Build a Smarter Marketing Budget in Minutes

Dozens of data points feed into the recommended monthly budget, including our decades of experience serving thousands of businesses across hundreds of industries.

In addition, we use our AI-powered forecasting technology to calculate the level of spend and allocation that businesses would need (based on their industry, business model, size, marketing reach, and marketing maturity) to reach their growth goal.

Besides internal data, our marketing budget calculator also considers research from trusted third-party firms, like Gartner and Deloitte.

Together, these data points help us provide businesses with accurate estimates for an effective (and personalized) monthly spend for digital marketing.

If you don’t know the answer to some of the calculator’s questions, like the average sales cycle length or the company’s growth goal, take a guess or run the calculator multiple times to build a range of results that can help inform your marketing budget planning.

The budget allocations use a mixed model to consider in-house vs. outsourced marketing management. A more conservative budget, for example, will likely rely on an in-house program while a more aggressive one will have the means to support an agency partnership.

The marketing channel budget allocations include:

• Strategy development
• Strategy management
• Professional services

They do not include (in the case of digital advertising) ad spend.

Allocating marketing spend based on business revenue serves as a starting point for calculating your marketing budget. However, how much a business spends on marketing should consider other factors, like:

• Industry, which influences competition across organic and paid channels
• Marketing maturity, which shapes the strategy of different channels (and the amount of runway businesses have to grow)
• Sales cycle length, which impacts how soon businesses see the results from marketing efforts
• Growth goals, which significantly influence how much an organization allocates to its marketing efforts.

The above factors are all included in our marketing budget calculator in order to provide organizations with a more informed estimate on how much to spend and where.

Use this marketing budget calculator as a research device for:

• Estimating overall spend based on your industry, business model, size, and other factors unique to you
• Understanding budget allocations
• Determining different spend tiers, like conservative, moderate, and aggressive
• Forecasting different scenarios, like spending heavier in one strategy or more aggressively overall

The conservative, moderate, and aggressive budget models represent different approaches to managing your marketing spend while achieving your growth goals:

First, share your feedback with us. Then, select the most comparable industry. For example, if operating in the home services industry with a focus on remodeling, consider selecting “Construction / Trades” as an alternative option.

Businesses should recalculate marketing spend when:

• Providers implement price increases, whether for third-party tools or agency services
• Organizations shift to a more aggressive growth goal (which will require additional spend)
• Companies switch to targeting a new market or audience
• Businesses see a downturn in company performance, which could indicate a need to change the overall budget or budget allocations

By default, organizations tend to recalculate their marketing budgets annually. The above, however, outlines events that can trigger a recalculation.