommended the wider focus of ROI, similar to Cook’s sentiment around time and energy investments. “Focus on where you can consistently produce quality content because you enjoy it. If you hate writing, don’t do a written blog—try video, or interviews, podcasts, etc.”

Editor’s note: Want an easier way to see how marketing channels contribute to revenue? Download this free Google Analytics Product Revenue dashboard to view revenue across products, sources, and more.

Google Analytics Product Revenue dashboard

9. Don’t Be Afraid to Cut Your Losses

Drawing from that data-backed approach to allocation, several marketers advised that you can’t be afraid to cut your losses. Don’t fall victim to the sunken cost fallacy—just because you’ve invested in a channel doesn’t mean you must (or should) keep pouring money into it.

“Don’t be afraid to move on from bad content,” warned Cristina Maria of Commusoft. “Many marketers seem to think that if they pour dollars into a channel that isn’t working well, it will magically transform it. Whether it’s Facebook Ads or paid Instagram Stories, you need to track ROI and cut your losses if it’s not working.”

Don’t Be Afraid to Cut Your Losses

“Don’t fall in love with a particular channel,” advised Robert Donnell of P5 Marketing. “We see too many clients that are enamored with SEO or Facebook—to the exclusion of other channels. We have to be objective about the allocation.”

In other words, kill your darlings and cut your losses.

10. Follow the 70/20/10 Rule

Wes Marsh of BCA Technologies told us they have a hard-and-fast guideline for marketing allocation:

“Put 70% of your budget into proven marketing channels that give you the best blend of quality leads at a low cost per lead, and then squeeze as much as you can out of it. Put 20% into other channels that still offer quality exposure and lead generation, even if there is less direct attribution (i.e. display, video, etc.). Finally, keep the remaining 10% of your budget available to explore new channels and for testing.”

Hey Marketers ’ Corey Haines also recommended leaving a portion of your budget available to experiment with new campaigns. “For every channel that you invest marketing dollars into, give yourself the ability to experiment with a portion of the budget. Even a small experimental budget,” Haines explained, “can go a long way in exploring new ways to use the channel, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, and exercising your creative muscles.”

Follow the 70/20/10 Rule

11. Research How Competitors Invest Their Marketing Dollars

At some level, the right marketing channels for your business come down to your industry and business model. That means you can glean some value out of researching how your competitors allocate their marketing spend.

“I’d start by looking at several competitors to identify a trend in the pattern of their traffic sources,” Dresean Ryan of Dresean Consulting suggested. “Analyze some of the competitors in your industry with tools like SimilarWeb to see where they’re investing most of their advertising dollar—by looking at their traffic source, you’ll be able to tell where most of their budget is going.”

12. Test What Works for Yourself

“Test, reallocate budget, test some more, reallocate some more, and so on. Amplify your successes and don’t be put off if something doesn’t work at first,” recommended Oliver Roddy of Catalyst Marketing .

Corey Haines of Hey Marketers explained, “It’s easy to make some assumptions and guesses about how certain channels will perform, but you won’t actually know until you experiment.”

The marketers we heard from recommended starting with small budgets and testing to see what works. “Figure out what’s working and then turn up the dial accordingly,” said Zaahn Johnson of The Kingdom .

“Only through testing each channel will you be able to determine where to allocate larger percentages of your marketing budget,” said Alistair Dodds of Ever Increasing Circles . “When you find a channel that absolutely flies and is delivering high ROI, be prepared to scale up quickly.”

“Make sure that you invest in a channel where you can accurately measure the metrics of your return,” noted Software Path ’s Megan Meade. “That way you can identify the most profitable areas for future investment and scaling up with the data.

13. Avoid Putting Your Eggs in One Basket

While it’s important to direct your budget toward the most profitable marketing channels and activities, you should also be mindful of investing too much in just one channel. For example, if you spend 90% of your marketing budget on SEO and Google changes their algorithm… you’re out of luck and out of budget,

David Hoos of The Good suggests, “If you find wild success with one channel, that doesn’t mean you should abandon the others. You don’t want to have the success of your business riding on a single channel.”

It seems like the marketers we spoke to our following this best practice, too. We asked, on a scale of 1-10, which channels do you typically invest more dollars into?

Which channels do you typically invest more dollars into?

While content marketing emerged as a clear leader, the answers were pretty evenly spread—with SEO and email marketing being just behind content, and Facebook and Google Ads in the top half, as well.

14. Spend More on Customers Deeper Into the Funnel

“My one piece of advice,” said Sara Bennett of PACE Staffing Network , “is to start further down the marketing/sales conversion funnel and work you way up as you can based on resources (money, time, etc.).”

“It’s imperative to understand what stage your customer is at in the sales funnel,” explained Lewis Kemp of Lightbulb Media .

“I have always seen my marketing efforts for where they are on the conversion funnel,” added Bennett. “That often correlates to how quickly you’ll receive a return on your investment.”

“I encourage marketers to invest in channels that are further down the conversion funnel (like lead generation, SEO, and Google Adwords) because there’s much less financial risk—and you’ll see ROI faster. Once these marketing channels are operating to a satisfactory level,” Bennett explained, “you can begin investing in channels higher in the funnel, until you work your way up to awareness and exploratory research.”

Kemp went on to echo Bennett’s advice about starting your investment deeper in the funnel, adding that marketers should “utilize cost effective channels (like paid social and email) higher up the funnel. Once the brand becomes more established, make the move to higher yielding and intent-based marketing channels (like Google and LinkedIn Ads).

15. Don’t Overlook the Top of the Funnel

I know we just talked about investing in the bottom of the funnel. And if you can only invest a little, that’s a good place to do it. But for marketers who have a little more wiggle room, it’s important not to overlook the top of the funnel.

As Brooks Manley of Engenius advised, “Don’t neglect investing in the top of your funnel. You won’t see the returns as quickly, but your sales funnel a year or two down the road will thank you.”

16. Be Flexible and Adaptable

“Marketing changes daily. What worked today might not work tomorrow, so you need to have the flexibility to move dollars around,” said Kyle Turk of Keynote Search.

“Shifting budget to high performing marketing channels and activities from low performing ones, requires you to be flexible and adaptable—and enables you to maximize ROI,” Turk explained.

“Evaluate what’s been done already. Reevaluate where your customer is spending their time Shift dollars there,” advised Maria Kiagias of Social Gold Group . “It sounds easy, but it’s hard for many businesses to let go of older marketing initiatives.”

Jacob Landis-Eigsti of Jacob LE Video Production told us adaptability is also a key component to being able to double-down on investment when you find something that really works.

“When you’re testing a strategy, you can keep spending low. But when you find a plan that works, keep putting money towards. I spent $400 a month while testing and ramped that up to $3,000 a month when I found a strategy that works.”

Allocate Your Marketing Budget for Better ROI

We heard a lot of tips from the marketers we spoke to, and they all boil down to a few key takeaways:

  • Be open and objective to testing new and varied channels and campaigns
  • Start small, based on any info you can get your hands on
  • Spread your allocation across multiple channels and throughout the marketing funnel

By following those basic rules and adapting to the results you see, you’ll find the right allocation for your marketing budget—and maximize your ROI along the way.

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Optimize Marketing Costs for Better ROIs: The Ultimate Marketing Budget Guide [2024]

ClickUp Contributor

February 8, 2024

Anyone in the finance profession would confirm that planning a marketing budget is both an art and a science. You go super generous with funds, and there’s the risk of blocking other growth investments. But if you spend too little, your whole sales funnel will go awry! 😅

Calibrating your marketing spend is a non-negotiable part of aligning your business goals with overall marketing initiatives. But there are several roadblocks to slow you down, such as the lack of reliable market predictions or process silos. According to statistics from MDG Advertising , 91% of companies believe that inaccurate data is the prime culprit behind misspends in marketing.

The average marketing budget constitutes almost 10% of the total company revenue , and no company can afford to waste that kind of resources on a budget that risks overspending and poor ROI. Luckily, we have just the right set of tips and strategies to help you out.

Our marketing budget guide will help you explore some core concepts to devise well-rounded marketing investments and avoid common pitfalls.

Bonus: We’ll also explore how to master effective marketing budget allocation with ClickUp , a free-to-use marketing and project management solution.

Why is a marketing budget important, and is it worth making one?

Where does a marketing budget go, what does a written budget for marketing campaigns comprise, how to calculate a reasonable marketing budget: common approaches, step 1: define your marketing style and goals, step 2: research what your competitors are spending on, step 3: create priorities for your marketing spend, step 4: set a cash reserve for unexpected costs , step 5: send the budget for approval, step 6: implement the budget and collect feedback regularly, relying on last year’s marketing budget, poor balance between traditional advertising and alternative marketing, over-prioritizing new customer acquisition, relying on inaccurate data , what is a marketing budget.

Any marketing plan aims to improve the company’s return on investment (ROI). You need to see if the campaign translates into enough revenue to justify the marketing costs. A marketing budget is your framework to carefully outline every marketing-related financial allocation within preset standards, ensuring you’re spending money toward fixed avenues. 

It encompasses every aspect of the marketing spend, specifying the who, what, why, and how of each anticipated expense, typically spanning across a quarter to a full fiscal year. 

This strategic allocation of resources ensures that your marketing strategies harmonize with overarching business objectives—you’re channeling funds into campaigns poised to yield the highest ROI and avoiding marketing investments that are not lucrative.

A proposed marketing budget generally undergoes scrutiny, approval, and allocation, often months ahead of the target marketing campaign. However, it’s a dynamic document, and you can always change it according to current business objectives, target audience , competitive landscape, and market trends. ⚡

Pro tip: Creating a budget for marketing spending is way easier if you have the right framework—i.e., marketing budget templates—to start with. Why not explore the ClickUp Marketing Budget Template ?

ClickUp Marketing Budget Template

It helps convert even the most complex marketing budget outlines into easy-to-follow visual budgets. The marketing budget template’s comprehensive single-page overview helps you both forecast and make adjustments as you go.

Many marketers would argue that creating and updating a marketing budget is time-consuming as you can never get 100% accurate estimations. However, designing a robust marketing budget plan offers numerous advantages, enabling you to:

  • Plan ahead: Allocate funds for projects several months in advance, ensuring effortless execution
  • Expand resources: Recruit freelancers and niche marketing staff to smoothen your creative space
  • Assess ROI: Calculate your Marketing Return on Investment (MROI) to make informed decisions that align with company objectives
  • Demonstrate value: Show the value of marketing activities and budget allotment for all projects to company executives
  • Measure progress: Compare year-on-year progress, tracking the effectiveness of each marketing project

In the past, traditional marketing teams used to prefer physical flyers, banners, and television ads for the company’s success. The situation has completely flipped in today’s era, thanks to a noticeably higher focus on digital marketing.

According to a 2023 Deloitte survey , companies spend over 50% of their marketing budget on digital marketing, with 19% going toward mobile activities and 17% toward social media ads.

Based on the latest trends, here are the cost centers of a standard marketing campaign:  

  • Paid advertising, including PPC, banners, and TV ads
  • Conferences, trade shows, or in-store exhibitions
  • Brochures, graphic design, and product packaging
  • Content marketing (blog and social media posts)
  • Freelancers, influencers, and agencies for public relations (PR) tasks
  • Surveys, focus groups, and market research activities
  • Software, website maintenance, and digital infrastructure
  • Giveaways and promotional materials
  • Miscellaneous operational expenses

So, drafting a budget is not just about including financial information. You must add contextual components to your predictions so that anyone who reviews them can get a complete picture of the initiative.

A well-rounded marketing budget typically comprises of:

  • Financial objectives: A clear outline of financial goals tied to marketing strategies
  • Positioning strategy : Defines how the brand positions itself within the market 
  • Brand strategy : The overarching strategy to boost brand identity
  • Product or service overview: Comprehensive details about the products and services and their unique value propositions
  • Specific budget goals: Detailed targets per product, distribution channel, or customer service
  • Sales plan: Strategies devised to drive sales in alignment with marketing efforts
  • Major campaigns: Identification and outline of significant marketing campaigns
  • Progress review dates: Scheduled timelines to evaluate budget status against set benchmarks

The U.S. Small Business Administration guidelines recommend allocating around 7–8% of your total gross revenue to marketing. However, revenue-based marketing budgets can be pretty one-dimensional.

Investing 8% of your revenue for marketing is only possible if your profit margins are reasonably wide. While it’s easy for established businesses, those breaking even, or worse, operating at a loss, cannot commit to this percentage.

There are a couple of other approaches for calculating your target marketing budget, such as:

  • Competition-matched budgeting: You’re willing to spend as much as your competitors. This is typically the principle used for calculating digital advertising spend
  • Identify your current marketing goals
  • Prioritize which marketing tactics need more resources
  • Monitor every allocation to avoid overspending
  • Objective-based budgeting: You build a budget based on the target objective with little to no cost restrictions

6 Steps to Creating Successful Marketing Budgets

A marketing budget is a collaborative effort of your company’s finance executives, marketing teams, and program leaders. Creating an effective marketing budget is more than just people and numbers, though—it’s about outlining a path for growth and strategic action.

Here’s a quick rundown of six crucial steps for creating your marketing budget. To simplify the process, we’ve demonstrated functionalities with the ClickUp Marketing Suite to break down certain steps. 🌟

The first step to creating a marketing budget is outlining the objectives that justify it. For example, you can consider setting goals focused on:

  • Increasing sales
  • Accelerating lead generation
  • Elevating brand awareness
  • Brand repositioning

However, precision is vital. Vague weekly goals like “ increase sales ” lack clarity and direction. Here’s an exercise you can do:

  • Note down your overarching business goals
  • Short-term goals focus on immediate improvements, like reducing website bounce rates or pushing online advertising
  • Long-term goals comprise broader achievements, such as search engine optimization or efficient marketing automation
  • Establish key performance indicators (KPIs)—they’ll later help quantify specifics within the budget

Use ClickUp Goals to set up your marketing goals with measurable KPIs. Track goals weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually, linking them directly to specific tasks or projects, fostering continuous improvement across your marketing endeavors.

ClickUp 3.0 Goals Simplified

Tip: If you’re struggling to etch out your marketing goals, adhere to the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) criteria for focused goal setting. The framework allows you to keep your goals realistic and doable. 

Once you know your goals, start researching your competitors’ marketing spend. To get started, ask these two questions:

  • Who performs well in the industry?
  • What marketing strategies and budget allocations do they employ?

Examine channels like website marketing, social media, video marketing, and PPC ads. Study competitors’ marketing tactics, message frequency, and success models. Identify similarities and differences with your own to carve your unique selling proposition.

Need a quick tool to compare? Use the ClickUp Competitive Analysis Template to map out the status of all industry leaders and competitors. It offers an interactive view, allowing flexible brand modification and positioning. You can evaluate their budget performance based on preset metrics or identify their strengths and weaknesses and craft smarter strategies.

Once you’ve got the numbers in place, you can immediately start documenting your budget using ClickUp Docs . Add nested pages, customize styling, tables, and real-time edits with your marketing colleagues to devise your proposed budget. 🧮

ClickUp 3.0 Docs Collaborative space with sidebars

If you don’t want to waste time writing research reports, use ClickUp’s AI Market Research Survey Generator to get well-structured marketing documents produced within seconds.

Marketing teams must differentiate between essential expenses and unnecessary add-ons. By organizing your budget and correlating spending with outcomes, you can identify where to invest and where to cut back. 

Take PR campaigns , for instance—here, you need to focus on tools that engage your target audience effectively, which would justify the amount you spend on acquiring those tools.

Using performance data analysis, you can identify the marketing channels with the highest ROI and allocate a budget based on each channel’s impact and potential returns.

The ClickUp Priority Matrix Template simplifies the process with a 2×2 matrix based on urgency and importance. You can use color-coded sticky notes to display marketing initiatives based on the ROI they generate. For example, if your blog post campaign generates the highest ROI, you can label it as High Importance in the template.

ClickUp Priority Matrix Template

Be very specific when you allocate the budget—keep elements like expected returns and funding schedule super transparent. However, even the most detailed budget planning cannot always guarantee your actual spending. So, what if you face a shortage of funds down the line?

Set aside a portion of your budget as a contingency fund for unexpected costs like thwarting aggressive competitor moves or capitalizing on sudden opportunities. This reserve should typically be at 10% of your total budget. It serves as a safety net and ensures flexibility in responding to unforeseen events .

You can now track your marketing budget allocations in versatile spreadsheets using ClickUp Accounting . This feature suite helps streamline financial tasks , track marketing spend, and generate reports. You can categorize your funds (like Cash Reserve or Google Ads Spend )  using Custom Fields and Tags to make tracking easier.

ClickUp 3.0 Adding Tags to Tasks

You can also set up ClickUp Automations to monitor when you’ve overspent and would need to make adjustments. Automations in ClickUp are no-code and customizable.

Bonus: Follow your marketing budget in action using the ClickUp Accounting Template and oversee invoices, fund status, sales records, income, and revenue projections.

After defining costs and setting up cash reserves, give your marketing budget some final touches and send it for approval. Who you send it to depends on your team hierarchy and approval network.

ClickUp has multiple communication features to help you stay in the loop or seek clarifications during approval workflows. The platform’s Chat view is a valuable tool for exchanging key information during budget approvals and special project updates. If you’re the one approving, you can also employ ClickUp Proofing to leave feedback on sections of the budget. 

ClickUp 3.0 Chat menu expanded

Don’t just implement your budget and forget about it. Regularly reviewing your marketing plan and budget is essential to keep up with evolving business needs. 

Use analytics from your marketing software to assess ROI and adapt your budget based on market changes or campaign effectiveness. Measure KPIs for each campaign and channel to optimize budget allocation.

A smart way to monitor your marketing budget is to set up finance-related pie charts and graphs in ClickUp Dashboards . From prioritization and deprioritization to progress tracking and team performance evaluation, it’s the place to be if you want a bird’s-eye view of your projects. 📈

Monthly or quarterly, scrutinize actual spending against performance metrics, adjusting allocations in real time—the changes are immediately reflected in your Workspace.

ClickUp also makes it easy to share your updated business strategy, sales calendar, product releases, and target customer documents with your marketing team. If you want, you can request their feedback through customized ClickUp Forms .

ClickUp Forms

If you end up with new budgeting optimization tasks, organize them in the platform’s Calendar view so you don’t miss any deadlines.

ClickUp Calendar View Dashboard Image

Creating a Marketing Budget: Common Mistakes 

Setting up your marketing budget involves numerous intricate components, leaving a lot of room for errors. Small business owners often struggle with marketing budget allocation as they cannot afford professionals to guide them.

Keep an eye out for these common budget planning mistakes. 

The market undergoes continual shifts as consumer priorities evolve. What worked effectively in one year might lose its impact in the next.

Thoroughly reassess your market budget to understand how technological advancements, political shifts, emerging social movements, and other factors have influenced consumer behavior. Timely customer insights will help you identify marketing opportunities or pull out bad investments before they lead to huge losses.

Businesses should balance investments between time-tested and emerging strategies to remain agile.

Finding the perfect marketing strategy often involves trial and error. It’s rare to find an ideal approach on the first attempt. However, don’t go overboard with experimentation. Instead of adopting random, unfocused approaches, go for some marketing initiatives that have proven to work reliably.

Still second-guessing your ideal marketing budget allocation ? The 70-20-10 rule might help you achieve a balanced framework. Here’s how it works:

  • 70% of your budget goes to proven strategies that have demonstrated success
  • 20% to explore new strategies 
  • The remaining 10% is left for experimental approaches, allowing room for innovation and risk-taking

While there’s often considerable emphasis on acquiring new paying customers in marketing, there’s substantial value in nurturing existing ones. 

Research indicates that acquiring a new customer can cost about five times more than retaining an existing one. Additionally, studies by Bain & Company’s Frederick Reichheld show that a mere 5% increase in customer retention rates could substantially boost profits by up to 95%.

Building loyalty among your existing customer base is not only cost-effective but also fosters a stronger and more enduring customer relationship, contributing significantly to long-term success.

Analytical data facilitates informed decision-making , allowing you to take calculated risks, sometimes relying on instincts or intuition. Utilizing inaccurate or unreliable data can significantly impact your budget planning process. 

However, having copious amounts of data doesn’t automatically ensure its quality. It’s essential to employ robust data-cleaning strategies to eliminate duplicates, inaccuracies, and other forms of bad data .

Enjoy Seamless Marketing Communications and Budgeting with ClickUp

Tired of marketing budgets that fizzle instead of flourish? Crafting a comprehensive marketing budget can feel like juggling spreadsheets in a circus tent. 🤹

But with an all-in-one solution like ClickUp, brainstorming, planning, and executing is as easy as pie. Plus, its AI Assistant can help your team be more efficient over time. Sign up for free to discover more.

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How to optimize your marketing budget: Do more with less

Written by by Hibathu Naseer

Published on  September 18, 2023

Reading time  10 minutes

With an economic downturn looming, it’s not surprising around 75% of CMOs report being asked to do more with less in a Gartner survey. Marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to set the right budget, optimize it and keep the leads flowing.

Managing social media and other marketing channels in this economy can be challenging. You’ll need a plan to address top budget concerns to provide clarity and control over every dollar spent. It will help prioritize vital areas, avoid overspending and adapt to unforeseen challenges.

In this blog, we’ll cover:

How to budget for your marketing needs

  • Optimizing your marketing budget: Best practices

Marketing budget breakdown

Sample marketing budget.

To set a marketing budget, you will need to look at past records, do thorough market research and analyze your team’s needs. Let’s look at these steps in detail.

Take a look at past results

The phrase “Yesterday’s lessons, tomorrow’s innovations” holds true when setting marketing budgets during a recession. It’s all about knowing what’s working, and focusing in on activities and core channels that are delivering.

See where your dollars had the most impact in the previous year—the campaigns that brought the biggest return on ad spend (ROAS), conversion rates or lead sources. For example, if you got X number of leads from influencer marketing in the previous year, you can propose an X+10% increase in budget for the same activity this year.

Create internal benchmarks by platform and across all media channels to identify areas of investment that are not worth continuing. If you didn’t have metrics in place last year, now is the perfect time to implement them based on your company’s overall goals.

Do your research

You need to be aware of the market conditions to allocate the right marketing budget. Research how the market has changed since last year: Do you have the same competitors? What is your current brand perception? How has AI impacted the market?

Look for industry benchmarks to gain insights into what your competitors are spending on marketing. This will give you an idea of what your marketing budget should be.

Take a look at this representation of the percentage of revenue different industries allocate to marketing per a Gartner report:

An image showing a bar graph with percentages of revenue allocated to marketing in different industries per a Gartner report. The graph compares 2021 to 2022, and industries that allocate the most to marketing include healthcare, media and tech products.

Also connect with industry peers to learn how they’re managing their budget and keep close communication with your team about the results they’re seeing from marketing spend.

Such insights will help you identify new areas in marketing where you can focus your budget or refine existing ones.

Understand your team needs

When creating your marketing budget, carefully evaluate team needs, skills and the required resources necessary to achieve your marketing goals. This is important considering skill gap is a major issue in many marketing teams. A Gartner survey reveals a majority of CMOs find their teams lack the capabilities required to deliver their marketing strategy.

Compare your team’s existing skills with the skills required to execute your marketing strategies effectively. You can either address these skill gaps by providing additional training and resources for your team or hire additional team members, freelancers, consultants or agencies to fulfill specific roles—both of which will affect your budget.

Another important factor to consider when setting budgets is your team’s bandwidth. For example, your SEO team may aim to increase domain authority through backlinks. However, they may not have the time to reach out to the many sites required to achieve this goal. So, you must set aside a budget to outsource this task to a backlinks expert.

Get the bigger picture

You now need to see the bigger picture and set priorities .

Company goals are the anchoring points of your marketing budget. Consider both long-term and immediate goals—the former to get leads quickly and the latter as a growth strategy for the future.

The market research you’ve performed will also help you develop new goals and navigate old ones. There might be significant shifts in the market that push your strategy in a certain direction or internal changes that will influence your brand marketing strategy .

Next, you’ll need to create an estimate of the costs associated with different marketing activities. Take into consideration the cost of tools, resources, employees and contractors.

Check out industry reports or consult peers to get an idea of the range you would have to spend. The final step is to submit the draft of the marketing budget to stakeholders and seek approval.

Optimizing your marketing budget: 5 best practices

To navigate the current economic situation, some brands are investing in more resources. According to The State of Social Media 2023 report, 79% of marketers expect an increase in their overall marketing budgets in the next three years.

An image showing stats from The State of Social Media 2023 report saying 79% of marketers expect an increase in their overall marketing budgets in the next three years.

Let’s look at some techniques you can use to audit your current marketing budget and prioritize things that move the needle the most.

An image describing techniques to audit your current marketing budget and prioritize activities such as 1. Remove siloes within marketing and sales teams; 2. Consider revenue; 3 Listen to customers; 4 Consider experimentation and contingency; and Use the right technology.

1. Remove siloes within marketing and sales teams

Oftentimes, sections of the marketing teams are functioning in separate bubbles. The advertising team may not know what the content team is doing and the PR team is unaware of what the customer marketing team is up to.

Getting teams to collaborate and find synergies between different channels can save money.

For example, when the teams focus on paid campaigns and SEO collaboration, they may discover that the website is already ranking organically for an expensive target keyword and there’s no need to bid for it. A holistic paid and organic keyword strategy like this can reduce your ad spend significantly.

Also making sure marketing and sales are aligned allows you to take better advantage of your budget. Sales needs to follow up on leads and marketing should be able to provide quality leads. Both sides should define and agree on what constitutes high-quality leads and create a handoff process so time is spent on nurturing quality leads.

2. Consider revenue

Regardless of the metrics you’re reporting on—pipeline, website sessions or conversions—in the current economic situation, it’s always best to base your budgeting decisions on the actual revenue that your activities are driving.

For example, an advertiser may think that a 1:3 ROAS ratio is fantastic. But if the company’s cost of goods sold is not considered, the company could still lose money despite the good ROAS.

Similarly, look into your current strategy and determine how to adjust your marketing budget based on what’s moving the needle for actual revenue.

3. Listen to customers

If you’re implementing multiple marketing campaigns but it’s not what your customer wants, chances are you’ll experience losses.

The best way to know where to put your money is by understanding and listening to your customers. Keep up with their changing needs and desires. Get to know how they are responding to marketing efforts. This will help you allocate the needed resources and help you invest in the right channels.

According to The State of Social Media 2023 report, 58% of business leaders believe that more effectively leveraging social media data and constantly adjusting social media strategy to the evolving needs of customers will give companies a competitive advantage.

It is clear that personalization and intuitive communication are important in marketing and are valued by customers. So, make sure you listen to your customers and understand their behavior.

Consider audience research as the starting point of channeling budget and resources so you gain the best returns.

4. Consider experimentation and contingency

In an ever-evolving market, marketing teams should be able to try, test and learn. Allocating money for this purpose may be difficult since it’s less certain but it can bring you the strongest outcomes.

Using a zero-based budgeting framework lets you focus on accounting for projected costs and performance outcomes for new initiatives where there isn’t past data to reference. It also helps assess reallocating budget for new initiatives or campaigns that come up after the budget has been confirmed.

Anything new brings risk, so you’ll need to justify each expense for its potential ROI and compare that to the ROI of existing campaigns. Thus, it allows business leaders to revisit, remeasure and reevaluate their marketing strategy. Then, leaders can decide if it’s worth pursuing or to stick with what they know works.

According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2023 , 38% of consumers agree that the most memorable brands on social prioritize original content over following trending topics. And 26% agree that memorable brands take risks with their social content. This demonstrates the dynamic nature of the marketing landscape, where innovation and bold approaches are valued by customers.

Apart from this, it’s always best to have a contingency fund in place to make use of a golden opportunity that may unexpectedly come to your team.

5. Use the right technology

Including the right tech tools in every digital marketing budget is a no-brainer. More and more marketers are investing in tools and technologies to get the most out of their time and efforts.

Per The Sprout Social Index™, more than 80% of marketers say AI has already positively impacted their work, giving them more time for creativity (78%) and increased efficiency (73%).

Since one of the biggest marketing expenses is tech, you need to carefully consider new tools and maximize the value of your tech stack.

How do you make sure to spend wisely on tools?

One way is to invest in robust tools that offer multiple functionalities in one place and/or integrate with your existing tech infrastructure. This is potentially more cost-effective than paying for multiple individual tools as you maximize your budget while streamlining your workflows.

For example, Sprout Social helps you manage inboxes across social platforms, monitor and manage ratings, handle paid promotions and it integrates with other tools in your stack. Here are some of the marketing functions you can handle with Sprout:

  • Marketing automation : Schedule content, funnel comments and messages into one social hub, generate shareable reports and track brand mentions.
  • Reputation management : Sprout’s Social Listening capabilities detect a crisis early and enable you to identify unfamiliar trending words from customer conversations.
  • Customer service : Build chatbots to handle customer support requests or direct messages to the right team. Our AI Assist functionality helps you write robust customer responses quickly.
  • Business intelligence : Sprout helps you understand customer behavior and surface business-critical information from social channels with sentiment analysis.
  • Powerful integrations : Integrations with other tools, like Salesforce , will enable you to access, share and manage data for 360-degree view of the customer.

A screenshot of the Sprout Social dashboard showing all messages in the inbox, the number of messages, sources, filters, responses by the social team, and more. In the screenshot, there's a pop-up where the user is responding to an incoming private message from the inbox.

You should complete regular assessments of your marketing tech stack before setting your annual marketing budget. Things might have changed and your go-to tool today may no longer fit your needs six months from now.

When crafting a comprehensive marketing budget, enterprises need to consider various categories that cover both marketing talent and technology. Here’s a breakdown of the top categories to have in your marketing budget:

Social media marketing budget

A social media marketing budget typically includes allocations for various expenses related to running effective social media campaigns and strategies. You will need to assign a budget for content creation as well as ad campaigns in case you’re looking into paid marketing.

Marketing talent: Social media managers, community managers, paid media strategists, creative designers and video editors.

Marketing technology: Social media management tool , employee advocacy tool , project management tool and graphic design tool.

Here’s an article where you can learn more about social media budgeting .

Influencer marketing budget

This budget covers the funds allocated for collaborating with influencers to promote your brand, products or services. It will depend on what the influencers charge per campaign or if you plan to pay them based on referrals.

Other factors include how you plan to manage the influencers—from contract negotiations to collaboration to tracking performance. An influencer management platform like Tagger (which was recently acquired by Sprout Social ) will help you do this more efficiently.

Marketing talent: Influencer relationship managers, content creators and creative editors.

Marketing technology: Influencer management platform and social media analytics tools.

Content marketing and SEO budget

This budget covers the funds to create high-quality content , optimize it for search engines and promote it to attract and engage your target audience across various platforms. It can also include public relations and executive communications to further support brand awareness and distribute content to wider audiences.

Marketing talent: Content strategists, SEO strategists, external communication professionals, content writers, editors and video producers.

Marketing technology: Content management system, SEO tools, AI writing assistant and website analytics tools.

Paid media budget

Your paid media budget should cover the expenses for the funds allocated specifically for setting bid strategies, ad placements and A/B testing.

Marketing Talent: Paid media marketing specialists, copywriters and graphic designers.

Marketing technology: Ad management platforms, conversion tracking tools, website analytics tool and social media analytics tool.

Customer marketing budget

This fund is for retaining and engaging existing customers, nurturing their loyalty and maximizing their lifetime value. It includes various expenses necessary to execute customer-focused marketing strategies effectively.

Marketing talent: Customer marketing manager, email marketing specialist and lifecycle marketing manager.

Marketing technology: Customer relationship management (CRM) software, email marketing platform, personalization tools and survey and feedback platforms.

By allocating resources to these essential categories and balancing marketing talent with technology investments, enterprises can create a robust and effective marketing budget that drives results across various channels.

Here’s a sample marketing budget with percentages allocated to the different categories listed above:

  • Social media marketing: 20%
  • Influencer marketing: 15%
  • Content marketing and SEO: 30%
  • Paid media: 15%
  • Customer marketing: 10%
  • Marketing analytics and automation tools: 3%
  • Website development and maintenance: 2%

Here’s another sample marketing budget:

  • Inbound content marketing: 30%
  • Social Media Marketing: 20%
  • Events and Sponsorships: 10%
  • Influencer Marketing: 5%
  • Email Marketing: 10%
  • Paid advertising: 15%
  • Miscellaneous (Contingency): 10%

To know more about the cost of social media management and the average amount a business should spend, here’s a detailed breakdown .

Investing in the right channels

Optimizing your marketing budget is a strategic initiative, which should be developed based on past experiences and analyzing what will work in the future. Investing in the right channels, like social media and technology will help you make the most of your marketing budget.

As you dig into the details of cost allocation, think about the ROI of social media and read our article to understand how you can optimize your marketing spend to improve your market position and propel your business forward.

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Marketing Budget Allocation 2024

Breakdown, digital spend, and template.

Marketing Budget Allocation 2021

Marketing Budget Allocation 2024 – Breakdown, Digital Spend, and Template

With the end of the financial year approaching, most marketing teams are preparing for next year’s marketing budget allocation.

Teams are collecting data on their past performance and predicting future trends.

What’s different this year than what we have been doing every year up until now? Needless to say that we are in the middle of a worldwide pandemic and it has changed the marketing landscape dramatically.

With trade shows being canceled worldover and more and more users working from home or virtually, businesses are forced to rethink their marketing strategies.

The idea for the marketing budget is to, ‘ Reallocate, not terminate. ’

Earlier you could connect with potential customers face-to-face, on retail floors, or at expos, but such interactions are now limited or non-existent.

The latest Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR)  report  on the COVID-19 impact on U.S. B2B exhibition says that among the organizers who were forced to cancel 2020 events, 81% have shifted to digital. Throwing light on the importance of digital landscape at present.

Related Article: B2B Businesses Turn to Digital Marketing During COVID-19 Outbreak

Digital marketing is increasingly being used to create brand awareness, engage customers, generate leads, and make sales.

As per a  CMO Survey report , about 60.8% of marketers said that they shifted their resources to ‘building better customer-facing digital interfaces.’

The report says and we quote,

“Customer behaviors expected to return to pre-pandemic levels in 6-12 months; digital experiences to remain valuable indefinitely.”

Companies traditionally spent a large proportion of their budget on sales every year and fixated on every little thing their sales teams could do to grow business. The same attention is now being extended to Marketing.

With the sales teams restricted in mobility and reach and with the dynamics of doing business changing, spending on marketing,  especially digital marketing , is the new norm!

As per a CMO Survey report, the marketing budgets were expected to increase by 8.7% from 2019 to 2020.

Further in this article, we will answer questions related to offline and online marketing budget allocation methods and best practices.

Quick jump to:

A. How to Budget Marketing Expenses

B. what percentage of revenue should be spent on marketing, c. how to allocate marketing budgets across channels, d. digital marketing budget, e. marketing budget allocation template.

How to Budget Marketing Expenses

If you’re wondering how to do a marketing budget and how to arrive at an effective  marketing budget breakdown  for the coming year, here’s a quick checklist to go through.

A1. Define marketing goals

Define what you wish to accomplish for the company next year. It can be creating brand awareness/value, acquiring new customers, gowing leads and sales, improving customer loyalty, or improving marketing ROI. Let your sales and marketing budget reflect your priorities.

During the pandemic,  building brand (33%) and retaining customers (32.6%)  are two main focus areas for marketers. (CMO Survey)

Prioritize your goals and channel your resources towards them.

A2. Factor in target customers’ attitudes and behaviors

Pay attention to what your target customers want, and focus on creating a marketing strategy and annual marketing budget around that.

As per the CMO Survey report, during the pandemic, about 84.8% of companies surveyed said that they observed increased value placed on digital experiences  by their customers, and 43.3% said that their c ustomers are unwilling to pay full price . About 79.1% of respondents said that there is greater acknowledgment among customers of “ companies’ attempts to do good .”

A3. The Golden Rule: Treat Marketing as an Investment!

Marketers often start looking at return on investment (ROI) in conjunction with their marketing spend in the short term.

Marketing spend is a long-term investment, similar to the money you put in for product, service, or business development.

The brand awareness you build today will help acquire customers tomorrow, sell the day after that, and retain customers for the future. It’s a funnel, so invest in every step in a strategic and timely manner, identifying ‘in which stage what percentage of your customers are.’

A4. Keep an eye on short, long-term results

Even though the true ROI of your marketing efforts can’t be measured accurately in short term, it’s always good to keep an eye on it and set ROI benchmarks based on marketing and sales data collected in the past.

Use tools like data analysis and CRM tools to measure short and long-term growth in sales, expected customer value, etc.

Related Article: Why Display Ad Performance Can’t be Measured in Clicks and ROI

A5. Create a Marketing Stack based on data

Create a marketing stack that aligns with your marketing goals and can help you effectively target your customers.

Use a data-driven approach to determine your marketing budget breakdown. This data can be obtained from internal and external sources.

In the following sections, you will get data on the percentage of revenue spent on marketing by companies, and the percentage of marketing budget spent on digital marketing by firms.

As per a CMO survey in 2019, typically, here’s the marketing budget percentage of revenue for companies.

– For B2C firms, the marketing budget was 14-15.5% of the firm’s budget.

– For B2B firms, the marketing budget was 10-11% of the firm’s budget.

– B2C companies’ average marketing budget percentage of revenue was roughly 9.8-16%.

– B2B companies’ marketing spend as a percentage of revenue was about 8.7%.

Therefore, about 8-16 percent of a company’s revenue is generally spent on marketing. This  average marketing budget  goes towards all the activities that come under marketing.

Smaller companies tend to spend higher percentages of their revenue on marketing. As companies and industries mature, they collect a lot of data to spend smartly on marketing, reducing their overall marketing costs.

Here are some screenshots of the data source highlighting, ‘how much businesses spend on marketing’.

B.1. Marketing budget as a percentage of a firm’s budget

B.2. average marketing budget as a percentage of revenue.

Average marketing budget as a percentage of revenue

During the pandemic , these percentages increased for both B2C and B2B firms:

– For B2B companies, the marketing budget is 11.3% of the budget and 8-12% of revenue.

– For B2C companies, the marketing budget is 14.9-17.3% of the budget and 13.9-15% of revenue.

marketing as percentage of revenue

As the revenue has dropped for most of the firms, the percentage of the marketing spend has gone up, which goes on to show that companies are focusing on marketing, while other departments are facing budget cuts.

How to Allocate Marketing Budgets Across Channels

The next big question is, ‘Where to spend the marketing budget?’

Marketers are spending about 10% more on customer experience and about 14% less on training. (CMO Survey)

Companies usually spend on content, advertising, software, employees, and expertise. Many companies outsource a lot of marketing activities.

B2B sectors are expected to see a 10% growth in digital marketing  spending in the next 12 months, as per CMO Survey.

As per a Marketo article , marketing spend allocation by companies looks like this: 40-50% of the marketing budget goes in campaign planning and content creation, 20-30% goes in paid advertising, 10% of the marketing budget goes in workforce marketing, 10% goes in software and tools, and 5-10% in events.

create ads

How to allocate budget for digital marketing?

As per the CMO report, paid digital media made up about 16 percent of total marketing budgets.

‘ Digital advertising spending worldwide will surpass 442 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, up 6.5 percent from 415.5 billion dollars a year earlier. The figure was predicted to continue rising, reaching almost half a trillion dollars by 2026.’ – Statista

Digital marketing has grown at an average annual rate of 11% between 2016 and 2021 (Emarketer), showing how the industries are increasingly focussing on their internet marketing budget.

During the pandemic, on average marketers have seen a rise in their digital budgets. (CMO Survey)

D.1. Top digital marketing channels

Most of the digital marketing budget is spent on Search and Display (banner ads, online video, etc.) advertising.

Online video is expected to grow the most  with the investment to double from 2016 to 2021.

D.2. How to allocate budget for social media marketing?

Social media marketing budget allocation has grown over time, too. Advertising on social media channels was expected to grow at an annual rate of 17% from 2016 to 2021.

Overall, the average advertising budget for digital media has been on an upward trajectory.

How to calculate the marketing budget?

Here’s a marketing budget allocation template to plan your annual marketing budget for next year. ( Download link below. )

Marketing budget template

Use the form below to download and use this marketing budget template. Write to us if you’d like to see more categories in this marketing budget template.

Explore more B2B digital marketing services and digital marketing content .

budget allocation marketing

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How Do You Allocate Your Marketing Budget

  • November 30, 2022
  • by Peter Fechter

Most marketing managers get excited about target audience advertising campaigns, engagement, social media strategies, or technical SEO, but they’re less thrilled when budgeting season comes around.

Sure, it isn’t glamorous, but budgeting is at the heart of your marketing. And it comes down to one thing: planning to spend your money on the ideal marketing channels to reach your target audience effectively.

This article is a mini guide for allocating your marketing budget. It will help you find the right starting point and guide your budget allocation journey while focusing on effective engagement strategies.

Keep reading for a short and sweet guide, or download our free ebook that dives deeper into the topic.

budget allocation marketing

How to allocate your marketing budget

Before allocating your marketing funds, you must know your overall marketing budget. You determine your marketing budget according to your goals and how much you’re willing to invest to drive engagement.

According to a Gartner survey , companies spent around 9.5% of their total revenue in 2022 . While you may shrug at this figure – given that every company is different – it’s a good benchmark you can use to plan your marketing budget.

Check out the example: 

A startup looking for fast growth may employ a more aggressive approach. It’s common for startups to invest 15-20% of their revenue in their marketing to effectively reach their target audience.

  Your marketing budget depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, how much you have to spend, and your sentiment on market trends. Still, your marketing budget will likely fall between 8-12% of your overall revenue.

Marketing budget allocation in 6 steps

You’re ready to allocate your budget once you’ve decided how much you plan to spend on your marketing. Essentially, you can break down your allocation process into ten easy-to-execute steps.

1. Set marketing goals

Before you set out to do anything, you must have clear goals. Budgeting is no different. You must define and clearly articulate what you’re trying to achieve, of course, with your target audience in mind.

You’ll want to write down SMART goals and tape them to your computer screen. They will serve as your true north throughout your marketing budget process. It’s the most critical step on this list because it should guide every budgeting decision you make.

S – Specific : choose only a few goals and explain them clearly and concisely

M – Measurable : your goals should be measurable and preferably trackable

A – Achievable : look at where you are now and imagine what is achievable

R – Realistic : your goals must be relevant to your company, and its overall success

T – Timely : goals are just goals if you don’t set a time limit on them

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budget allocation marketing

2. Identify long-term goals

What does success look like to you? Where do you want to be by the end of the quarter? Where should you be by the end of the year?

Asking yourself these questions will help you decide which marketing channels will help you accomplish your goals. Keeping long-term goals top-of-mind is an excellent way to guide your budgeting process and help you make the proper allocation decisions to drive engagement, for instance.

You should also reevaluate your buyer’s journey and sales funnel and determine where you need to improve most to obtain your desired results.

For example, if you want to increase your website conversion rate, you may need outside help to optimize your sales copy and customer touchpoints.

3. Use marketing tactics

Before you allocate your marketing budget, you must use the right tactic. One simple budgeting tactic that works for most budgeting scenarios is the 80-20 rule.

The rule tells us to:

  • Invest 80% of our budget in strategies that work and 20% in strategies that optimize growth.
  • The 20% can be broken into 10% for new strategies and the other 10% for entirely experimental strategies.

On top of that, monitoring key marketing metrics should be one the basis on what further tactics to use.

4. Determine potential ROI

Knowing your future ROI is challenging, even when using the most advanced scenario planning methods. Still, you can look back on your company’s past performance and get a good idea of how much you’ll make if things remain the same. While it won’t be exact, it should give you a good estimation.

From there, you can add your future costs. They should be linked to your goals and what you want to improve. Here are some things to consider:

  • Will you hire new talent?
  • Will you add to your marketing stack?
  • Will you spend more on PPC ads?
  • Will you spend more on content creation?
  • Will you attend events?

5. Understand the competition's spend

It will provide you with insights for shaping your own marketing strategy. Research market research to see how similar businesses or direct competitors distribute budgets among: 

  • digital marketing, 
  • content marketing, 
  • public relations, 
  • paid advertising,

just to name a few. 

It doesn’t mean copying them, but identifying market opportunities and gaps you could fill. 

Analyzing competitive marketing activities also offers a clear view of what’s resonating with your target audience.

6. Review previous marketing investments

Before moving forward, evaluate your previous marketing investments. 

Examine the returns from various marketing strategies you’ve employed in the past. 

Did video marketing yield a higher lead conversion rate than sponsored web content? Did SEO or search engines optimization deliver more value than social media ads? 

Answers to these questions will give you a solid foundation to prioritize your marketing spending in the coming period. Also, looking back offers the chance to eliminate wasted expenses and refine strategies that underperformed.

7. Engage key stakeholders and the marketing team

A successful marketing plan is often a collaborative effort. 

Engage marketing leaders, marketing teams, and other key stakeholders in the budgeting process. Their insights and experiences can offer valuable perspectives on: 

  • market trends, 
  • innovative marketing initiatives, 
  • and customer preferences. 

Including the marketing staff in this process ties business goals with marketing efforts and helps develop a cohesive and effective approach to reaching paying customers.

8. Be flexible

The business landscape changes, and so should your marketing strategy. As you allocate your marketing budget , leave some flexibility for changes based on market dynamics.  

For instance, if a new digital channel emerges as a significant player, you might want to reroute funds to explore it. Or, if a particular marketing campaign is yielding exceptional results, it may be beneficial to inject more funds into it. 

Monitor your actual spending against your marketing budget template and tweak as needed.

9. Allocate your marketing spending

After gathering all the above, you’re ready to divide your marketing budget. Remember to make your SMART goals the deciding factor that guides your allocation process and target audience engagement.

Here are some of the channels you’ll have to consider:

  • Email marketing
  • Advertising campaigns
  • Content writing
  • Social media marketing
  • Copywriting
  • Networking events

Marketing is an ever-evolving thing that includes many variables and moving parts. Similarly, budgeting is not a constant. It’s a time-consuming experiment that requires patience and a good deal of foresight and understanding of your target audience’s preferences.

budget allocation marketing

10. Stay on track

You’ve allocated your budget, so now what?

You have to track your spending. It’s the only way to see if your budget allocation was effective in reaching your target audience.

Track the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to stay on top of your budget in real-time.

Here are 7 marketing budget KPIs you should track:

  • Sales growth
  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • Return On Ads Spend (ROAS)
  • Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI)
  • Lead Conversion Rate
  • Conversion Rate by Marketing Channels

Optimizing your marketing budget with MARMIND

Building a marketing budget is challenging when you don’t have the right tools. 

MARMIND is the only MRM that combines planning , budgeting, and tracking in one intuitive platform.

Solution for allocating marketing budget.

From workflows and spending limits to tracking KPIs and AI-driven resource allocation, Marmind makes budgeting easier and streamlines your entire marketing effort.

But don’t take our word for it. Marmind made the highly exclusive 2022 Forrester WAVE report.

Last Thoughts

Unfortunately, there isn’t a perfect formula for allocating your marketing budget. But the steps above are excellent for finding a formula that works for your company. However, using a budget planning tool like Marmind for that is always a good move anyway.

It’s your job to key in on that sweet spot that will optimize and grow your marketing effort.

FAQ on how to allocate your marketing budget

Depending on the company's success goals and target audience, different strategies might emphasize digital marketing, public relations, or trade shows. For optimal results, marketing investments must be channeled correctly to reach target customers.

Absolutely! Small businesses can greatly benefit from marketing budget templates. Templates offer a structured framework and make it simpler for small business owners to outline their marketing activities, estimate costs, and track actual spending against projections. 

A good template simplifies the budgeting process so that every dollar contributes to the business's goals.

Yes, dedicating funds to market research and focus groups before a major marketing campaign can be extremely beneficial. 

It helps companies understand their target audience better, refine their marketing message, and identify opportunities for better engagement.  

Having this insight can greatly improve the effectiveness of the subsequent campaign, which means the company gets better results from their marketing spend.

Peter Fechter

Peter Fechter

Peter is Digital Marketing Manager at MARMIND and mainly responsible for website and lead management. When he's not busy creating content, he is developing new strategic approaches for campaign planning.

budget allocation marketing

Deepdive: Budget- & Costs Module

In this video, we show you the 5 main features of MARMIND’s budget & cost module – and how it can be used in the best way for your marketing purposes: 

  • Top-Down Budget Planning
  • Spend Management & Forecasting (Bottom-up Basis)
  • Set up reconciliations from actual costs to planned/committed costs
  • How to set up scenarios
  • How you can integrate budget forecasts, ROI and performance KPIs into other views and into reports

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Budgeting 101: How to Set and Allocate Your Marketing Budget

by Ana Gotter • November 20, 2018

budget allocation marketing

Let’s talk money.

We know how worthwhile marketing can be. We know how important is to start, scale and sustain a business. All of this is great. The part that stumps a lot of businesses when it comes to marketing, however, is going to be the money.

Marketing is expensive. It can be costly to run paid campaigns, whether that’s through Google Ads or hiring influencers to promote your products of services. These costs go up if you bring in marketing experts to run or consult on your campaigns. Higher costs can directly yield higher results, however, and can be a necessity.

The key is to know how to determine what you can afford to spend, what you should be spending and and how to divide up the funds. A lot of people don’t like talking money and there’s a lot of conflicting information out there about you should spend. In this post, we’re going to look at how to calculate and allocate your marketing budget so you’ll know exactly what you should be spending.

Decide What You Should Spend Overall

There’s a lot of advice about there about what you should be spending. Some people say that you should never spend money on marketing until you’ve started making substantial profit, but this is flat out wrong, because you typically won’t be able to make  any profit if no one knows that you exist.

budget allocation marketing

Here’s some of the best advice out there on what you should be spending:

  • For newer companies or those are aggressively trying to scale fast, your ad costs should be 12-20% of your overall gross revenue. If you’re trying to scale quickly, keep it to at least 12% of your projected revenue. You  do need to spend money to make money.
  • For more established companies looking to maintain and increase profitability, between 5-12% of your overall gross revenue is typically a good place to hit. Established companies already have a base of loyal clients and marketing can be used to keep them engaged and connect with newer audiences instead of needing to start from the bottom.

One thing that I always flag for clients is that they shouldn’t spend money they absolutely can’t afford to lose. There is a lot of trial and error in marketing, even from experts, especially when you’re first getting started. Some hit and miss is normal while you run split tests on everything from product pricing to marketing messaging and figure out what works. It’s all part of the investment, but marketing can be a big gamble. If not profiting on that $1000 marketing ad spend means you’ll lose your house, don’t spend it.

Create a List of the Platforms You Want to Market On

You likely know now approximately how much you can afford to spend based on the figures above. Once you select the platforms and tools you want to use, you can start to hone in on the exact costs you’ll incur and how you want to divide up your budget.

Write down a list of all of the platforms you want to market on. Put them in order of priority. Options include:

  • Search Ads like Google Ads or Bing Ads
  • Social Ads, including Facebook Ads , Instagram Ads, Promoted Pins , and LinkedIn Ads
  • Content marketing
  • Influencer marketing
  • Social media marketing, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit, and more
  • SEO and on-site marketing
  • Physical marketing materials, like signage, postcards, or  flyers
  • Referral programs or affiliate programs 
  • Email marketing 

Be specific about which platforms you want to use. If you’re planning on using Facebook  and Instagram  and LinkedIn, specify on your list. It’ll matter in the next stage.

Consider Expected Costs & Potential ROI of Each Platform

Before you divide up the budget, you need to look at the potential costs and ROI of each one.

Some platforms will have higher costs than others, but they might also have a very high ROI. Most PPC campaigns  can yield high ROI very quickly, even though they’re high-cost. Email marketing is low-cost, but can also yield high results. Social media marketing, on the other hand, can be low cost if you don’t hire someone to tackle it for you, but the focus is more on relationship-building and the ROI you see is harder to track and may come in over a much longer period.

In addition to the obvious costs of a specific platform—like the estimated PPC cost—you also want to look for “hidden” costs that will affect the ROI of each platform and how much you need to spend on it.

These include:

  • Expenses of hiring an agency to consult or execute your campaigns
  • Expenses of hiring an expert to contribute through graphic design, photography, copywriting, or strategy (even if they’re one-time fees)
  • Costs of software needed to execute the campaigns, including social contest software, email subscriptions, analytics tools, and CRMs
  • Costs of “failed” attempts, like a blog post or ad campaign that doesn’t convert

Some costs will be one-time fees, while others will be on-going. Assess which costs will yield immediate gain and how the costs factor into projected ROI. Be a realist here—don’t hope that 100% of your PPC clicks you pay for will get you results, because in reality that number will be much, much smaller.

Look at What’s Already Working

Do you have marketing campaigns already up and running? If so, what’s working for you?

This can be tricky, because you want to avoid the sunk cost fallacy . If you’ve invested a few thousand into LinkedIn marketing but it’s not working for you, there’s no purpose in continuing to throw ad spend at it (even if you paid a lot for a strategy from an expert). That being said, if you’ve got a solid content marketing campaign going and you’re seeing traction, you won’t want to just jump ship and abandon it for something shinier.

budget allocation marketing

Design your marketing strategy and thus your marketing budget based on all of the factors above and what’s already working for you. And remember that some marketing strategies (especially low cost ones) take time to see results, so it’s a long-term effort.

Divide Up Your Budget

You’ve got your list, and your expected costs for each platform you want to target. Now it’s time to actually divide up the budget.

budget allocation marketing

Let’s use an example. Our new business is called Puppy Paws Treats & More and we sell gourmet dog biscuits and luxury toys. We’re a new business, and our gross revenue is currently at $100,000 per year. We want to scale quickly, so we’re going to opt for a 15% marketing budget. This gives us $15,000 to spend.

The main platforms this company wants to use is Google Ads to catch people in the funnel, Facebook Ads shown to dog owners to drive awareness, content marketing for relationship building, and email marketing.

We want to put $500 per month towards Google Ads and $500 towards Facebook Ads that is both reaching new audiences and using retargeting. The email marketing software is will cost about $400 per year, so to save money, we’ll write the emails ourselves. This doesn’t leave enough money left over for a content marketer to write every post, but it does allow for a $1000 content marketing plan to be developed by a professional, we can implement. Remaining funds can go to marketing tools like social media marketing management software, CRMs, and analytics platforms.

In this case, the imaginary business above prioritized Google Ads and Facebook Ads to help them find new audiences, so the budget  had to go there instead of hiring a professionally content marketer to tackle each post. If they valued content over the ads, they could have found a mid-level writer to write one post weekly and still had maybe two or three hundred left over for ads.

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Prioritize what’s important to you and you’ll find a way to make it work. And this is important: stick to your budget, because if you go over without careful analysis, it can put your business in jeopardy.

Determining your marketing budget doesn’t just involve deciding how much you can afford to spend, but it will also involve dividing up that budget and allocating it in the right places. Take a careful look at what you can afford to spend and remember that even if your revenue isn’t high, you need to spend money to make money. That’s never more true than with marketing. Here’s a super useful Digital Marketing Budget Calculator if you want a general rule of thumb and baseline.

Are you ready to scale up your PPC marketing and want to ensure that your ad spend is well invested? Get in touch with us and see what we can do for you .

What do you think? How do you determine your marketing budget? How do you decide how to divide it up between multiple platforms? Let us know in the comments below! 

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Marketing is essential to connecting your product or service with an audience. But that process isn’t cheap. There are ad buys, graphic work and copywriting to name only a few things. A marketing budget is how marketers know how much they can spend on their campaign.

Understanding how to create a marketing budget is a key element of any marketing plan. Once you’ve made the marketing budget, you have to track it to ensure you stay within your marketing budget. We’ll explain how to do that and even throw in a free marketing budget template to help you get started.

What Is a Marketing Budget?

A marketing budget is an outline of the costs that a company will spend to market its product or service. The marketing budget covers a finite period of time, the length of which can be anywhere between a quarter to a year.

The marketing budget includes all expenses related to the advertising campaign. These can include paid advertising, sponsored web content, additional marketing staff, registering a domain and building a dedicated website, print and billboard advertising, TV ads and much more.

Budgeting is a crucial part of any marketing plan; you need to allocate your resources properly to meet various marketing strategies that your company sets. It’s a complicated job that’s simplified through project management software.

ProjectManager is online project management software that helps you plan and track your marketing budget. Our Gantt chart helps you organize your tasks, resources and marketing costs. Once you have a marketing plan and set the baseline, you can track the planned costs versus actual costs in real time. Keep to your marketing budget—get started with ProjectManager today for free.

ProjectManager's Gantt chart

How to Create a Marketing Budget

Creating a marketing budget is an essential part of planning your marketing campaign. Without the funds, your efforts will fall short. Below are the steps you should take when building a marketing budget for one or more campaigns over the quarter or year.

1. Set Marketing Goals & Objectives

Your goals and objectives should be SMART . That’s an acronym for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound. For a marketing budget, you need to think about your sales funnel and devise short- and long-term goals while setting key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your performance .

2. Conduct Market Research

You don’t want to go into the marketplace without a clear picture of the market . You need to conduct market research to understand your target audience. That includes demographics, customer needs and so forth. But don’t neglect the competition as they’re vying for the same customers as you are. Identify the competition and list what you have in common with them and how you can differentiate yourself.

3. Develop Your Marketing Campaign

The budget depends on the concept you’ve chosen to deliver the message about your product or service. That message must align with the overall strategy of your company. Once you have made these decisions, the related costs will become clear, such as ad materials, graphic design, art or photography and so forth.

4. Choose Marketing Channels

Your message will be most effective on specific channels depending on the target audience you’re trying to reach. This requires some research to determine if your audience is swayed by social, email or content marketing , just to name a few.

5. Estimate Marketing Costs

A marketing budget is a forecast of how much you think you’ll spend. But once that budget has been approved, you’ll have to stick with it, so it’s imperative that your estimates are accurate. There are many techniques to help you estimate your marketing costs, from revenue-based to competition-matched, top-down and goal-driven. You might also use a combination of these techniques.

6. Develop a Marketing Budget

Once you’ve gone over these five steps, you can begin to put together your budget with the resources and costs you’ve determined. These will have to be tied to the larger marketing plan. For example, resources will have to align with a schedule so teams have what they need when they need them. The marketing budget is part of the marketing plan and will develop together.

Marketing Budget Allocation

Marketing budget allocation is the maximum you can spend on a marketing plan. That money has to reach the target audience and provide leads, sales and other KPIs that will deliver a return on investment (ROI) for the company.

The marketing budget allocation is how much funding is designated for each expenditure line in the budget. As noted above, it’s a figure that the marketing budget cannot exceed. If you don’t put a marketing budget allocation into your marketing budget, you can end up spending more than your revenues.

A marketing budget allocation is used to estimate revenues and expenditures over a time period. Management uses this when planning and figuring out how to allocate their resources for the best results. The financial limit set by the marketing budget allocation cannot be exceeded.

The marketing budget is usually done annually, though it can be quarterly, and revenues are estimated to determine how many resources will be employed over that budgetary period. This informs the budget allocation, which is usually divided into departments and program units, which makes it easier to identify necessary resources.

Tracking Your Marketing Budget

The idea of tracking your budget is an essential part of managing the marketing initiative. You’ve spent a lot of time and effort planning the budget, but that doesn’t mean your work is done. A marketing budget, like any part of your larger marketing plan, is not chiseled in stone. It’s a living document that must be constantly reviewed and revised.

First, create a baseline or benchmark for the budget . That is, you have to capture those planned costs and expenditures so you have something to compare against when you’re executing your marketing plan. Without taking this step, you could overspend. For example, if you don’t know your photography budget and the photographer comes back with more costs, you’re going over budget.

That doesn’t mean that costs are frozen, but having a baseline means you know when you’re going over your budget and can adjust the scope of your campaign or the schedule to make up for the added funds spent in photography, as in our example.

Everyone on the marketing team is going to have money earmarked for their tasks, but the marketing manager has the final say. The team can have some anatomy, but for efficiency and transparency, there should be a centralized purchasing process in which the manager is in control.

It’s also best to have software that delivers real-time data. You don’t want to know that money was spent days ago, you need that information immediately. Having real-time data means managers can make more insightful decisions when managing their budgets.

Marketing Budget Template

While a marketing budget template isn’t going to give you real-time data and will require you to manually input all your financial information for the marketing campaign, it’s still a good start if you don’t have project management software. Our free marketing budget template for Excel is a great tool to help you manage your budget. You can break up your spending over quarters and view the year-to-date spending against your total yearly budget.

ProjectManager's free marketing budget template for Excel.

Use our free marketing budget template to organize the money you’ve allocated to marketing initiatives, whether paid advertising, sponsored web content, marketing personnel and so forth. You can use our free marketing budget template as a strategic tool when spending across your marketing channels. Use our free marketing budget template when you strategize your marketing for the year and turn creative ideas into financial realities.

ProjectManager Tracks Marketing Budgets

Unlike templates, ProjectManager is online project management software. That means our tool updates in real time and even automates workflows that you set up. We have task approval settings to ensure that nothing moves forward until it’s been reviewed for quality assurance.

Schedule Your Marketing Campaigns

While marketing managers want to use robust Gantt charts to schedule marketing campaigns, not everyone uses this tool to execute their work. Our multiple-project view means you can use what you want and all views are updated in real time. For example, a calendar view captures events that are easy to see at a glance.

Track Marketing Costs In Real Time

Of course, seeing events and activities is important, but so is tracking that work. It’s how you keep to your budget. Once you set a baseline on your marketing plan, you can view planned versus actual effort on the real-time dashboard . No setup is required. You get a high-level view of six metrics whenever you want, from costs to workload and more.

Manage Teams, Time & Resources

There are a lot of ways to spend money on a marketing campaign, and marketing managers have to stay on top of all of them. Resources can be tracked on the Gantt chart while human resources can be balanced on the workload chart . To keep track of how much time your team is spreading on their tasks, use our secure timesheets. They not only streamline payroll but help you keep track of invaluable time.

Timesheet view in ProjectManager

Marketing budgets fund a variety of departments and even outside vendors. You can connect sales, marketing and your art department as well as any contractors on our collaborative platform. Anyone can share files, add comments and tag other team members to get their input. It’s all done in real time so whether you’re working in the office, at home or anywhere, you’re able to work better together.

Related Content

Creating and managing a marketing budget can be challenging. That’s why we’ve created blogs, templates, guides and more to help you streamline your marketing management process.

  • 10 Free Marketing Templates for Excel, Word and More
  • What Is Marketing Management: An Essential Introduction
  • What Is a Marketing Plan and How Do I Make One (Template Included)
  • Marketing Implementation 101: How to Implement Your Marketing Plan
  • How to Write a Creative Brief
  • Push vs. Pull Marketing: A Quick Guide

ProjectManager is award-winning software that helps marketing departments plan, schedule and track their campaigns in real time. Plan and track time and budgets to keep your costs in control. Join teams at NASA, Siemens and Nestle who use our software to save money. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

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How to Create a Marketing Budget (for 2024)

  • 3 months ago

Are you struggling to find the right balance for your marketing budget? Maybe you don’t know which marketing strategy to use. We have the information you need to improve your overall marketing performance.

We surveyed business owners to understand how small businesses approach marketing. More than 1,800 people responded, and we’ve used their insights, as well as data gathered for our average marketing budget report to provide a guide for creating marketing budgets.

We’ll explain what a marketing budget is, how much experts suggest spending, and how much marketing teams spend, then we’ll discuss how to create a marketing plan. We’ll even show you how to promote a company on a tight budget so you can become a marketing leader without spending thousands on ads.

What is a marketing budget?

What is the average marketing budget for a small business, how does having a budget help you avoid the traps of digital marketing, how to create a marketing budget, why you need an integrated marketing strategy, how to promote your business on a limited marketing budget, what is your experience with marketing budgets.

A marketing budget outlines the costs a company spends on marketing its products or services. Your marketing budget should cover a specific duration, usually a quarter or a year. Your budget may also have periods for particular marketing campaigns.

Your marketing budget should include all expenses related to spreading the word about your business. Your marketing budget allocation will estimate costs for various line items, including:

  • Marketing team
  • Paid advertisements
  • Marketing software
  • Outsourced marketing services

Expect your company marketing spending to be approximately equal in all four categories.

We asked how much business owners spend on marketing strategies. We found that two-thirds spend less than $1,000 per year marketing their small business, while 15% spend over $10K and another 19% spend between $1K and $10K.

Meanwhile, the Small Business Administration suggests a marketing budget allocation of 8% of company revenue. That means two-thirds of businesses are only marketing enough to make $12,500 in revenue annually.

To make $100K in revenue, you should be spending around $8,000. Meanwhile, if you want $100K in after-tax profit, you’ll want to spend $32K to $400K on marketing each year, based on 2% to 25% profit margins .

A digital marketing budget makes tracking performance against goals and industry benchmarks easier when comparing marketing channels. The budgets for each channel can also be set in most advertisers’ software, preventing marketing from running rampant.

You can also limit wasted expenses on Google Ads by narrowing your spending to only high-performing keywords.

You can also use the high-performing keywords to guide other marketing team efforts by focusing social media ads, video marketing, and search engine optimization on subjects that actually contribute to your company’s success.

Author’s No-Nonsense Note About Marketing Budgets

There are two ways to go about marketing: Spending time or spending money. Every hour you spend marketing is one you can’t spend providing services or creating custom products. Of course, eCommerce stores, content creators, and marketing agencies are marketing during all work hours.

If you have virtually no marketing budget or want to do it all yourself, I suggest assuming you will spend 20 hours per week promoting your business and 20 billable hours per week serving customers. You’ll need to calculate your service rates (or product prices) based on these reduced weekly hours.

Creating a marketing budget involves careful planning, analysis, and allocation of resources to ensure that marketing activities align with business goals. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create a marketing budget:

  • Understand customer needs.
  • Examine your business goals.
  • Review past marketing budget management.
  • Measure the average cost per lead.
  • Calculate the average conversion rate.
  • Establish how many leads you need.
  • Define your marketing objectives.
  • Create your marketing budget.
  • Regularly monitor and adjust your marketing spend.

Understand customer needs

Your marketing strategies should focus on showing you understand your target customers. To succeed, you’ll want to use research and marketing analytics data to gain deeper insights into what existing and potential customers want and need.

Without market research, marketing teams may have a difficult time identifying the marketing channels to reach their target audience best.

Explore demographic and psychographic factors like age, gender, income level, location, and brand loyalty to learn more about what your target audience cares about.

Examine your business goals

You’ll want to consider the overlying business strategy and goals before you create a marketing plan and budget. You might need to talk to executives, investors, and other team members to establish what the business goals are, then create a marketing plan that helps you achieve those goals.

Your business strategy will also impact the marketing team’s goals because the marketing budget needs to be high enough to accomplish the business goals.

Throughout this piece, we’ll assume you are trying to make $250K across 1,000 customers. We’ll use these numbers to help illustrate some of the concepts you’ll use to avoid common marketing budget mistakes.

Review past marketing budget management

Before you create a marketing budget plan, review previous years’ marketing budgets and marketing campaigns. Identify what worked well and what didn’t. Look for indicators like:

  • Which marketing channels were under budget or over budget?
  • Which marketing campaigns had a higher or lower return on ad spend?
  • Did you overestimate or underestimate the previous year’s marketing budget?
  • Did you add new products or services that impacted marketing costs?
  • How does your cost per lead, cost per click, clickthrough rate, and conversion rate compare to industry averages?

This data will help you make more informed decisions for the upcoming budget.

Wordstream is a good source for these metrics if you do not have information from previous marketing campaigns. It will provide you with a good benchmark to compare your performance.

This is Wordstream’s data regarding cost per click, cost per lead, click-through rate, and conversion rate for Google Ads.

Measure the average cost per lead

Cost per lead (CPL) is a marketing metric that compares what you spend on lead generation to the actual number of leads you generate. This helps you understand how much it will cost for a marketing campaign.

The CPL formula is:

CPL = Amount spent on leads / Number of leads

Ideally, marketing investments would use your current numbers, but for those just implementing marketing tactics, use the benchmarks in the table above.

Calculate the average conversion rate

Conversion rate (CVR) measures the percentage of leads you turn into paying customers. Use the formula below to calculate the average conversion rate:

CVR = Number of Sales / Number of Leads

Establish how many leads you need

Now that you’re familiar with some of the terms used in a digital marketing strategy, you’ll want to calculate the number of leads you need to hit $250K in gross revenue.

You’ll need to use the formula:

Desired Customers / CVR = Leads to Meet Goal

Let’s assume you’re in the home improvement field, which has a 10.22% CVR. That means you’ll divide:

1,000 Customers / 10.22% = 9,785 leads

Taking it a step further, your marketing plan needs to calculate how much marketing projects cost by multiplying the leads needed by the CPL ($66.02) .

9,785 x $66.02 = $646,005.70

As you can see, this is way higher than the $250K revenue you’re hoping to make. That’s because marketing leaders like Google and Facebook tend to charge based on an estimated lifetime customer value. Effectively, you’re paying a percentage of the revenue that you expect to make over the life of the customer relationship.

This is why a marketing budget includes a budget allocated to increasing the earnings from each paying customer through remarketing, loyalty programs, and other strategies that are less costly than paid advertising.

Define your marketing objectives

Next, you’ll want to define your marketing goals and align them with your business goals. Let’s look at some business goals and corresponding goals to include in your marketing budget.

You could tie marketing goals to other business goals, like:

  • Raise brand awareness by X%
  • Limit discounting current customers’ bills to under Y%

These are just a few examples of how your business goals should impact your marketing strategy. Want to know more about tying marketing goals to business goals? Check out this blog .

Create your marketing budget

First, you’ll want to establish the total funds available for marketing. This may be based on a percentage of revenue, a fixed amount set by the company, or other financial considerations.

We suggest using the marketing budget of 12.3% that was mentioned in this CMO study . A startup marketing budget may need to be even higher. MaidThis CEO Neel Parekh told us:

When you first start a business, you may need to spend 20% to get clients faster.

Check out our interview with him below.

YouTube player

Use a marketing budget template

Whether you’re a small business owner or work with them, you can use the information in this report and our marketing budget template to create a balanced small business budget.

The template lets you choose your industry and your revenue goal. Then it suggests a sample marketing budget amount.

Once you know how much your marketing budget should be, you can use the other tabs to set the budgets for specific aspects of your marketing strategy. Then add the actual expenses for an entirely new way of budgeting.

Pro Tip: Seriously, this marketing budget template is probably the tool I am most proud of during my seven years of consulting.

Allocate budget by channel

Decide how much of your budget will be allocated to the marketing channels outlined below.

As you go, you’ll notice that some budget-based initiatives make advertising small business products and services easier than others do. Start limiting your marketing spend on the ineffective channels and transfer it to the ones that are performing better.

Marketing spending as a percentage of revenue ranges from 0% to as high as 38.57%, with an average of 12.3% and a median of 10%. In addition, the average marketing budget dedicates 53.4% of its marketing dollars to its digital marketing budget, while the rest is spent on traditional advertising.

Marketing Budget Distribution

Once you’ve decided how much to spend on marketing, you’ll want to break your marketing budget down to the costs for all marketing campaigns. Marketing costs for small businesses will include:

  • Content marketing budget: Expect to spend a minimum of $29 per piece, but some of the best content creators have content marketing budgets that cost up to $1,000 per piece. You may also find content creators that charge $.05 to $1 per word.
  • Paid digital advertising budget: Small businesses should expect to spend $2.59 per click, $3.12 per 1,000 impressions, $.66 to $1.23 on remarketing, $15 to $800 on tools, and a minimum of $350 per month for the monthly ad budget, according to WebFX .
  • Ad monitoring budget: To pay someone to monitor ads for your small business, include a marketing spend of $350 to $5K per month or 12-30% of monthly ad spend—whichever is more.
  • Email marketing budget: Your email marketing budget will vary based on the number of email addresses on your list and the features you need, but you should expect to spend around $18 per month for up to 1,000 people on your email list. As you grow, costs may increase up to $540 per month, plus related labor costs.
  • Social media marketing budget: Social media marketing in 2023 is expected to reach $72.33B in spending, or $2,178.62 per business (calculated by dividing $72.33B by the number of U.S. businesses).
  • Sales funnel automation budget: Automation systems might be included in your email marketing, social media marketing, or other marketing channel budgets.
  • Marketing tools and software: You might include these costs in other categories or put them in a dedicated category. On average, 25.5% of marketing budgets are spent on tech. Depending on the size of your company and the number of customers, necessary tools and software could be free or cost thousands per month.
  • Outsourced marketing expenses: Some companies will outsource all or part of their marketing. As you’ll see in the chart below, approximately 23.5% of marketing costs go to marketing services and agencies.
  • Traditional advertising budget: Traditional marketing budgets are expected to decrease by 2.6%, according to the CMO report. This includes print ads, outdoor advertising, radio spots, and more.

For social media, paid ads, and traditional advertising, you may want to break the promotional budget into specific marketing channels. We recommend utilizing this marketing budget template .

Small Business Allocation: How It’s Different

Professional marketers who responded to the CMO Survey said they spend approximately equal portions of their marketing budgets on marketing labor, paid media, technology, and outsourcing.

Meanwhile, our surveys show that small business owners think about their marketing efforts and spend their marketing budgets differently. The primary form of marketing most small business owners use is social media (60%), followed by Google Ads (17%), SEO (10%), print (7%), and content marketing (6%).

In addition, 44% of small business owners state that print advertising has not worked for their business, while just 24% did not find social media effective. Google Ads and SEO were tied at 13% for perceived ineffectiveness, while content marketing is the channel small business owners find most effective.

Interestingly, small business owners focus least on the strategy that has the most perceived effectiveness. If you’re looking for ways to grow your business, consider creating more content.

Include a contingency

However you think you’ll allocate your marketing dollars, it’s always best to give yourself some wiggle room when creating a marketing budget plan. Most budgets for marketing tend to be approximately 20% higher than companies actually spend.

Make sure you include a contingency in your budget that is up to 10% so you have some extra room if you need it as you manage your small business.

Regularly monitor and adjust your marketing spend

Continuously monitor the performance of your marketing activities against your budget. Make adjustments as needed to optimize performance and maximize return on investment (ROI).

The most commonly used marketing analytics software is Google Analytics . The most common metrics to measure marketing performance are:

  • Sales, revenues: 69.9%
  • Digital, web, and mobile performance: 55.6%
  • Content engagement: 43.4%
  • Lead generation: 40.3%
  • Lead conversion: 36.9%
  • Campaign costs, efficiency (e.g., production, content reuse): 34.8%
  • Campaign effectiveness (e.g., gross rating points, reach, frequency): 34.7%
  • Customer satisfaction: 32.7%
  • Campaign ROI: 30.7%
  • Customer churn, retention rate, loyalty: 28.6%

When a company integrates its marketing strategy, it makes sure every marketing channel pulls from the same playbook.

An integrated marketing strategy is crucial for businesses and organizations for several key reasons:

  • Consistency: An integrated marketing strategy ensures that your brand messaging and visuals are consistent across all channels. This consistency helps you create a cohesive brand identity that earns trust and credibility with your audience.
  • Maximized Reach and Exposure: Different people consume information through different channels. By integrating various marketing channels (such as social media, email, content marketing, traditional advertising, etc.), you can increase your audience and visibility.
  • Improved Customer Experience: An integrated approach allows for a seamless and unified customer experience. When customers encounter a consistent message and experience across different touchpoints, it makes for a smoother and more enjoyable interaction with your brand.
  • Increased Efficiency: Coordinating different marketing efforts can lead to increased efficiency. For example, when your social media efforts align with your content marketing strategy, you can repurpose content for both channels, saving time and resources.
  • Better Data and Analytics: Integrating different channels will help you get a better picture of your audience and their preferences. This allows for better tracking, measurement, and analysis of marketing efforts, leading to better-informed decision-making.
  • Adaptability and Agility: An integrated strategy enables you to pivot when market conditions or consumer preferences change. If one channel isn’t performing as expected, you can adjust your approach across multiple channels more easily.
  • Competitive Advantage: Companies that successfully integrate their marketing efforts often gain a competitive edge. This is because they’re able to deliver a more cohesive and compelling message than competitors with a disjointed or inconsistent approach.
  • Alignment with Business Goals: An integrated strategy ensures that all marketing efforts are aligned with overall business goals and objectives. This means that every campaign and initiative is contributing to the broader mission of the company.
  • Optimized Budget Allocation: Integrated marketing allows for better allocation of resources. By understanding which channels are most effective for your specific audience, you can allocate your budget and staff to maximize return on investment.
  • Long-term Growth and Sustainability: An integrated approach sets the foundation for sustainable growth. By building a strong and consistent brand presence, you’re more likely to retain customers and attract new ones, leading to long-term success.

In today’s highly competitive and fast-paced business environment, having a well-thought-out and unified marketing plan is essential for staying relevant, reaching your target audience, and achieving your business objectives.

Promoting your business on a limited budget requires creativity, strategic planning, and a focus on cost-effective methods. Here are some practical steps to help you get started:

  • Define your target audience.
  • Leverage social media.
  • Optimize your website.
  • Invest in content marketing.
  • Be consistent with email marketing.
  • Collaborate with influencers or partners.
  • Utilize free marketing tools.
  • Network in your industry.
  • Offer referral incentives.
  • Leverage user-generated content.
  • Do your own graphic design.
  • Perform local SEO.
  • Run giveaways and contests.
  • Measure and adjust.

Keep reading to learn more about small business marketing methods on a small budget.

Define your target audience

You need to understand your target market to tailor your marketing efforts toward the people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services. Your target market should be as narrowly defined as is reasonable.

Some of the demographics and data points you can use to narrow your target market and reduce your online advertising expenditures include:

  • Other demographics

The more narrow your budget, the less cost involved.

Leverage social media

Most small businesses that are operating on a small marketing budget will focus on social media posts. You can get a lot of free marketing when you:

  • Choose the Right Platforms: Focus on the social media platforms where your target audience is most active.
  • Join Facebook Groups: There are groups for everything on Facebook. Join your local groups to network and attract customers.
  • Post Regularly: Regular and engaging content can help build a community around your brand.
  • Utilize Hashtags: They can expand the reach of your posts to a wider audience.
  • Engage with Your Audience: Respond to comments, answer questions, and foster a sense of community.

Optimize your website

Try using a free website builder to start. Ensure your site is user-friendly and responsive on mobile. Once you’ve set up your website, use SEO techniques to improve your site’s visibility on search engines.

As you grow, you’ll gain more functionality from a paid website.

Invest in content marketing

As we mentioned earlier, content marketing is one of the least used but most effective types of marketing small businesses can do. Businesses should create valuable, relevant, and informative content that resonates with their target audiences. Blog posts, videos, infographics, and e-books are all great options.

Be consistent with email marketing

Collect email addresses through your website and social media. Then send out regular newsletters with updates, promotions, and valuable content.

Collaborate with influencers or partners

Partnering with influencers in your niche can expose your business to a broader audience. You can also collaborate with complementary businesses for joint promotions or events.

Utilize free marketing tools

Free tools, like Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, and onsite social media analytics, help you monitor performance and make data-driven decisions. There are many other free apps to use as a small business, too.

Network in your industry

Attend industry seminars, conferences, and other events to make connections and spread the word about your business. These are great places to meet potential customers and people who can refer you to customers.

Offer referral incentives

Encourage your existing customers to refer friends and family by offering discounts or special deals. It doesn’t have to be much—people will appreciate 5% to 10% discounts.

Leverage user-generated content

Encourage customers to share their experiences with your products or services on social media. You can feature their content on your platforms and share them with your followers on social.

Do your own graphic design

Use free or low-cost tools, like Canva , to create eye-catching visuals for your marketing materials. Canva makes it easy to create content and doesn’t require design experience.

Perform local SEO

Optimize your business for local searches so people in your area can easily find you. To do this, you need to:

  • Make sure your name, phone number, and address are consistent across the internet.
  • Sign up for Google Business Profile.
  • Improve your online listings.
  • Share updates, like new locations or hours, with Google.
  • Request Google reviews.
  • Optimize URLs, title tags, headers, meta descriptions, and content on your website.
  • Add a Google map with your location in your site’s footer.
  • Create localized content.
  • Improve your site’s mobile friendliness.
  • Participate in the community. When people see your company interacting with the local community, it builds trust, and search engines may take notice.

Run contests and giveaways

Engage your audience by offering prizes in exchange for social media engagement or email sign-ups. The point here is to get more followers and more emails to contact. You’ll want to:

  • Establish your goals.
  • Choose a contest to run.
  • Build the contest.
  • Promote the contest.
  • Track the results.
  • Follow up after the contest.
  • Improve the next contest.

Check out Wishpond’s blog for a more extensive guide on hosting contests .

Measure and adjust

Keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Focus on the strategies that give you the best ROI. This will help you avoid falling into the category of small business owners unsatisfied with their marketing results.

These small business marketing statistics can help you create an informed marketing budget, especially when you remember that online marketing is steadily gaining traction over traditional marketing channels, like print and radio.

We’ve discussed the importance of creating a marketing budget, provided you with marketing budget allocation best practices, and shared tips on how to use marketing budget templates whether you have an established business or are just starting one.

Whether you have a marketing department or not, take the time to make a marketing budget. It will help increase sales and reduce wasted spending.

Based on years’ worth of UpFlip interviews, I can tell you that marketing automation software and content marketing have some of the best returns.

Have you ever created a marketing budget? What was the biggest pain point in creating it, and what new marketing strategy will you try next?

Brandon Boushy

Brandon Boushy lives to improve people’s lives by helping them become successful entrepreneurs. His journey started nearly 30 years ago. He consistently excelled at everything he did, but preferred to make the rules rather than follow him. His exploration of self and knowledge has helped him to get an engineering degree, MBA, and countless certifications. When freelancing and rideshare came onto the scene, he recognized the opportunity to play by his own rules. Since 2017, he has helped businesses across all industries achieve more with his research, writing, and marketing strategies. Since 2021, he has been the Lead Writer for UpFlip where he has published over 170 articles on small business success.

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EA flop Immortals of Aveum reportedly cost around $125 million, former dev says "a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea"

"No one bought it"

Immortals of Aveum

A new report sheds some light on just how much EA invested in its single-player FPS Immortals of Aveum, which received mixed reviews and was deemed a financial flop.

Immortals of Aveum launched in August 2023 amidst one of the busiest years of game releases in history, bookended by behemoths like Diablo 4 , Starfield , and Baldur's Gate 3 . Ascendant Studios' self-styled "Call of Duty with magic" experiment was compelling enough, and I personally think it deserved more attention , but it ultimately missed EA's expectations by enough of a margin that about 45% of the studio's workforce was laid off shortly after release. The studio's CEO, Bret Robbins, has gone on record to blame Immortals' poor sales on last year's extraordinarily busy release calendar , but an anonymous former Ascendant employee speaking to IGN said, actually, the concept of the game itself and its sizable budget were both fundamental mistakes and ultimately doomed the project.

"At a high level, Immortals was massively overscoped for a studio's debut project," the former employee said. "The development cost was around $85 million, and I think EA kicked in $40 million for marketing and distribution. Sure, there was some serious talent on the development team, but trying to make a AAA single-player shooter in today's market was a truly awful idea, especially since it was a new IP that was also trying to leverage Unreal Engine 5. What ended up launching was a bloated, repetitive campaign that was far too long."

Whatever the reason Immortals of Aveum didn't succeed, it sucks that its failure will only further discourage major studios from investing in the sort of big budget single-player, no-nonsense action games we're seeing less and less of these days, and redundancies affecting passionate developers suck even worse.

Another anonymous employee, still at Ascendant, told IGN that there was potential in Immortals' old-school approach, but admitted it failed to find an audience regardless. "It's not a sequel or a remake, it doesn't take 400 hours to beat, has zero microtransactions, no pointless open world grinding. Although not everyone loved it, it reviewed pretty well, currently sitting at a 74 on OpenCritic and a Mostly Positive on Steam. No one bought it."

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Budget 2024: Food processing ministry gets higher allocation

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The Centre aims to bolster agriculture and allied sectors, including food processing, through higher private and public investment in post-harvest activities such as aggregation, modern storage, efficient supply chains, and marketing

The Indian government is committed to reduction of post-harvest losses. (File Photo: AP Photo)

New Delhi: The interim budget for fiscal year 2024-25 (FY25), announced on Thursday, provided a higher allocation for the ministry of food processing industries, reflecting the government's focus on the vital role of allied farm sectors in India's commitment to food security and reduction of post-harvest losses.

Presented by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, the budget allocated ₹ 3,290 crore to the ministry, an increase from the revised estimate of ₹ 2,912 crore for 2023-24. Sitharaman emphasized the government's intent to bolster agriculture and allied sectors, including food processing, through enhanced private and public investment in post-harvest activities such as aggregation, modern storage, efficient supply chains, and marketing.

Funding for the Pradhan Mantri Formalisation of Micro Food Processing Enterprises (PMFME) scheme stands at ₹ 880 crore for FY25, up from ₹ 639 crore in the previous fiscal year. However, the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Sampada Yojana (PMKSY) saw a budget reduction to ₹ 729 crore. The Production-Linked Incentive Scheme for the food processing industry received an allocation of ₹ 1,444 crore, indicating focus on encouraging innovation in this sector.

The PMFME scheme has provided significant support, assisting 240,000 self-help groups (SHGs) and 60,000 individuals with credit linkages, furthering efforts to reduce post-harvest losses and enhance productivity and incomes, minister Sitharaman said.

PMKSY, on the other hand, has benefitted 3.8 million farmers and generated 1 million jobs.

Mint in January had reported that the government will allocate over ₹ 1,200 crore for the PLI scheme for the food processing industry, around ₹ 900 crore for the PMFME scheme, and nearly ₹ 750 crore for PMKSY in the FY25 budget.

These schemes are designed to empower the food processing sector by incentivizing micro, small, and medium enterprises, supporting the formalization of micro-enterprises, and creating an efficient supply chain management system. This approach aims to provide better returns to farmers, create employment, reduce agricultural wastage, and boost the export of processed foods.

“Budget 2024-25 is a great step towards a promising and bountiful agritech future. The budget provisions strengthened agriculture value chains through food processing infrastructure and minimized wastage and crop insurance," said Alekh Sanghera, co-Founder and CEO, FarMart. “Better market access and post-harvest management empower smallholders with sustainable income."

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#BudgetSpeech2024: A call for strategic alignment in South Africa's hospitality industry

A s we eagerly anticipate the upcoming budget speech, the tourism and hospitality industry reflects on remarkable achievements while recognising the pressing need for collaboration with the government in terms of budget allocation to address significant challenges and unlock new opportunities.

The tourism sector's substantial contribution of 7.6% to the country's GDP highlights its crucial role in economic growth. Achieving a phenomenal 48.9% surge in international tourism in 2023, with 8.5 million arrivals, showcases South Africa's global attraction.

However, as we celebrate these successes, there are several challenges and untapped opportunities that require immediate attention.

Back-logged infrastructure upgrades

The fragility of our infrastructure is evident in the poor state of our roads, particularly in the Eastern Cape, where resorts face closure due to accessibility issues, hampering domestic travel promotion. Four-hour journeys that used to be a mere 10-minute drive impede the sector's growth.

Investing in regional airports is vital to enhancing accessibility and affordability for domestic travellers. These airports need infrastructure development, increased capacity and terminal sizes with more competitive flight operators. The cost of flights to certain secondary nodes such as Pietermaritzburg, Upington and Kruger National Park are exorbitant at the expense of the region's tourism growth. We can not have hotels closing due to travellers not being able to afford flights or roads being in dismal condition.

The industry is ready for job creation

The government is the country’s largest employer and seems to hold on to this burden of job creation firmly, but it needs to empower the private sector to drive job creation.

The hospitality industry, with its potential to generate 800,000 job opportunities and contribute R287bn to the national economy, stands as a gateway for skills training and job creation and the government needs to allow for better collaboration with the industry. In a nation grappling with staggering unemployment figures, hospitality and tourism have the potential to make a significant contribution.

Roles within hospitality cultivate adaptability, communication, and cultural awareness, accelerating personal and professional growth. Part-time roles provide flexible opportunities for skills development, leading to scalable career paths with global relevance. As matriculants move forward, hospitality stands as a beacon for meaningful careers.

Need for public-private partnerships

Effective collaboration between the government and private sector, facilitated by industry bodies such as SATSA and Fedhasa, is imperative.

We see a significant opportunity for a dynamic public-private partnership, wherein the government collaborates with the hospitality and tourism industry to uplift and empower smaller players within the informal tourism and accommodation sector. This multifaceted approach involves not only providing resources and enhancing accessibility, tasks that governments can readily facilitate, but also encompasses vital skills training and development.

We need to involve tour operators, both small and medium-sized, along with independent eateries and other niche players. These smaller players are integral to the fabric of South Africa's tourism landscape, contributing to the diverse range of experiences that attract visitors.

For the private sector to drive job creation and competitiveness, it must be empowered. If the government maintains a bureaucratic approach and holds onto certain areas, it risks impeding private sector-driven initiatives. Therefore, private companies must take the lead in this endeavour, with the government providing support to facilitate their efforts.

Government spending in the hospitality industry

Clarity on government expenditure in conferencing and accommodation is vital and Treasury needs to be transparent regarding budgetary concerns in limiting government travel and entertainment.

The sheer volume of government operations makes it a significant supporter of and an important revenue stream for the hospitality industry.

Engaging with the hospitality sector to determine reasonable rates and dispel misconceptions is critical for mutual understanding and in finding mutually agreeable solutions moving forward.

Renewable energy incentives

There is a pressing need for greater consideration of subsidies and incentives, particularly from a tax perspective, to encourage the adoption of renewable energy within the tourism industry. Some establishments are already resorting to implementing load-shedding surcharges due to the substantial cost of maintaining an uninterrupted power supply for guests.

Many guests choose hotels specifically for their ability to provide a seamless environment for both work and leisure. However, the financial feasibility of transitioning to renewable energy remains a significant challenge for numerous properties, given the scale of investment required.

It would be highly beneficial for the government to provide stimulus packages tailored to the hospitality and tourism sectors, aimed at supporting initiatives to adopt renewable and more cost-effective energy solutions. Such support would contribute to sustainability efforts and alleviate the financial burden on businesses grappling with the rising costs of conventional energy sources.

In navigating the trajectory of South Africa's hospitality industry, a unified approach that combines government support, private sector innovation, and industry collaboration is not just desirable – it's essential. Only through strategic alignment and mutual commitment can we unlock the full potential of this important sector and propel South Africa into a sustainable era of tourism and economic prosperity.

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  8. 16 Ways for Creating a Marketing Budget (and How to Spend It)

    1. It allows you allocate your resources effectively Having a marketing budget allows you to keep track of all your expenses, cut down on unnecessary costs and allocate your resources only to marketing projects that support your marketing goals and are likely to generate good results both short term and long term. 2. Easily track your ROI

  9. How to Plan a Marketing Budget in 6 Steps: 2024 Guide

    Check out these six critical points you'll want to establish to set up your marketing budget: Determine your business's goals. Establish your sales cycle. Know your outside costs. Understand your market. Get an idea of what strategies you want to use. Research strategy prices. 1. Determine your business's goals.

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    1. Determine Your Total Spending Requirements Budgetary decisions should be based as much as possible on actual facts and figures, be it previous spending or informed estimates. This is easier for companies that have already been in the game for a couple of years, as they have a much clearer understanding of the various costs they'll incur.

  19. How to Create Marketing Budget: A Quick Guide

    The marketing budget is part of the marketing plan and will develop together. Marketing Budget Allocation. Marketing budget allocation is the maximum you can spend on a marketing plan. That money has to reach the target audience and provide leads, sales and other KPIs that will deliver a return on investment (ROI) for the company.

  20. How to Create a Marketing Budget (for 2024)

    Meanwhile, the Small Business Administration suggests a marketing budget allocation of 8% of company revenue. That means two-thirds of businesses are only marketing enough to make $12,500 in revenue annually. To make $100K in revenue, you should be spending around $8,000.

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    Given the rigid power structure, local officials are incapable of influencing the allocation of sufficient funds for the repair of the heat supply infrastructure, the political scientist concludes. ... the State Duma approved Russia's budget, which until 2026 gives top priority to military expenditures. About 30 percent of the 10.8 trillion ...

  27. #BudgetSpeech2024: A call for strategic alignment in South Africa ...

    Alan Campbell, Sales and Marketing Director of Anew Hotels & Resorts The tourism sector's substantial contribution of 7.6% to the country's GDP highlights its crucial role in economic growth.