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topic: marketing-spend-benchmarks
Topic:
marketing-spend-benchmarks
16 entries tagged
marketing-spend-benchmarks
.
Rules (1)
rule
Rule — Output tiers, NOT a hard percentage-of-revenue, for digital-minus-ads spend
Reference entries (15)
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Research brief: SMB widget spend benchmarks — feasibility of a "digital-minus-ads" % of revenue (June 2026)
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Gartner — budget-conscious vs big-spender divide; low-budget CMOs pour into search/performance
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Schonfeld 2025 — advertising-to-sales ratio average 3.07% across 2,500 public companies
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Conductor 2025 State of SEO — 91% of digital experts say SEO positively impacted website performance
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Caveats — vendor quarantine and structural gaps in spend-benchmark evidence
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Maturity variation — startups 12-20%+; mature firms with referral engines 3-5%
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Professional services / B2B — 6-9% total but higher relative weight on website/content
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Home/trades services — 8-15% of revenue total marketing, heavy paid skew
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UpFlip — 66.3% of small business owners spend under $1,000/yr on marketing (the survivorship correction)
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Why no SMB benchmark exists — "website/SEO/content/tools" cuts across native reporting categories
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Vertical variation in marketing % — ~3% (energy) to ~18-25% (CPG)
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BDC Canada — B2B 2-5%, B2C 5-10% of revenue; avg small business ~$30K/yr (2019)
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US SBA guideline — 7-8% of gross revenue for businesses under $5M
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Duke/Deloitte/AMA CMO Survey Spring 2025 — marketing = 9.4% of revenue (broader size mix)
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Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey — marketing = 7.7% of revenue (flat YoY, down from ~11% pre-pandemic)