5 excellent marketing budget examples to copy

Established companies spend about 7% to 9% of revenue on marketing. Scaling B2B software companies spend far more: combined sales and marketing regularly runs at 25% to 30% of ending annual recurring revenue (ARR), or 35% to 45% of revenue in benchmarks segmented by growth rate or funding type.

The 2026 Gartner CMO Spend Survey of 401 chief marketing officers across North America, the UK, and Europe put marketing at 7.8% of company revenue. European B2B marketing decision-makers reported investing 9% in Forrester's 2025 survey.

The percentage is the easy part. For a finance operations manager, the harder job is proving the number afterwards, because marketing spend arrives as ad-platform card top-ups, agency invoices, event deposits paid months ahead, and software subscriptions that renew without anyone re-approving them.

When those transactions land in separate systems, the marketing budget becomes a spreadsheet you reconcile at month-end instead of a control you run during the month.

This guide gives you:

• Benchmarks by growth stage

• A sample category split

• A five-step method for building the budget

• Five examples drawn from published company accounts

One finding from those accounts should shape how you read every benchmark here: none of the five companies reports marketing on its own. Each reports sales and marketing as a single line.

Key takeaways

• Set the marketing budget from growth objectives first, then check it against a revenue percentage.

• Pick the benchmark that matches your growth stage, because scaling companies spend several times the share of revenue that stable companies do.

• Separate marketing spend from sales spend in your own ledger, since the largest public companies report the two as one line.

• Allocate by category with a named owner for each, then track committed spend against the allocation every month.

• Capture spend against its category at the point of payment, so the budget works as a live control rather than an annual document.

How much should a company spend on marketing?

A company should set its marketing budget by growth stage:

• Roughly 8% of ARR on marketing alone for a scaling B2B software company, with sales spend on top

• Around 10% of revenue as the median across B2B technology companies

• Approximately 7% to 9% of revenue for an established business

Growth rate moves the figure more than industry does. In 2025 B2B benchmarks, the median marketing budget across 323 B2B technology companies was 10% of revenue, but it ranged from 14% below $5M ARR to 4% above $250M ARR.

Before picking a number, check what it measures. Surveys report four different things:

1. Marketing as a share of ARR

2. Combined sales and marketing as a share of ARR

3. Fully loaded sales and marketing as a share of revenue

4. Marketing as a share of total revenue at large companies

A 44% figure and a 7.8% figure can both be correct for the same company, depending on which line you count. Mixing them will make your budget look either reckless or timid for no reason.

Marketing budget benchmarks by growth stage

The sections below develop each stage with the sample sizes and dates behind these figures.

High growth: Startup

A high-growth startup should plan for marketing alone at about 8% of ARR.

For combined sales and marketing, High Alpha reports 28% to 30% of ending ARR for companies below $20M ARR. Separate revenue-based benchmarks reach 44% for companies growing 31% to 50% and 45% for venture-backed companies.

2026 spending benchmarks, drawn from more than 1,000 private B2B SaaS companies in March 2026, put median marketing spend at 8% of ARR and selling costs at 15%. Equity-backed companies in that sample spent 100% more on marketing than bootstrapped companies.

Growth rate pushes the revenue-based combined figure up sharply. 2026 SaaS benchmarks, covering 342 companies' 2025 results, show a 35% median for sales and marketing overall and 44% for companies growing 31% to 50%.

Funding structure matters too. The 2025 SaaS benchmarks, covering 563 companies, put venture-backed companies at a 45% median of GAAP revenue, compared with 33% for private-equity-backed companies.

For a finance operations manager, the practical consequence is timing. At this stage, most marketing money leaves through ad platforms and tools billed monthly on cards, so a single annual figure hides overspend for weeks.

Benchmarkit's 2025 report notes that scaling companies set budgets from next year's booking goal rather than historical trends. Expressing the budget as a monthly run rate tied to pipeline targets, and reforecasting it when bookings move, follows the same logic.

Moderate growth

A company growing at a moderate pace, typically past $20M ARR and below 30% annual growth, should budget around the 10% revenue median for marketing alone.

For combined sales and marketing, separate benchmarks report:

• 29% of ending ARR for the $20M to $50M cohort

• 35% of revenue as the median across all companies

The High Alpha benchmarks, with more than 800 respondents, 17% of whom were in Europe, put the median at 29% of ending ARR for the $20M to $50M cohort. The interquartile range was 24% to 34%.

That narrow range is the useful signal. In cohorts below $5M ARR, the middle half of companies spread from 20% to 50%. By $20M to $50M ARR, the spread had roughly halved.

Finance teams can therefore treat spend as more predictable and move from a run rate to a fixed annual envelope with quarterly reforecasts. A variance of more than a few points against plan should prompt a conversation rather than a footnote.

Stable growth

An established company with stable growth should expect marketing to sit between 7% and 9% of revenue, a figure that has barely moved for three years.

Gartner's survey recorded:

• 7.7% in 2024

• 7.7% in 2025

• 7.8% in 2026

The survey covered a population dominated by companies with more than $1bn in revenue.

Forrester's global B2B benchmark of 7% to 8% held across every revenue level. Its European respondents reported 9%, with 37% expecting an increase.

At this stage, the argument inside the business moves from the total to the split. Most marketing leaders feel short of money whatever the total. In Gartner's 2025 survey, 59% of CMOs said they lacked the budget to execute their strategy, as reported by a Marketing Week analysis.

Marketing and finance leaders therefore need to decide which categories should give ground to others, using the numbers to support that conversation.

Sample marketing budget breakdown

A workable sample marketing budget for a mid-sized B2B company allocates:

• 30% to 40% to content

• 20% to 30% to paid advertising

• 10% to tools

• 10% to staff costs charged to the marketing line

• 5% to 10% to creative and PR

• 5% to 10% to events

• 2% to 6% to analytics

The midpoints add up to approximately 99%, and the ranges show where one category can give ground to another.

Treat this as a starting allocation rather than a benchmark. No 2025 or 2026 primary survey reports a single mean split across these seven categories, so each line below is anchored to the closest published evidence and states the assumption behind the number.

The large-company surveys do show direction. Paid media rose from 27.9% of marketing budgets in 2024 to 31.4% in 2026, funded by cuts to agencies. Martech fell from 26.6% in 2021 to nearly 22% in 2025.

Sample allocation

Content marketing: 30% to 40%

Content takes the largest share of this sample marketing budget because it is the channel B2B marketers most often name as their best return. Production, SEO, and distribution of owned assets all sit within this category.

The 2026 State of Marketing, which surveyed 1,505 marketers in September 2025, found that website, blog, and SEO was the top ROI channel for B2B respondents at 30.2%, ahead of email at 23.6%.

The 2026 B2B research found that 32% of 1,015 B2B marketers named owned media as a top-three investment priority for 2026.

The share is generous by design. If you count only brand-awareness and content programmes, 10Fold's 2026 survey of 400 senior B2B technology marketing executives in the US, France, Germany, and the UK put the two together at 16% of projected spend.

The difference is definitional. This sample loads production and SEO work into content, where many surveys would count it under labour or agencies.

If your content is produced in-house by salaried staff, move the share towards 30% and record the people in the staff line.

Paid ads: 20% to 30%

Paid advertising should take 20% to 30% of the budget, and UK evidence supports holding it there rather than allowing it to drift higher.

The Profit Ability 2 study, covering 141 UK brands and £1.8bn of media spend from 2021 to 2023, found:

• Generic paid search returned £2.29 of short-term profit per £1

• Generic paid search returned £3.52 when two-year effects were included

• The all-channel average was £1.87 in the short term and £4.11 over two years

• Paid social returned £1.62 in the short term and £3.20 over two years

Search pays back fastest, but the longer-term return favours a broader mix.

Marketing teams can also overspend fastest in paid media. Ad platforms bill card top-ups and auto-renewing spend caps, so a campaign can run past its allocation before an invoice exists.

One way to hold the line within its share is to pay each ad account from its own virtual card with a monthly limit that matches the allocation.

Spendesk's smart company cards include subscription virtual cards that can carry an individual limit and receipt reminder per platform. This allows you to control the paid-ads line at the card rather than reconstructing it at month-end.

Creative design and branding: 5% to 10%

Creative design and brand asset production takes 5% to 10% of this sample. The line covers production work rather than brand media, which belongs in the paid-ads line.

The distinction matters because the well-known brand-versus-activation ratio describes media, not design fees.

Les Binet and Peter Field's research for the IPA found an optimum split of roughly 60:40 between brand building and activation, later revised to 62:38. However, the IPA itself cautions that there is no best-practice ratio that applies uniformly.

For B2B, the ratio inverts. Binet and Field's 2019 B2B research, reported in The Drum, found activation at 54% of spend and brand building at 46%.

Design and branding spend at a scaling B2B company is therefore mostly production:

• Sales decks

• Landing pages

• Campaign creative

• Event materials

Much of this is bought from agencies, which took 20.7% of large-company marketing budgets in Gartner's 2025 survey, according to a Chief Marketer analysis.

Tag agency invoices to this line when they arrive instead of leaving them in a general agency bucket.

Public relations and events: 5% to 10%

PR and events should take 5% to 10% of a mid-sized marketing budget, which matches where most B2B marketers already sit.

In the Content Marketing Institute's 2026 research:

• 40% of B2B marketers allocated 1% to 10% of their budget to events

• 26% allocated 11% to 30%

• 78% allocated something to experiential marketing

Events are also the one category UK marketers have continued revising upwards.

The Q2 2026 Bellwether reported a net balance of +11.0% of UK firms raising events budgets. Events has led or nearly led every quarter since Q1 2025.

Elsewhere, the picture is flatter. A 2025 events survey found that 66% of 250+ B2B event decision-makers were holding budgets flat or cutting them for a second year.

Decide which pattern your company follows before sponsorship contracts arrive.

For finance, events are the category with the longest gap between commitment and payment. Deposits go out months before the event and the balance lands afterwards, so record the budget as committed on the day the contract is signed rather than when the first invoice appears.

Analytics: 2% to 6%

Analytics takes 2% to 6% of this sample marketing budget. This is deliberately small because most measurement tooling is already counted under tools and software, and the published evidence for a larger dedicated share is dated.

The most recent survey to isolate analytics spend was the September 2022 CMO Survey, a US-only sample. It put marketing analytics at 8.87% of marketing budgets and projected 14.45% within three years.

No later edition has repeated the question, so treat that figure as a ceiling from a different market rather than a target.

Spending anything here buys measurement quality. Nielsen's 2025 Annual Marketing Report found that only 32% of 1,400 global marketers measured media spend across digital and traditional channels together, down from 38% in 2024.

If the marketing team cannot show which channel produced pipeline, finance cannot defend the paid-ads line at the next review. Push the share towards 6% if the company runs marketing mix modelling or an attribution platform outside the core stack.

Tools and software: 10%

Tools and software should take about 10% of a mid-sized marketing budget, roughly half the share large companies report, because a 50-to-500-person company's stack is usually a handful of platforms rather than hundreds.

Gartner's nearly 22% martech figure comes with a utilisation problem. Teams reported using only 49% of their stack's capability in 2025, up from 33% in 2023.

A Marketing Week analysis of that number in February 2026 said that a 50% wastage level was still far from ideal. It cited McKinsey research in which 47% of martech decision-makers named stack complexity and data integration as key blockers.

Stack size grows faster than most teams expect. The State of Martech 2025 report put the average small business, defined as having under 500 employees, at 152 apps across all functions.

The finance-side mechanism behind that number is the subscription paid on a card that nobody reviews at renewal.

Listing every marketing subscription by supplier, owner, and renewal date before setting this line is the fastest way to find duplicates. It is the same review you would run on any category of marketing expenses.

Staff members: 10%

Staff costs charged to the marketing budget take 10% in this sample. The number only works if you decide upfront which people it includes.

Large companies put labour at 21.9% of the marketing budget in Gartner's 2025 survey, more than double this line, because they count the whole marketing function's payroll inside it.

This sample assumes that:

• Salaried marketing headcount sits in the payroll budget

• The marketing line carries freelancers and contractors

• Training and recruitment for the marketing function sit in the marketing budget

That is a choice, and it needs to be written into the budget so the marketing lead and finance compare like with like.

If headcount does sit inside the marketing budget, roughly double this line and reduce content and paid ads in proportion. The total share of revenue from the benchmark section does not change. Only the split does.

How to create a marketing budget

Build the marketing budget from objectives and the cost of achieving them. Then check the total against the growth-stage percentage rather than doing it the other way around.

This is the objective-and-task method, one of six approaches the Chartered Institute of Marketing teaches alongside:

• Affordable budgeting

• Competitive parity

• Marginal analysis

• Percentage of sales

• Zero-based budgeting

The approaches are covered in the CIM's Marketing Impact module.

Kotler and Armstrong's Principles of Marketing calls the objective-and-task method the most logical, but also the most difficult, because it forces you to cost each activity before funding it.

1. Get your priorities straight

Start by writing down what marketing must deliver next year in numbers the business already tracks. Pipeline created and new ARR are two options. Customers acquired can serve as an alternative target.

Those targets should set the budget size.

Forrester's 2027 planning guidance is direct on this point:

Instead of distributing budget increases evenly across marketing subfunctions, high-performing CMOs make strategic bets, meaning targeted investments, that align with business priorities.

The same guidance recommends setting aside dedicated budget for experimentation.

The alternative, fixing the budget as a percentage of sales, is faster but weaker. Kotler's criticism is that it does not provide any basis for choosing a specific percentage.

It also cuts the budget when revenue falls, which is often the moment investment matters most.

Use the percentage as a check on the objective-built total, and hold the experimentation reserve as its own line so it cannot be absorbed into paid media.

2. Know your current spend

Pull twelve months of marketing actuals by supplier before setting a single target. Rolling forward last year's lines without checking what they bought is how obsolete spend survives.

The ACCA budgeting guidance describes incremental budgeting as quick and easy to do and easily understood, but warns that it can create inefficiency, inertia, and budgetary slack.

Zero-based budgeting removes that slack at a cost. ACCA calls it massively time-consuming and costly.

Gartner's middle path uses a rotating schedule in which each department rebuilds its budget from zero every two to three years.

For marketing, a practical version is to zero-base the tools and agency lines, where subscriptions and retainers accumulate, and roll forward the rest.

Finance teams usually need to collect the data from card statements and supplier invoices. Employee expense claims may hold additional transactions.

Tag every transaction to:

• One of the seven categories above

• A named owner

• Committed spend or invoiced spend

You may also find business expenses paid on personal or shared cards that never reached the marketing ledger.

3. Use a marketing budget template

A marketing budget template should hold:

• The annual allocation for each category

• Monthly phasing

• A named owner

• Committed spend

• Invoiced spend

• Paid spend

Without these columns, an event sponsorship signed in March and invoiced in September looks like headroom for six months. An overrun appears in the committed column months before it shows in the paid column.

A template also fixes the definitions highlighted in the benchmark section. Decide whether staff costs, sales development, and shared CRM seats sit in marketing or elsewhere, and write the rule at the top of the sheet.

If you would rather adapt a working structure than build one, Spendesk's marketing budget template provides a starting point for the category lines and phasing described here.

4. Prepare your measurement and ROI analysis

Agree the return metrics before business leaders approve the budget. Choose metrics that connect marketing spend to revenue rather than clicks.

High-growth companies in Benchmarkit's 2025 benchmarks were more likely to measure:

• Marketing cost per dollar of pipeline

• Marketing cost per dollar of new ARR

Benchmarkit's 2026 data put median customer-acquisition-cost payback at 16 months, down from 18 months the year before. The top quartile was at six months or fewer.

Cost per unit of pipeline and CAC payback are two measures a finance team can audit from the ledger.

Be careful with platform-reported returns. Google's own economic impact methodology states:

We assume that for every $1 businesses spend on Google Ads, they generate an average of $2 in profit.

Its widely quoted 8x figure is a modelled estimate combining paid and organic search that rests on assumptions from a 2009 study.

Analytic Partners found that last-click attribution can overestimate the impact of paid search by 190%.

If the marketing team's ROI slide comes from the ad platforms themselves, ask for a second measure.

Marketing mix modelling, which Harvard Business Review described in 2023 as experiencing a resurgence as real-time attribution weakens, is one option. A pipeline-sourced analysis from the CRM is a cheaper alternative.

5. Distribute the budget

Distribute the approved total to category owners with monthly phasing, and give each owner the same view of committed and remaining budget that finance has.

Recommended phasing:

• Phase paid ads and content evenly.

• Front-load event deposits into the months contracts are signed.

• Keep the experimentation reserve central.

• Review monthly against phasing using committed spend.

• Move money between categories within the ranges from the sample breakdown.

• Reforecast the total each quarter against bookings.

Approvals made without budget context are how an events line drifts past its share before anyone notices.

Spendesk is an all-in-one spend management platform that consolidates company cards, expense management, accounts payable, procurement, and budgeting.

In its budgeting module, the budget owner sees the remaining balance and the financial impact of a request at the moment they approve it. The reallocation decision therefore happens before the money moves rather than at month-end.

Five marketing budget examples from well-known companies

Five companies with published accounts show how widely sales and marketing spend varies with growth stage:

• Salesforce reports 34.5% of revenue.

• Tableau reported 59.0% in the FY2017 historical comparison used here.

• Alphabet reported 7.1%.

• Microsoft reported 8.05%.

• Mindbody reported 39.3% in its last full public year.

All five figures are combined sales and marketing, so they are as much a guide to reporting structure as to spend levels.

Tableau also published FY2018 results before its acquisition, as the detailed example explains.

The five companies at a glance

Each example below gives the trend behind the headline figure and the one practice worth copying.

1. Salesforce

Salesforce spent $14,345M on sales and marketing in the year to 31 January 2026. That represented 34.5% of $41,525M revenue.

The share fell each year:

• FY2024: 36.9%

• FY2025: 35.0%

• FY2026: 34.5%

Its FY2026 annual report records these figures.

The definition filed alongside the numbers is the part worth copying. Sales and marketing expenses consist primarily of employee-related costs and commissions for sales and marketing staff, payments to partners, marketing programmes, and allocated overhead.

Salesforce also defines marketing programmes as including:

• Advertising

• Events

• Corporate communications

• Brand building

• Product marketing activities

That sentence does what step three asked of your template: it fixes what counts as programme spend.

For a scaling company, the useful move is to keep the same list but report it as its own line, so marketing programmes can be benchmarked against the 8% to 10% figures rather than the 35% combined figure.

2. Tableau

Tableau's sales and marketing spend rose from 52.5% of revenue in FY2014 to 59.0% in FY2017, while revenue more than doubled from $412.6M to $877.1M.

Its FY2017 annual report records the comparison.

FY2018 shows the trap in year-on-year comparison. On the old ASC 605 revenue basis, the ratio reached 63.1%. On the ASC 606 basis adopted in January 2018, the same year reads 51.4% in the FY2018 earnings release.

Nothing changed in what the marketing team spent. The revenue denominator changed.

Salesforce completed its acquisition of Tableau on 1 August 2019 for $15.7bn net of cash, as its completion announcement records. No standalone Tableau figures have been published since.

For a finance team benchmarking its own ratio, the lesson is to hold the revenue basis constant when comparing years and note any change in recognition policy against the marketing budget line.

If your company adopted IFRS 15, check whether your own ratio moved for the same reason.

3. Google

Alphabet spent $28,693M on sales and marketing in 2025, representing 7.1% of revenue, down from 7.9% in 2024.

It separately disclosed advertising and promotional expenses of approximately $9.9bn, about 2.5% of revenue and up from $8.7bn in each of 2023 and 2024, in its 2025 annual report.

The two numbers are layers of the same budget:

• The full sales and marketing line carries people, commissions, and overhead.

• The advertising note captures what Alphabet paid to promote itself externally.

That two-layer disclosure is the split a scaling company should replicate internally: total function cost on one line, external programme spend on another.

It also shows that a mature company puts roughly a third of its sales and marketing line into paid promotion, which is a useful reference when a marketing lead argues that the paid-ads share should be higher.

4. Microsoft

Microsoft's sales and marketing expense was $26,710M in the year to 30 June 2026. This represented 8.05% of $331,839M revenue.

The ratio fell from:

• FY2024: 9.98%

• FY2025: 9.11%

• FY2026: 8.05%

The figures are based on Microsoft's FY2026 income statement.

Advertising expense disclosed in the notes to the filing was $2.7bn, or 0.81% of revenue, up from $2.1bn.

Microsoft's 2025 annual report defines the sales and marketing line as including:

• Payroll

• Employee benefits

• Stock-based compensation

• Advertising

• Promotions

• Trade shows

• Seminars

The pattern to copy is the falling ratio. Revenue grew approximately 18% in FY2026 while sales and marketing rose about 4%, so the function delivered operating leverage without a cut.

That is the answer for a CFO who asks why the marketing budget cannot grow in step with revenue. At scale, both the benchmarks and these accounts show the share falling.

5. Mindbody

Mindbody, the fitness and wellness software company, spent $71.8M on sales and marketing in 2017, representing 39.3% of $182.6M revenue.

The share had declined every year from 45.7% in 2015 as revenue grew from $101.4M.

Its FY2017 annual report records these figures.

Its last reported quarter, Q3 2018, showed $26.0M of sales and marketing on $63.8M of revenue in the earnings release.

Vista Equity Partners then took the company private in a deal valued at approximately $1.9bn, as Mindbody announced, completed on 15 February 2019.

No marketing figures have been published since.

Mindbody is the closest of the five to a scaling European software company's position: revenue growth above 30% a year funded by a sales and marketing line near 40% of revenue, with the ratio easing a few points each year as the base grew.

If your company sits in the moderate-growth band from the benchmark section, that trajectory is a realistic model for how the marketing budget's share of revenue should move over four or five years.

Taken together, the gap between Alphabet and Microsoft at 7% to 8% and Tableau and Mindbody at 40% to 60% is the growth-stage gap from the benchmark section, made visible in audited accounts.

Salesforce sits between them, still spending a third of revenue on the combined function at $41bn of revenue. That tells you how long the acquisition-heavy phase can last in enterprise software.

Get started with Spendesk's marketing budget template

Whatever percentage you take from the benchmark section will hold up for about a month.

After that, the marketing budget is only as good as the record of what has been committed against it. That record is built at the point of payment, not at the point of planning.

The five companies above show how much of the variation stage explains. Your own accounts will only show it if each marketing transaction carries a category and an owner when the money leaves.

Spendesk's budgeting module gives budget owners and finance the same view of committed and remaining spend, while Spendesk's well-planned budget template gives you the category structure to start from.

Get a free tour of the platform to see how card limits, approval workflows, and budgets work together for a marketing team, or book a free demo.

Frequently asked questions about marketing budgets

A useful marketing budget defines what counts, sets a review rhythm, and keeps company stage and business model visible when you compare benchmarks.

What is a marketing budget?

A marketing budget is the amount a company sets aside for a period, usually a year, to fund marketing activity.

It is broken into categories such as:

• Content

• Paid media

• Events

• Tools

• Agency fees

It is also phased by month.

A marketing budget differs from the sales and marketing expense line in published accounts, which also carries sales salaries and commissions.

How often should you review a marketing budget?

Review actuals against phasing monthly and review the total quarterly.

The monthly review catches committed spend drifting past its allocation. The quarterly reforecast adjusts the total to bookings or revenue.

Rebuilding the whole budget from zero is a separate exercise. Gartner's guidance is to do it on rotation every two to three years rather than annually.

How much should a B2B company spend on marketing compared with a B2C company?

At the large-company end, B2B companies spend a higher share of revenue than B2C companies.

Gartner's 2024 CMO survey put marketing spend at:

• 8.4% of revenue for B2B companies

• 7.9% for mixed business models

• 5.7% for B2C companies

B2B budgets also lean towards activation over brand, at 54% to 46% in Binet and Field's B2B research.

How much of a marketing budget should go to AI tools?

Large companies put 15.3% of marketing budgets into AI initiatives in Gartner's 2026 survey, although only 30% reported mature AI readiness. A large share therefore does not guarantee the capability to use it effectively.

Among B2B technology companies in Benchmarkit's 2025 benchmarks, 23% planned to allocate 16% to 20% of the marketing budget to AI, up from 11% a year earlier.

For a scaling company, a smaller share tied to named uses such as content production and SEO is easier to defend than a headline AI line.