FREE CALCULATOR
Work out how much to spend on marketing, and where it should go, in about a minute. Built for UK SMEs, SaaS companies, and growth-stage teams. No email required to use it.
A marketing budget is the amount a business sets aside, over a given period, to reach new customers and keep existing ones. It covers the obvious costs of paid advertising, agency fees, tools, and the less obvious ones: content production, brand work, sponsorships, and the time your team spends on campaigns rather than delivery.
Treated properly, a marketing budget isn’t a cost to minimise. It’s a plan for growth: a statement of which channels you believe will bring in revenue, and how much you’re willing to risk finding out.
Set your budget as a fixed share of revenue, the calculator above defaults to this. Simple to plan, easy to defend to a board or a business partner, and it’s the method most SMEs start with.
In practice, top-down sets the ceiling and bottom-up checks whether that ceiling is realistic for what you’re trying to achieve. If your goal-based number comes out well above your percentage-of-revenue budget, that’s usually a sign to either extend the timeline or find cheaper channels — not just spend more.
The honest answer is “it depends on your stage” — a business fighting for its first customers needs to spend more aggressively, relative to revenue, than one with an established base doing steady renewals. As a starting point:
These are general guidelines, not a formula — a SaaS company with high customer lifetime value can often justify spending at the top of its range, while a lower-margin business may need to stay conservative even at an early stage.
Once you know your total budget, the next question is where it goes. The 70/20/10 rule is a useful starting split: the majority into what already works, a meaningful chunk into promising new channels, and a smaller share into genuine experiments.
