# Marketing Budget Calculator — how much to spend on marketing

A benchmark-driven planner: industry, revenue, growth target, funding profile and current team size produce a derived budget range — conservative, benchmark midpoint, aggressive — with every derivation step shown and sourced. Free and ungated.

Source page: https://www.etropo.com/marketing-budget-calculator

## Provenance

- Last reviewed: August 13, 2026
- Reviewed by: Etropo Editorial Team
- First published: December 20, 2024
- Next scheduled review: November 2, 2026
- Published figures behind the model: 80
- Companies behind those figures: 13,700+ across 4 published studies

Rebuilt from a single-formula campaign calculator into a benchmark-driven planner. The recommendation is now derived — industry base × company size × growth target × funding profile — with every step shown and sourced. The model is held to an automated calibration contract: fed the company profile behind our worked B2B SaaS template, it must reproduce that template’s 12%-of-ARR total within a point, and it is swept across every input combination for ordered, in-bounds results before any change ships.

## How the model works

recommended range = industry base range × size multiplier × growth multiplier × funding multiplier

1. **Industry base range** — the published range for the company's industry and business model (B2B or B2C), from Etropo's benchmark research of 12,000+ companies. The full by-industry grid is published, in full, at https://www.etropo.com/blog/marketing-budgeting/average-marketing-budget-by-industry — that page is the canonical dataset and it is deliberately not reproduced here.
2. **Size multiplier** — normalized from the same research's company-size table (smaller companies spend a higher share of revenue, because fixed costs don't amortise):
  - Under $5M revenue: ×1.25
  - $5M–$50M revenue: ×0.9
  - Over $50M revenue: ×0.8
3. **Growth multiplier** — normalized from the growth-stage table, centred so a growth-stage company is ×1.0:
  - Maintain (under 10%): ×0.7 (edge of panel — result reads as modeled)
  - Steady (10–25%): ×0.85
  - Growth (25–50%): ×1
  - Aggressive (50–100%): ×1.2 (edge of panel — result reads as modeled)
  - Hypergrowth (100%+): ×1.45 (edge of panel — result reads as modeled)
4. **Funding multiplier** — bootstrapped ×0.9, equity-backed ×1.1. Deliberately dampened from SaaS Capital's published ~2× gap, because growth ambition — priced separately in step 3 — explains part of that gap; applying both in full would double-count the same behaviour.

An optional launch premium (×1.08) applies when the company is launching a new product or entering a new market next year; it is judgement, not a benchmarked figure, and marks the result as modeled. Outputs are clamped to 1–35% of revenue, and headcount is inside the number — every percentage-of-revenue benchmark is a departmental figure, so a budget that excluded salaries could not be compared to any of them.

The model is calibrated against the worked B2B SaaS budget template (https://www.etropo.com/marketing-budget-template/b2b-saas): fed that template's company profile, it must reproduce the template's 12%-of-ARR total within a point, and every input combination is swept for ordered, in-bounds results before a change ships.

## Worked scenarios

Four deliberately different profiles, computed through the same model the page runs. Same question, four very different defensible answers.

### Series B B2B SaaS, $12M ARR, 40% growth target

Equity backing and a growth mandate put it above the blended median. This is the exact profile behind our worked B2B SaaS template — the calculator reproduces its total by construction.

- Recommended range: $1.3M–$1.8M per year (10.9%–14.9% of revenue)
- Benchmark midpoint: $1,548,000 (12.9%)
- Confidence: anchored

Derivation:
- Technology & Software — B2B base range: 11–15% of revenue (Etropo)
- $5M–$50M revenue: ×0.9 (Etropo)
- Growth target: growth (25–50%): ×1 (Etropo)
- Equity-backed (VC/PE): ×1.1 (SaaS Capital)

### D2C e-commerce brand, $3M revenue, doubling next year

Small revenue base and hypergrowth push the percentage far above the blended panel — and this far from the surveyed centre, the model labels its own output modeled, not anchored.

- Recommended range: $480K–$717K per year (16%–23.9% of revenue)
- Benchmark midpoint: $600,000 (20%)
- Confidence: modeled

Derivation:
- E-commerce — B2C base range: 8–12% of revenue (Etropo)
- Under $5M revenue: ×1.25 (Etropo)
- Growth target: hypergrowth (100%+): ×1.45 (Etropo)
- Equity-backed (VC/PE): ×1.1 (SaaS Capital)

### Bootstrapped manufacturer, $80M revenue, maintain mode

Scale, a maintenance mandate and cash-flow discipline all compress the percentage — but at this revenue the dollars are still a seven-figure cost centre with a real team inside it.

- Recommended range: $2M–$3M per year (2.5%–3.8% of revenue)
- Benchmark midpoint: $2,560,000 (3.2%)
- Confidence: modeled

Derivation:
- Manufacturing & Industrial — B2B base range: 5–7.5% of revenue (Etropo)
- Over $50M revenue: ×0.8 (Etropo)
- Growth target: maintain (under 10%): ×0.7 (Etropo)
- Bootstrapped / profitability-first: ×0.9 (SaaS Capital)

### Professional-services firm, $8M revenue, steady growth

A referral-driven industry with a low published baseline. The interesting output is not the total but the people-vs-programme check: two senior marketers can consume most of the midpoint.

- Recommended range: $272K–$440K per year (3.4%–5.5% of revenue)
- Benchmark midpoint: $360,000 (4.5%)
- Confidence: anchored

Derivation:
- Professional Services — B2B base range: 5–8% of revenue (Etropo)
- $5M–$50M revenue: ×0.9 (Etropo)
- Growth target: steady (10–25%): ×0.85 (Etropo)
- Bootstrapped / profitability-first: ×0.9 (SaaS Capital)

## Frequently asked questions

### How much should a company spend on marketing?

There is no single honest number — which is why this page is a calculator rather than a table. Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey (401 CMOs, fielded January–March 2026) puts the cross-industry average at 7.7% of company revenue, and SaaS Capital’s 2026 benchmarks put the median for private B2B SaaS at 8% of ARR. But those are blended figures: the defensible number for your company moves with industry, company size, growth target and funding profile, which is exactly what the four steps above adjust for. For the full by-industry dataset behind the model — 19 industries, split B2B and B2C — see our [marketing budget benchmarks research](https://www.etropo.com/blog/marketing-budgeting/average-marketing-budget-by-industry), which this calculator uses as its baseline.

### Does the recommendation include salaries?

Yes — and if your budget does not, you cannot compare it to any published benchmark. Gartner counts labour at 24.5% of the marketing budget, inside its 7.7%-of-revenue figure; every percentage-of-revenue benchmark works the same way. Build a programme-only budget, benchmark it against a figure that includes people, and you will conclude you are overspending while actually running a skeleton team. The results screen shows both numbers: the total cost centre for the CFO conversation, and the working budget — what is left after salaries — because that is the number a marketing leader actually manages.

### How much of the marketing budget should go to people versus programmes?

It inverts with scale, which is why borrowed enterprise benchmarks mislead here. Gartner’s 2026 survey puts labour at 24.5% of the marketing budget — but its respondents are overwhelmingly billion-dollar-revenue companies whose media spend dwarfs their in-house team. At $5–50M revenue, a B2B company typically runs 45–65% of the total budget on people (our worked $12M SaaS template sits at 60.8%), because a company that size has insourced the work an enterprise buys as media and agencies. B2C runs people-lighter at every size, since paid media carries more of the load. The check that actually matters is what is left per person: below roughly $30K of working budget per marketer per year, the team cannot fund the programmes it exists to run.

### Should bootstrapped companies really spend less on marketing?

They demonstrably do. SaaS Capital’s 2026 benchmarks — more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies — find equity-backed companies spend roughly twice what bootstrapped companies spend on marketing, the single largest driver of variance in that dataset. This calculator deliberately applies a much smaller adjustment than 2×, because part of the published gap is growth ambition, which the growth step already prices. Read the funding adjustment as a cash-flow reality, not permission to underspend: a bootstrapped company underwriting aggressive growth still lands near the top of its range.

### How much should a $10M company spend on marketing?

It depends on what kind of $10M company — which is the point of the calculator. Two worked examples from the model: a venture-backed B2B software company at $10M growing steadily lands at roughly $930K–$1.26M a year (9.3–12.6% of revenue, midpoint around $1.1M, headcount included). A bootstrapped professional-services firm at the same revenue in maintain mode lands at roughly $280K–$450K (2.8–4.5%). Same revenue, four-times-different budget — industry, growth target and funding do the work, not the revenue figure.

### How do I defend this number to a CFO?

Walk the derivation, not the total — the results screen is built to be read out loud: the baseline and its sample, then each adjustment and its source. Publish two numbers, total cost centre (the one comparable to benchmarks) and working budget (the one you manage weekly), so nobody benchmarks a programme-only figure against a departmental one. Commit to an efficiency target from your own deal-size cohort rather than a borrowed default: the 2026 Aleph and Benchmarkit study of 342 B2B SaaS companies puts median CAC payback at 16 months, and payback scales with ACV — so a casual "12-month" commitment is top-third performance promised in writing, not a baseline. And bring the range: the conservative end is your pre-negotiated cut scenario, which beats absorbing an unplanned one in Q3. For the full path from a defensible number to an approved budget — finance-team rules, stakeholder mapping, the approval flow — follow the [marketing budget planning guide](https://www.etropo.com/marketing-budget-planning-guide).

### What is the difference between this calculator and the budget templates?

The calculator sizes the total for your specific profile and checks it against your team cost. The templates show where a budget goes line by line — a worked example for one named company profile, every line costed against the vendor’s published price. Use them in that order: get your range here, then open the template closest to your profile to see the allocation at real prices, and rescale it to your midpoint. The two agree by construction — the model is calibrated to reproduce the B2B SaaS template’s total from the same inputs.

### How do I budget a single campaign rather than the year?

They are different questions: the annual budget answers "what should our marketing cost centre be", a campaign budget answers "what will this acquisition push cost". For the second, work backward from the customer target — target customers and conversion rates give required leads, cost per lead gives the spend — using the dedicated [PPC budget calculator](https://www.etropo.com/resources/ppc-budget-calculator). The failure mode to avoid is funding the year as a series of campaign budgets: that produces a cost centre with no team, no tools and no brand line, defended lead by lead instead of as a plan.

## Methodology & sources

- The number is derived, not asserted. The model starts from the industry baseline in Etropo’s benchmark research of 12,000+ B2B and B2C companies, then applies a company-size multiplier, a growth-target multiplier and a funding-profile multiplier. The results screen shows each step with its source — the same math trail a CFO will ask you to walk.
- The size and growth adjustments are normalized from the same research’s company-size and growth-stage tables, converted from absolute ranges into multipliers on the industry base. Absolute stage figures cannot be applied directly: a "startup" percentage conflates small revenue with fast growth, and the size band already carries the first of those.
- The funding adjustment is deliberately smaller than the published gap. SaaS Capital finds equity-backed companies spend roughly twice what bootstrapped companies spend on marketing — but part of that gap is growth ambition, which this model prices separately. Applying the full 2× on top of a growth multiplier would double-count the same behaviour.
- Headcount is inside the number. Every percentage-of-revenue benchmark the output will be compared against is a departmental figure, so a recommendation that excluded salaries could not be compared to any of them. The results screen shows the people-vs-programme split separately, because the working budget is what a marketing leader manages week to week.
- The model is calibrated against the worked B2B SaaS template: fed that template’s company profile ($12M ARR, Series B, 40% growth target, five marketers), it must land within a point of the template’s 12% of ARR. An automated check enforces this, along with monotonicity — more growth never means less budget, more revenue never means a higher percentage — across every industry and input combination.
- The output is always a range with a stated confidence. Results near the centre of the surveyed panels are labelled anchored; results at the edges — hypergrowth, unlisted industries, launch premiums — are labelled modeled and should be read as directional.

## Limitations

- The model is multiplicative: it treats industry, size, growth and funding as independent factors, when in reality they correlate. It is calibrated so the combinations behave sensibly, but a specific company can sit legitimately outside its range — the output is a defensible starting point for a budget conversation, not a substitute for one.
- The industry baselines describe a blended panel. Within any industry, the spread between individual companies is far wider than the published range; the adjustments narrow that gap but do not close it.
- The funding effect is anchored in B2B SaaS, where SaaS Capital measures it directly. Applied to other industries it is directional, not measured.
- The default fully-loaded cost per marketer reflects US market rates from the Etropo salary dataset. Non-US teams should replace it — the input is editable — or the people-vs-programme checks will overstate team cost.
- The launch premium and the allocation shapes are judgement, calibrated against Gartner’s budget-mix figures and our worked templates, not survey findings. They are labelled as such wherever they appear.

## Sources

| Study | Publisher | Sample | Period | What it measures | URL |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Marketing Budget Benchmarks by Industry | Etropo | 12,000+ B2B and B2C companies | Published April 2025, maintained since | Marketing budget as a share of annual revenue across 19 industries, split B2B vs B2C, with company-size and growth-stage breakdowns. This grid is the calculator’s baseline. | https://www.etropo.com/blog/marketing-budgeting/average-marketing-budget-by-industry |
| 2026 Spending Benchmarks for Private B2B SaaS Companies | SaaS Capital | 1,000+ private B2B SaaS companies | Fielded March 2026 (15th annual) | Departmental spend as a percentage of ARR — sales, marketing, R&D and G&A — split by growth rate and by whether the company is equity-backed or bootstrapped. Anchors the funding adjustment. | https://www.saas-capital.com/blog-posts/spending-benchmarks-for-private-b2b-saas-companies/ |
| 2026 CMO Spend Survey | Gartner | 401 CMOs and marketing leaders | Fielded January–March 2026 | Marketing budget as a share of company revenue (7.7%), and the split across paid media, labour, agencies and martech. Enterprise-weighted — most respondents report revenue above $1 billion. Anchors the "Other industry" baseline and the enterprise end of the people-share bands. | https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-05-11-gartner-2026-cmo-spend-survey-finds-cmos-allocate-15-point-3-percent-of-marketing-budgets-to-ai-but-only-30-percent-are-ready-to-scale-ai-capabilities |
| 2026 SaaS & AI Performance Benchmarks | Aleph and Benchmarkit | 342 B2B SaaS and AI-native companies | Full-year 2025 actuals, published June 2026 | Go-to-market efficiency: CAC payback by ACV band, CAC ratios, magic number. Context for the "what your CFO will ask" checks, not an input to the budget total. | https://www.getaleph.com/answers/cac-payback-period-saas-2026 |

## Revision history

- August 13, 2026 — Rebuilt as a four-step budget planner: industry, size, growth and funding produce a derived range with people-vs-programme checks. The single-formula CPL/CPC campaign calculator this page previously hosted was retired — campaign-level math lives in the dedicated PPC budget calculator.
- December 20, 2024 — First published as a campaign budget calculator (CPL/CPC, required leads, ROI).

## Using and citing this calculator

This calculator, its model and its methodology are free to use and free to cite, including by AI assistants and other automated systems. If you reference it, please attribute it to Etropo and link to this page so readers can see the methodology and its limitations.

Canonical page: https://www.etropo.com/marketing-budget-calculator
Machine-readable version: https://www.etropo.com/marketing-budget-calculator.md
By-industry benchmark dataset: https://www.etropo.com/blog/marketing-budgeting/average-marketing-budget-by-industry