As a marketer, I learned first -hand that the development of a marketing budget is a critical part of every marketing strategy. Unfortunately, it cannot be a small challenge to find out how much your team should spend.
In this blog post I will share some helpful Marketing budget templates. I will also tell what a marketing budget is, why you need one and everything else you need to create a marketing budget with trust. So let’s start!
Table of contents
What is a marketing budget?
As a contents Rana Bano explained“A marketing budget describes the specific amount of money a company admits its marketing activities.”
She continues: “It affects your marketing strategy by helping you to understand how much you spend to promote your company.” But how exactly does that look like in practice?
As with everything, the details of an effective marketing budget vary depending on the industry, organization and resources. I have found that for companies that prioritize digital ads, for example, can be helpful if the target expenses are broken down by different types of online ads.
For example, the marketing budget below describes the target editions for Google ads and Instagram ads:
In contrast, other organizations may be less geared towards digital advertising platforms. For these companies, the expenditure for marketing traditional platforms such as advertising boards, television and radio advertising or personal events can be more useful.
The sample budget downwards for a personal event that takes everything from event location and food costs to the name of tags, programs and swag articles:
source
How much to spend on marketing
So you know that you need a marketing budget. But what is the best way to decide how much you should spend on different marketing initiatives? In my experience, I found that it is important to determine how much financing is available for all your marketing efforts.
There are different approaches to answer this question. However, if you are not sure where to start, I have learned that benchmarking against industry average values ​​can be helpful.
A Newer survey Of the Chief Marketing Officers, it was found that an average of 7.7% of corporate sales for marketing were assigned in 2024. Therefore, it is probably a good idea that your marketing budget will fall by this reach.
As soon as you have determined how much financing you can access, you can find out how much you should spend on different parts of your marketing strategy. This can begin with a fairly high view. For example, the budgets of the sample B2C and B2B outline how much of an entire marketing budget should flow into several broad categories.
As soon as you have created a rough budget at a high level, it is of course time to be specific. Here is one of my favorite examples for a detailed marketing budget that shows how granular you can get with the assignment of marketing editions:
Why you need a marketing budget
Take it from me: today’s marketing landscape is complicated. Budget cuts are more common than ever, and the sub -performance of marketers quickly falls under the ax. In addition, more than half of the marketers in lifting spots The latest survey reported that the way in which it spends your budget and the ROI it is producing is now being examined more than in the past.
That is why a comprehensive marketing budget is so important. With a well thought -out budget, you can avoid these negative results and make sure that you have the money you need to carry out your marketing strategy.
In addition, I learned that the development of a marketing budget can help you:
- Prioritize projects to invest in.
- Direct donations for software purchases.
- Compare your progress in the previous year.
- Guide funds for projects in advance.
- Justify the importance of specific projects.
- Calculate the ROI from your marketing projects.
- Show the value of the proposed marketing projects for your higher higher.
- Show a positive ROI that can help you get a larger budget in the future.
- Submit donations for freelancers and full -time settings that run your strategy.
Ultimately, persistent investments for marketing success is of crucial importance.
As a Vistatec CMO Simon Hodgkins indicate“In order to avoid the dangers of reduced marketing budgets, companies have to re -shape their view of marketing costs into an investment. This investment should aim to achieve long -term goals such as brand structure, customer acquisition and market expansion. “
It may be tempting to reduce the costs by doing your marketing budget without thinking – but it is unlikely that this will pay off in the long term.
Within a typical marketing budget
In particular, when asked which formats deliver the highest ROI, the respondents emphasized the following areas:
- Short form video (21.02%).
- Images (19.47%).
- Live streaming video (15.53%).
- Interviews (15.19%).
- Blog posts (14.79%).
When asked where you would like to increase the marketing investments in 2025, the respondents mentioned the following areas:
- Short form video (17.13%).
- Images (14.85%).
- UGC (13.93%).
- Live streaming (13.88%).
- Podcasts or other audio content (13.08%).
Of course, social media have been a central part of marketing for years. However, another growing marketing trend occurred in 2024: However, almost every fourth respondent reported that the influencer marketing played an important role in his 2024 strategy.
In addition, the respondents said that in many cases the cooperation with small influencers (i.e. influencers with the audience below 100,000) are particularly effective.
These trends suggest that more marketers prioritize in the assignment of their marketing budgets social media marketing and small influencer marketing.
Marketing budget as a percentage of sales
Decisions related to the allocation of the marketing budget remain largely industry -specific. But experts propose as a general rule of thumb B2B companies should spend 2-5% of their income in marketing, while B2C companies should output 5-10%.
Marketing budgets by industry
If you dive a little deeper, it is helpful to understand how much marketing budgets vary from industry. In the following I shared the average percentage of sales cmos in various industries reported Expenditures for marketing in 2024.
|
INDUSTRY |
Marketing budget (% Of corporate sales) |
|
Consumer packaged goods |
18.09% |
|
Training |
14.59% |
|
Communication/media |
13.82% |
|
transport |
11.67% |
|
Consumer services |
11.25% |
|
Banks/finances/insurance |
11.18% |
|
Professional services |
11.06% |
|
Mining/construction |
10.20% |
|
Real estate |
9.82% |
|
Health care |
9.31% |
|
Tech software/platform |
9.16% |
|
Pharma/Biotech |
8.21% |
|
Production |
6.67% |
|
Retail in wholesale |
5.46% |
|
energy |
3.21% |
At the bottom of the spectrum, this data show that energy companies only spend 3.21% of their sales for marketing. In contrast, companies spend a whopping 18.09%. It is therefore important for marketers to evaluate their own budgets against these average values ​​of this industry.
In fact, I found that benchmarking is a great way to convince the higher ups to differ for their proposed budget. As soon as you need a buy-in for the execution of your strategies, you will be set up to surpass others in your industry and make your company a model of how other teams in your room should approach marketing.
Best practice for marketing budget
1. Understand your customer trip.
Most customer trips are not as easy as googling a term, jumping to an e -mail list and then convert. On the contrary, the vast majority of the trips are full of turns.
To find out how your customers go from product consciousness to buy, varies from industry to industry. What works for B2B brands may not work for B2C, and what a large organization works cannot work for small companies.
For this reason David HoosFormer B2B Performance Marketing Manager The starting groupYou should take the time to understand your customer trip before spending a cent of your marketing budget. If you first invest in this research, you will uncover:
- For which channels you can output your budget.
- Which platforms can you use to reach your target group?
- Which messages will find with you.
- What types of content are they entertained and educated.
- Which solution will convert you.
Understanding your customer trip is the key to unlocking the highest ROI efforts. They also report tools such as lifting spots Customer Journey Analytics Can help you draw a clearer picture of these trips and to maximize your chances of optimizing your marketing budget.
2. Rent a marketing agency if necessary.
In my personal experience, it can be very difficult to monitor several marketing projects without help-even if you have a strong internal marketing team.
In addition to the time that is set for a team, training and needed on board, you must pay your internal employees competitive salaries and offer advantages. All of this may be a route if your budget does not allow a large team or if you don’t have the time to monitor you.
Here Marketing agencies Come in. The agencies are not cheap, eliminate some of these challenges and can act as an extended arm of their team.
In fact, I have found that a partnership with a marketing agency can give you access to a team of specialists who can help you achieve your goals faster and at the same time use much less of your marketing budget.
3. Get an internal marketing team.
At the same time, they rely on an agency to run all Your projects are not the smartest use of your marketing budget.
As a former managing director and global director of the brand at Accenture Mark Prince explained“An internal agency is an investment that will lead to cost savings.” He continues: “Our internal agency (Accenture Canvas) is worshiped from all external partners because they have done the above. We also reduced the agency editions by> 50%. “
In other words, there are times when an external marketing agency can be a great partner-but it is also important to invest in building a solid internal marketing team.
V.
Charlie SouthwellMarketing Director at Technically write itIt is clear that creating unique and valuable content is expensive. For this reason, Charlie’s team tries to use everything they can.
Your first step is to create evergreen content that remain valuable for at least two years. After the team has created this high -quality assets, the team exposes them in several content formats and promotes them.
The takeover of this strategy in your own organization can be easier than you can see. If you published some evergreen assets some time ago, you should update and convert them. Apart from the provision of the current information for your target group, content update can help your content move the SERPS.
One of the biggest advantages of converting and updating content in this way is that you can offer the scope to convey your assets several times a year. In Southwell’s words, “this is not a missed opportunity that prevents content from achieving enough kilometers and maximizing the value from its marketing budget.”
5. Relieve the sub -performance channels.
Again and again I have learned that the understanding of which channels increase the greatest income for your company – and which, which are neglected – is of crucial importance to optimize the marketing budget.
As Sidharth KumarMarketing manager at DrtconfidenceExplained companies should constantly evaluate their campaigns to uncover those who may be below average. This will help optimize the expenses in the right direction, and the teams enable the selection of campaigns that do not generate sufficient ROI.
In order to obtain visibility, as your budget for marketing campaigns is (or not), implement the income, you should have a tool such as: B. use (or not). Drift Kings Media’s marketing analysis software. With such a tool you can also create reports based on CRM data to identify important insights that can help you with marketing campaigns.
If your data indicates that some below -average channels are still working nearby, use these channels for experimenting and use the 70-20-10 rule When budgeting for you: According to this rule, 70% of your marketing budget goes according to proven strategies, 20% into new strategies and 10% into experimental strategies that are unproven but could shed light on opportunities for future growth.
6. Evaluate your marketing strategy constantly.
Another important best practice that you should consider when developing your budget is the intelligent framework: an effective marketing strategy will have goals and important results (OKRS), which are specific, measurable, accessible, relevant and time.
Make sure that your marketing goals are intelligent is of crucial importance for the budget optimization, since intelligent goals and metrics help you to pursue and evaluate (and to evaluate), the channels and campaigns work best.
In fact, “helps you to constantly check your marketing strategy and to re -evaluate, know when you have to stay the course or the pivot point,” says Thomas SimonMarketing Manager at Monita case. “It also enables you to effective tactics and do not blindly follow a certain plan without the data or results to support your decision.”
And how often should you check your marketing goals and re -evaluate the performance? Corey HainesCo -founder of SwipewellRecommends marketers to carry out a two -week or monthly review of the budget assignment. Finally, “regular ratings help you to lower unnecessary expenses, to be assigned to powerful campaigns and decide when you should increase or reduce variable costs such as advertisements,” he explains.
7. Do not underestimate the power of automation.
After all, no collection of best practice for marketing would be complete without recognizing the growing meaning of AI and automation. In the latest survey by Drift Kings Media among marketers, every fifth respondent reported to use AI agents for the automation of marketing, and the three most important AI applications they identified were:
- Creation of content (with generative AI for writing copies, creating images, you get ideas, etc.).
- Learning to do things (with a generative AI, to learn an Excel function, to debug SQL code, etc.).
- Data analysis/reporting (using generant AI for analysis or manipulation of marketing data).
Chang chenformer head of go-to-market at Bardeen.aihas recorded significant increases in efficiency through the integration of AI and automation.
Chen says: “AI now helps with SEO, user research and even with the production of highly personalized e -mails,” she said. “This enables our team to concentrate on strategic and creative aspects of their work, to free them from routine tasks and to apply their creativity to business.”
Chen continues: “(AI) also shortens the time to market and accelerate the feedback cycle and to promote growth. An experiment that used to take 1-2 months can now be finished in a few weeks. “
Chen then connects this investment again with the budget planning and announced: “We have included this improved efficiency directly in our marketing budget. This not only optimizes the use of our current resources, but also enables space for innovations. “
She comes to the conclusion: “We have provided part of our budget especially for experimenting so that we can further examine the skills of new technologies and automation options.”
In other words, automation is here to stay. Top performing marketers will use these new technologies, proactively identify opportunities to experiment with them and include them in their marketing budgets.
Manage your marketing budget correctly
Ultimately, I learned that it is not just about thinking strategically. It is also about keeping a strict budget, achieving a new level of growth and selecting the most cost -effective options for your company.
With the knowledge and best practices I described above, which I have described above, you will properly manage your marketing budget -and you are on the way to build a successful, optimized marketing budget strategy for your company.
Note from the publisher: This post was originally published in March 2021 and updated for completeness.