How Much Should You Actually Be Spending on Marketing?

Part of our series on growing your brand without a giant budget.

It is one of the first questions any business asks, and one of the hardest to get a straight answer to. Most answers are a percentage plucked from thin air and repeated because everyone else repeats it. Here is what the benchmark surveys actually say, how most businesses arrive at their number today, and a better way to think about the whole question.

How most businesses actually set a budget

Before any benchmark, it is worth being honest about how most marketing budgets get built in practice, because none of the three most common methods are as rigorous as they sound.

• Percentage of revenue, or last year plus a bit. The most common approach by far: apply a fixed percentage to expected revenue, or simply take what was spent last year and adjust it up or down. As the marketing commentator Mark Ritson put it in Marketing Week, the percentage applied is usually arbitrary: why 5% and not 4%, or 8%, or 2.5%? Simple to explain to a board. Harder to defend on its merits.
• Working back from a cost-per-acquisition target. Some businesses set a sales or lead target, work out the cost per acquisition needed to hit it, then size the budget from there. It looks more rigorous, but it tends to overvalue channels that are easy to measure with last-click data and undervalue the brand-building media that puts people in the market to buy in the first place. As we covered in our piece on measuring results on a small budget, last-click attribution systematically undercounts the channels that create demand rather than simply capture it.
• Zero-based budgeting. Rather than starting from last year’s number, zero-based budgeting starts every line at zero and requires every pound to be justified fresh. It is the private equity playbook, and it is genuinely disciplined. But as Ritson wrote of Kraft Heinz, a company that went through exactly this process under 3G Capital’s ownership, it has a habit of stripping out the long-term brand investment that does not show a return inside the current financial year, which tends to be precisely the investment that protects a brand’s pricing power and demand over the years that follow.

None of these approaches are wrong exactly. They are just usually applied without a sense check against what comparable businesses actually spend, or what the spend is meant to achieve.

What the benchmark surveys actually say

The two most cited figures come from Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, which puts the average marketing budget at 7.8% of company revenue, and the Deloitte and Duke Fuqua CMO Survey, which puts it at 9.0%. Worth flagging clearly: both surveys are dominated by large organisations, the vast majority of Gartner’s respondents report annual revenue over a billion dollars. Treat these as a reference ceiling for what big, established companies spend to defend their position, not a target for a smaller business trying to grow.

The more useful number in the Deloitte data is the sector breakdown, since spend as a share of revenue varies enormously by business type: B2B product companies average 6.4%, B2B service companies 9.0%, and B2C product companies 15.5%. A café and a software company are not the same exercise, and the benchmark should reflect that.

A smarter way to think about it: share of voice versus share of market

Rather than a flat percentage, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s research on excess share of voice offers a more useful comparison: how much of the advertising conversation in your category you own, relative to how much of the market you already own. When a brand’s share of voice is higher than its share of market, that excess tends to predict growth: for every 10 percentage points of excess share of voice, a brand gains roughly 0.5% of market share a year on average.

This is a genuinely useful sense check for a smaller advertiser. It does not tell you the absolute number to spend, but it tells you whether your spend is proportionate to your ambition. If you want to grow share and your visible presence in the market is smaller than your current market share, the budget is working against the goal, whatever percentage of revenue it represents.

What is actually happening in the UK right now

Context matters too. The IPA Bellwether Report, published quarterly by S&P Global on behalf of the IPA, tracks how UK companies are actually moving their budgets. Marketing spend was revised up in both Q1 2026, to its highest level in almost two years, and Q2 2026, with a net balance of +7.3% and +6.9% of companies increasing budgets respectively. That is useful context for whether now looks like a moment other businesses are investing or pulling back, even if it says nothing about what your own number should be.

Putting it together: a practical starting framework

A sensible budget for a business setting one from scratch draws on all of the above, rather than picking just one method.

• Start with the Deloitte sector figure closest to your business type as a rough anchor, not a target
• Adjust it for your stage: defending an established position needs less than building awareness from nothing
• Protect a genuine split between long-term brand building and short-term activation, rather than letting a zero-based process quietly strip the brand half out. Work out how the 60/40 rule we set out in The Long and the Short of It needs to look for you in order to achieve short and long term growth.
• Ensure you make room for media cost inflation against the previous year’s numbers. Your media agency is always a great port of call for this.
• Sense check the result against your excess share of voice: if you want to grow and your voice is smaller than your market share, the number is too low.
• Revisit it quarterly against what is actually happening in the market, not just once a year at planning time.

Your budget-setting checklist

• A stated method for how this year’s number was reached, not just last year’s number rolled forward
• A sector-appropriate benchmark checked, with big-company survey data treated as a ceiling, not a target
• A deliberate split protected between brand building and activation, agreed before the year starts
• Your share of voice sense-checked against your share of market
• A quarterly review point booked in, not a once-a-year, set-and-forget number

Not sure what your number should be?

We help businesses set a media budget that actually reflects their sector, their stage and their ambition, not a percentage picked out of the air. Drop us an email at sales@hurstmediaagency.co.uk and we will talk it through with you.