It’s a reasonable question. Unfortunately, there isn’t a percentage I can give you that will magically fit every business.
A company trying to fill tomorrow’s appointments has different needs from one building a reputation over the next two years. And £2,000 spent well can do more than £10,000 spread across six channels because someone said you “need to be everywhere”.
I’d start with a more useful question: what job does this budget need to do?
Pay for a clear decision
Before paying to reach more people, work out who you want to reach, what you want them to do and how you’ll know whether it worked.
That might require research, a marketing audit or simply someone taking a proper look at your customer journey. It’s tempting to skip this part because strategy doesn’t arrive as a shiny new advert.
But if your offer, audience or follow-up process is unclear, production and media spend can get expensive quickly.
Pay for the thing people will see
Good marketing needs something to send people to.
That could be a clear service page, useful photography, a landing page, an offer that makes sense or a booking process people can complete without losing patience.
If you spend your entire budget buying clicks and almost nothing on the experience after the click, you’ve funded half a journey.
You don’t need to rebuild everything at once. Find the asset that matters most to the campaign you’re running and make sure it does its job.
Pay to reach the right people
This is the part many businesses think of as “the marketing budget”: Google Ads, social ads, sponsorships, events and other promotion.
The amount you put here should reflect the opportunity and your ability to handle the demand. If your team can only take on five new clients this month, the plan should account for that. If enquiries regularly go unanswered, fix that before trying to double them.
And don’t spread a small budget across every platform just to say you’re present. Choose the places your customers are most likely to notice you and take action.
Pay to learn
Set some budget and time aside to find out what happened.
Which activity brought suitable enquiries? Which messages attracted the wrong people? How many enquiries became customers? What did those customers spend?
You won’t always get a perfect answer. People may see a post, hear about you from a friend and then search your name. But you should know enough to make your next decision better than your last one.
A simple way to plan your spend
For each proposed activity, write down:
- What result do we want?
- Who is responsible for delivering it?
- What needs to be created or improved first?
- What will it cost to run?
- How will we judge whether to continue?
If you can’t answer those questions, hold off on allocating the money.
Your marketing budget should pay for a connected route from being noticed to winning business. The split will be different for every company. The important part is knowing what each pound is there to achieve.
