Marketing Budget Planner

There is no correct marketing budget, but there are recognisable wrong ones. This gives you a defensible starting range based on how established you are and how fast you are trying to grow — then tells you roughly how to split it.

Where the percentages come from

The starting bands are drawn from the way established businesses actually budget rather than from any official standard. Mature businesses defending a position typically spend a low single-digit percentage of revenue. Businesses growing deliberately spend more. New businesses, with no reputation and no repeat customers yet, spend the most as a proportion of revenue and the least in absolute dollars — which is uncomfortable but unavoidable.

The output is a range, not a figure, because the correct number depends on your margin, your capacity and how competitive your market is. Two businesses with identical revenue can justify budgets that differ by a factor of three.

Why the website question changes the answer

Because advertising to a website that cannot convert is the most reliable way to waste money in this industry. If your site is slow, unclear, missing a phone number on mobile, or has no page for the service you are advertising, the budget should go into fixing that first. The calculator shifts money accordingly rather than pretending the problem does not exist.

This is the single most common correction we make on accounts we take over. The ads are usually fine. The page they land on is not.

How the split works

• Paid advertising — buys attention immediately and stops the day you switch it off. The right first channel when you need enquiries this month.
• Search visibility (SEO and local listings) — slow to build and slow to decay. The right investment when you can afford to wait a quarter for it to matter.
• Website and conversion work — multiplies everything else. Money here improves the return on every other line.
• Content and creative — what the other three have to point at. Underfunding it makes the rest work harder for less.
• Measurement — small, boring, and the reason you can tell which of the above is working.

What the planner deliberately ignores

Seasonality. Almost no business should spend one twelfth of its annual budget in each month — a trade should be heavy in spring, a venue heavy in the enquiry quarter, a retailer heavy before the peak. Take the annual figure this produces and weight it toward the months that actually convert.

It also ignores your competitors, and they matter. If three well-funded competitors are bidding on the same keywords, your cost per click is set by them, not by your budget. That is a reason to check the market before committing rather than a reason to spend more.

A sanity check worth doing

Take the monthly figure this produces, divide it by your cost per enquiry, and multiply by your conversion rate. If the resulting number of customers is fewer than you need to cover the spend, the budget is too small to be worth starting — and the honest answer is to fix the offer, the margin or the website first.

Figures and bands on this page are guidance drawn from Canadian local markets, not benchmarks or guarantees. Your own numbers should replace them as soon as you have three months of data.