Marketing Budget Examples to Emulate (With Free Templates)

What is a marketing budget?

A marketing budget is an outline of your specific, planned spending to market your products or services for a certain period.

Planning your marketing budget is not a walk in the park. However, it is crucial for any marketing leader to ensure their team is optimizing its marketing campaigns and monitoring the effectiveness of its strategies.

With marketing budget examples as your guide, you can plan your budget and measure your return on investment (ROI).

In this blog post, we’ll go through marketing budget examples and templates to help you start planning yours. Here are the topics we’ll cover:

• How much should businesses spend on marketing?
• 7 marketing costs that marketers must consider
• Marketing budget plan breakdown
• 5 marketing budget examples
• Free marketing budget templates
• How to create a marketing budget

To learn more, you can download our guide for managing your marketing budget or use our free marketing budget calculator.

How much should businesses spend on marketing?

According to Statista, chief marketing officers surveyed in North America, and Northern and Western Europe reported that 7.7% of their revenues were allotted to marketing in 2024.

When it comes to marketing budgets, though, there’s no single magical number for all businesses. Here’s a general guide for typical marketing budgets this year:

Note that each company’s marketing budget varies based on:

• Industry
• Business size
• Location
• Growth rate
• Sales cycle

Here’s our reference on adjusting your budget based on your industry. In addition, you must consider the following when planning your marketing budget:

• Business goals (sustain or grow)
• Projected growth
• Expenses for the year
• Competition
• Economic climate

7 marketing costs that marketers must consider

Before creating your marketing budget plan, list the costs you’ll incur based on your marketing strategies. Here are the common costs that marketers must consider:

1. Branding
2. Website design, development, and maintenance
3. Content marketing
4. Public relations
5. Events and activations
6. Digital advertising spend
7. New employee, and freelancer or agency costs

Let’s go through each one:

1. Branding

Branding involves creating a unique identity for your business and offerings through your marketing messages, design, and customer journey.

Consider the following branding-related costs to your marketing budget:

• Market research
• Brand book development
• Visual style guide development
• Editorial style guide development
• Branding tools

2. Website design, development, and maintenance

A well-maintained website is essential for your digital marketing campaigns. Here are the costs you need to include in your marketing budget:

• Website redesign (if you’re due for a redesign)
• Website development
• Website maintenance
• Content migration
• Domain name renewal
• Hosting
• Content management system
• Website tools and plugins
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Web design agency or freelancer fees

3. Content marketing

Content marketing is three times more effective at generating leads than outbound marketing. To effectively implement this strategy, you must factor in these costs in your marketing budget:

• Content planning software (such as keyword research tools)
• Writing software (such as grammar checker)
• Video production costs
• Content management and analytics tools
• Agency or freelancer fees

4. Public relations

Your public relations (PR) efforts manage how information about your brand is disseminated to the public by the media. Ensure you allocate enough resources to your PR campaigns by adding these costs to your marketing budget:

• Press release service
• PR tools (such as reputation monitoring software)
• Press release writing
• Events
• Media relations
• Newsletter tool
• Agency retainer fees

5. Events and activations

Events and activations are offline efforts to engage with your prospects.

If you’re launching new products or increasing your brand awareness, events and activations are excellent ways to provide an interactive experience. When done right, they can help convert prospects.

Here are some costs related to holding events:

• Program
• Venue
• Equipment
• Special on-site promotions
• Miscellaneous materials
• Agency and freelancer fees

6. Digital advertising spend

Based on your marketing and business goals, allocate how much money you’ll spend on the following:

• Search ads
• Display ads
• Affiliate marketing
• Social media ads
• Paid lead generation campaigns
• Agency or freelancer fees
• Campaign analytics tools

7. New employee, and freelancer or agency costs

You may hire a freelancer or an agency when you’re trying a marketing strategy for the first time. Factor these costs into your marketing budget.

If you hire more full-time employees within the year, consider the costs associated with hiring them:

• New employees’ equipment and software
• Benefits
• Onboarding costs
• Salary

Marketing budget plan breakdown

Now that you’ve identified the costs you must include in your marketing budget, you must allocate a percentage of your resources to your marketing budget categories.

Pro tip

Align your marketing budget breakdown with your goals and strategy for the period.

If your priority for a certain period is to increase brand awareness, you may need to allocate a bigger budget to your branding efforts. Here is a sample breakdown of how your marketing budget might look per channel:

You need to adjust your budget based on factors such as:

• Customer personas
• Sales cycle
• New product or service launch
• Industry
• Economic conditions

High-ticket items such as automobiles and real estate properties may require businesses to have test drives or open-house events when they launch new offerings. As a result, they may need to increase their PR budget and paid advertising dollars.

Your marketing budget breakdown may also vary per year or season. You may shift your budget depending on the company’s goals each quarter, too.

In a recent survey we conducted among 500+ business leaders, the top digital marketing goals they identified were to increase revenue (68%) and sales (65%). While these are the main goals for most businesses, many companies also set goals to increase brand awareness, engagement, or website traffic.

So, depending on what goals your company wants to achieve, your budget may shift as needed to meet those goals.

5 marketing budget examples from companies

If you’re looking for some marketing budget inspo from other companies, here’s a summary of marketing budget examples from five different companies:

Let’s go through each marketing budget example:

1. Abercrombie & Fitch

This publicly traded retailer announced that it used 5% of its total sales for its marketing efforts in the first quarter of 2024. Abercrombie & Fitch generated net sales of $1.02 billion during the period.

2. Airbnb

Airbnb invested $953 million in advertising efforts in 2023, according to a Statista report. The marketing budget is 9.61% of its $9.92 billion revenue for that year.

3. Nike

Nike invested about $4.06 billion in its global advertising and promotion activities in 2023, which was 8% of their budget. The athletic apparel brand generated $51 billion in revenue in 2023.

4. Ford

In 2023, Ford used $2.5 billion in marketing and advertising activities globally. Its investment is estimated to be 1.42% of its total revenue.

The American automobile manufacturer’s revenue for 2023 was nearly $176 billion.

5. New York Times

The New York Times invested $151 million in its marketing efforts in 2022. It’s an estimated 6.54% of its $2.31 billion revenue that year.

Marketing budget templates

Manage your precious dollars and track your marketing investment with the help of free marketing budget templates. We created these downloadable templates to make it easy for you to plan your budget and manage your resources:

1. Marketing budget plan template

This template helps you break down your marketing budget according to channel or strategy. Input the total allocated marketing budget. Then, based on your marketing goals, allot a percentage to each strategy or channel.

2. Marketing budget tracker template

Use this template to allocate your marketing dollars and track your spending monthly. This spreadsheet has one sheet per marketing category.

Input your allocated budget per cost item. Then, input the actual amount spent to monitor your spending.

How to prepare a marketing budget

Now that you’ve looked at some marketing budget examples, it’s time to get started on creating your marketing budget plan:

Let’s discuss each one:

1. Determine your goals and strategies

Before you bust out your marketing budget templates, the first step you must take is to identify what you want to accomplish.

Establish your goals and strategies. That way, you can align your budget with your objectives and allot more dollars to strategies to help you achieve your most important goals.

Your focus areas can be any of the following:

• Increase brand awareness
• Increase your social media following
• Increase your number of reviews
• Grow your number of newsletter subscribers
• Grow your number of leads
• Increase sales

Make sure you set SMART goals. Make them specific and time-bound so you can measure your ROI and success. For example, to increase sales, make the goal specific by indicating, “Increase sales by 10% year-over-year by December 2024.”

Once you’ve set your SMART goals, determine your marketing strategies. Align your strategies with your goals, ensuring they’ll help you achieve them.

2. Identify and evaluate your current marketing investment

How much is your current investment in each marketing strategy? Take note of your current spending on each strategy, and then analyze how effective each strategy is by measuring its ROI.

Your analysis will determine whether you should pause a specific strategy or continue using it as you plan your budget.

3. Understand your sales cycle

How long is your sales cycle? What are the touchpoints and strategies you can invest in to convert your prospects? These are the questions you must answer as you evaluate your sales cycle. Understanding how long your sales cycle is and the sales process that your prospects go through informs you where you must allocate your marketing dollars.

Identify the touchpoints where you can nurture them into considering your brand, and invest in strategies to ease them into conversion.

For example, sales cycles for business-to-business (B2B) companies, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers for dental clinics, are typically longer than that of business-to-consumer (B2C) firms. To increase brand awareness and make your SaaS business visible in every stage of the buyer’s journey, you can invest a portion of your budget in content marketing.

With content marketing, you can create informative pieces for your target audience at different stages of their journey. For example, you can create top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) content, such as a blog post about the benefits of using software for dental clinics.

You can also nurture your prospects who are in the middle of their journey and making a shortlist of SaaS providers. How? Publish case studies that show how your offerings have helped organizations retain customers and grow their practice.

4. Identify and research costs

The next step is to identify the costs associated with your marketing strategies.

First, outline any costs associated with your strategies. For example, let’s say you own a furniture shop that will launch a new collection within the year.

To increase awareness about your new offerings, you’re employing the following strategies:

• Content marketing
• Digital PR
• Digital advertising

The costs associated with these efforts can be the following:

• Content marketing for furniture shops
  1. Content strategy
  2. Video strategy
  3. Video production
  4. Freelance writer
  5. Photographer fees
  6. Freelance artist’s fees
  7. Agency fees
• Digital PR for furniture shops
  1. PR content production
  2. Influencer compensation
  3. Other influencer partnership fees
  4. Media relations press kit expenses
  5. Freelancer fees
  6. Agency fees
• Digital advertising
  1. Search ad budget
  2. Display ad budget
  3. Affiliate marketing budget
  4. Campaign analytics tools upgrade
  5. Freelancer or agency fees

Then, research the price. You can refer to your existing spending and also research other providers. You might, for example, review your past content marketing expenses and explore alternative providers.

5. Use marketing budget tools to distribute your resources

Now that you’ve identified your goals, strategies, and costs, you can use marketing budget templates and free calculators to allocate your monetary resources.

Use a marketing budget plan template to break down your dollars according to channels and strategies. Then, you can use a marketing budget plan tracking template to monitor your spending and review your ROI.

6. Plan how you’ll measure your ROI

Think of your marketing budget as an investment in growing your business. That said, you must plan how you’ll measure your marketing ROI.

For example, let’s say you invested in SEO services. You’d like to see an increase in site visitors and online inquiries. If your investment in these strategies provided such results, you may consider continuing your SEO efforts in the next year.

Use an effective marketing budget plan to grow your business

These marketing budget examples are handy when planning your budget and allocating resources to the right strategies. If you’re looking to hire a marketing agency to help you grow your business, consider partnering with WebFX.

We’re a full-service digital marketing agency with 28 years of experience. Our team will take the time to understand your business, industry, and goals to craft effective strategies within your budget.

Contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our digital marketing services!