How much should your business spend on marketing each month? Enter your revenue, industry and growth goal to get a recommended range and a suggested split.
The calculator uses a simple percent-of-revenue framework. It is the same starting point most small business advisors use, because it ties marketing spend to what the business can actually support. A business holding its position typically spends around 3–5% of revenue on marketing. One aiming for steady growth spends 6–9%. One opening a new location, launching a new service or trying to grow fast usually needs 10–15% for a period of time.
We nudge the range up a point for health and wellness businesses, where competition for local attention is heavy, and down a point for professional services, where each client is usually worth a lot and a smaller budget goes further.
The range is a ceiling and a floor, not a target you have to hit on day one. A smart way to use it:
Content and social media covers shooting and editing video and photos, captions, posting and replying to comments. This is what makes people recognize and trust you before they ever call. See how our team handles it on our social media management page.
Website and SEO covers your site, ongoing updates, local SEO, Google Business Profile work and AI search optimization so tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews can find and recommend you. Your website is where almost every other channel sends people, so it has to convert.
Paid ads is spend plus management on Google, Meta, TikTok or YouTube. Ads are the fastest lever you can pull, but they only work if the landing page and follow-up are solid. Our paid ads page explains how we approach it.
Tools covers your CRM, call tracking, scheduling, review requests and automation. It is the smallest slice but often the one that saves the most leads, because fast follow-up wins jobs.
Percent of revenue is a guide, not a law. A brand new business with little revenue may need to spend more than the formula says just to get noticed. A business with a full calendar and a waitlist may need less. Seasonal businesses should shift spend toward the months right before their busy season, not spread it evenly.
Also count your own time. If you are spending 10 hours a week doing marketing yourself, that time has a real cost, even if it never shows up on a bank statement.
The best way to sanity-check the number is to pair it with the lead value calculator. If you know a lead is worth a certain amount and your budget brings in enough leads to beat that cost, the budget is working.
A common guideline is 3–5% of revenue to maintain your position, 6–9% to grow steadily, and 10–15% for aggressive growth like a new location or launch. Treat it as a starting range and adjust based on what your tracking shows.
Yes. Your website, SEO, Google Business Profile, CRM, call tracking and scheduling tools all exist to win and keep customers, so they belong in the marketing budget. Leaving them out makes the budget look bigger than what is actually reaching customers.
Most businesses need both. Ads bring fast, measurable traffic but stop the day you stop paying. Content and SEO build trust and keep working over time. The split in this calculator balances the two based on how buyers in your industry typically choose a business.
Track where every call, form and booking came from, then compare your cost per lead and cost per customer to what a customer is worth. If each channel brings in customers for less than they are worth, it is working. If you cannot tell, fix tracking before spending more.
Book a free strategy call. We will look at your number and tell you honestly where it would do the most good.