Is your marketing budget a choice or a default? -

Do you think marketing budgets are just a financial decision? Are you investing or are you spending?

Have you ever wondered why two founders with similar businesses, revenues and ambitions can invest so differently in marketing? It is an interesting question to ponder, because the answer is rarely found in a spreadsheet.

Does the answer live in the quieter conversations we have with ourselves about what marketing is actually for, and whether the work being done needs promoting, and what it feels like to spend money on being seen?

Marketing budgets are just as much a psychological decision as a financial one. The amount we choose to invest often reflects our relationship with visibility, confidence and risk just as much as it reflects our revenue. Bring the psychology into the open alongside the logic and the numbers, and the budget stops being a reluctant guess and starts becoming a genuine growth tool.

The story behind the marketing budget

Before looking at a single spreadsheet, it is worth pausing to notice what comes up emotionally. When you think about spending money on marketing, what feeling arises? Relief? Resistance? A quiet guilt, as if you are about to do something indulgent?

Some founders might have a strong dislike to marketing spend. Particularly those in businesses, where a familiar belief tends to run something like this: “Good work speaks for itself. If you are excellent at what you do, you do not need to shout about it.” This sounds humble, and it is, but is it worth asking whether it sometimes masks discomfort with how to be visible? Or does it reveal an identity built so entirely around expertise that self promotion feels foreign?

There is no judgement here. These thoughts and feelings are understandable human responses to the vulnerability of putting yourself and your business out there; and so the data is worth pondering too.

The services and consulting sector has one of the lowest marketing spending percentages of any industry, sitting at around 6% of revenue. For people whose entire livelihood depends on a pipeline of clients, that is a remarkably small investment in being found. Sopro

Compare that with their SaaS counterparts. The median private B2B SaaS company spends around 8% of annual recurring revenue on marketing, and companies experiencing above-median growth allocate an average of 14% or more. The difference is not just sector convention. It reflects a fundamentally different relationship with marketing as fuel rather than a luxury.
SaaS Capital Rampiq

A marketing budget is also about capacity, benchmarks and return on investment

Marketing budget is about capacity, benchmarks and return
Some businesses might believe they have a “low marketing budget” when in reality they have a fragmented approach. A mix of occasional spend, sporadic activity and limited internal capacity.

DIY marketing in the early stages of a business makes sense. Founders write their own posts, manage their own website, run their own campaigns. It can feel efficient from a cost perspective, but it draws heavily on time. It also keeps marketing close to the business, with messaging shaped by real client conversations and direct insight.

But over time, DIY marketing becomes more complex and consistency becomes harder to maintain. The cost is no longer just financial, it is time, focus and opportunity, and increasingly requires strategic marketing thinking and expertise.

A well informed and structured marketing investment considers:

• Time invested, including founder and team capacity
• Internal resource and capability to deliver consistently
• External expertise to bring strategic direction and specialist skills
• Financial spend across channels and campaigns
• Clear budget allocation aligned to priorities and stage of growth
• Benchmarks to sense check investment against industry norms
• Focus on proven tactics that deliver consistent results
• Investment in testing and refining new approaches
• Measurement of return on investment to understand what is working.

Without this alignment, marketing can feel harder than it should, often leading to activity that feels busy but delivers little measurable return.

Avoidance or restraint? It is worth knowing which

There is an important distinction between conscious, strategic restraint and avoidance dressed up as wisdom. Both can look identical from the outside.

When a founder says, “We rely on referrals,” that can be a perfectly healthy and intentional strategy. But it is worth sitting with that sentence a little longer. Is it a choice, or is it a default? Is the pipeline genuinely strong, or is there a quiet concern being managed by not looking too closely?

This is not about pushing anyone towards spending more. It is an invitation to make the decision consciously rather than by habit.

In the UK, 58% of SMEs spend less than £250 per month on marketing, just £3,000 a year. Yet companies that are underinvesting against industry benchmarks consistently struggle to build the predictable lead generation engine they need. The gap between intention and outcome is worth exploring. Whitehat-seo Whitehat SEO

The psychology of “leftover” budgets

Another pattern that comes up repeatedly in conversations with founders and marketing leaders is ad hoc marketing spend and activity.

Is the marketing budget often treated as what is left over? Without a clear strategy it might feel like once salaries are covered, operations are funded and other priorities are met, then whatever remains becomes the marketing budget.

If marketing is expected to drive growth, but is not always resourced as a core driver of revenue, then it is no surprise that this can lead to frustration.

In many businesses, there is a sense that a portion of marketing spend is wasted, often estimated at 20 to 30 percent. This increases pressure to prove short term results and can lead to reactive decision making rather than considered strategy.

Perhaps the more helpful mindset is to see marketing as part of the revenue engine to invest in, rather than a cost centre.

A marketing budget framework to think about

One of the most grounding approaches is to move away from the question “How much should I spend?” and towards “What am I trying to achieve, and what will it realistically take?”

Think of it like planning for a marathon. You would not guess randomly at how many miles to put in each week. You would work backwards from the race, build a plan, and leave room to adapt. Marketing works the same way.

As a starting point, for professional services firms maintaining steady growth, a budget of 6 to 11% of revenue is a reasonable benchmark. For more aggressive growth, that rises to between 11% and 20%, concentrated on new client acquisition and brand-building.

For SaaS founders, early-stage companies often dedicate 20 to 30% of revenue to marketing, while mature firms in efficiency mode typically spend 5 to 7%. Galaxie Software Data-Mania, LLC

These marketing investment figures are not prescriptions. They are reference points that are useful for calibrating whether your current spend reflects your actual ambitions.

Thinking like an investor, not a spender

Imagine treating your marketing budget in the same way you would approach investing. Whether it is property or the stock market, the mindset is rarely about immediate return. It is about long-term growth, compounding and consistency.

Marketing works in a similar way. Short term activity can generate quick wins, but sustainable growth tends to come from consistent, well directed investment over time.

There is a helpful framework often used by experienced marketing leaders:

• 70% invested in proven, reliable channels
• 20% in emerging opportunities
• 10% in experimentation

This balance creates both stability and progress. It allows you to build on what works while still adapting to change. Without this structure, budgets can become either overly cautious or spread too thinly across too many activities to deliver meaningful results.

Choosing where to invest your energy

Once you have a number you can commit to, marketing channel decisions become easier to make. Not because the options narrow, but because you are choosing from intention rather than reaction.

For professional services firms, the highest trust activities tend to be thought leadership: writing, speaking, webinars, a considered LinkedIn presence, and well-placed SEO. These are not expensive in absolute terms, but they reward consistency. They work because they build credibility over time, and credibility is the actual currency clients are exchanging when they hire you.

For SaaS firms, the trends favour paid media, which now accounts for 30.6% of total marketing budgets and is the only growing segment, with digital channels overall representing 61% of spend. The unit economics of SaaS, particularly customer lifetime value relative to churn, make earlier investment in acquisition worth it. Whitehat SEO.

In either case, a good B2B marketing return on investment (ROI) target sits between 3:1 and 5:1, meaning every £1 spent should return between £3 and £5. That is not a vanity metric; that is a sustainable business. SimpleTiger.

The risk of cutting marketing budget

In more challenging economic periods, marketing budgets are often one of the first areas to be reduced. On the surface, this can feel sensible. In practice, it carries risk.

There is a well-known analogy used by experienced marketers. Cutting marketing spend is like turning off the engines of an aeroplane at cruising altitude. Of course, in reality that would be unthinkable, but the comparison is useful. The impact is not immediately visible, but momentum is gradually lost. Pipeline slows, visibility reduces and over time the business begins to lose altitude. Restarting that momentum later is far more difficult and often more expensive than maintaining it in the first place.

Consistent investment, even at a modest level, tends to outperform cycles of heavy spend followed by complete withdrawal.

A different way to think about marketing budget

A marketing budget is more than just a line on a spreadsheet. It can be thought of as a declaration of intent. It says: this business has something worth sharing, and we are willing to invest in being found.

The founders who build thriving firms are rarely those who waited until everything felt solid enough to deserve marketing. More often, they understood that the marketing is part of how it becomes solid.

Your budget does not need to be large. It just needs to be honest, chosen with care and aligned with SMART business goals which are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound.

If you’d like to take a more intentional approach to your marketing, get in touch to explore how your strategy, investment and activity can align to attract the right clients and support steady, sustainable growth.

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Further reading and sources