How much should you actually spend on marketing?

Search this and you will be told to spend 7 to 8 percent of revenue. The number is everywhere, usually attributed to the Small Business Administration.

We went looking for it on the SBA's own site and could not find it. It circulates between marketing blogs, each citing the last. That does not make it wrong, but it does mean nobody quoting it has checked.

What the better-sourced numbers say

The CMO Survey, now in its 35th edition and fielded in January 2026, reported marketing spend at a mean of 8.96% of revenue and a median of 5%.

Gartner reported 7.8% of company revenue for the same period.

Both are real surveys. Both are also dominated by large companies. Gartner's sample skews heavily towards businesses above a billion dollars in revenue, which is not a useful comparison for a shop with four vans.

So the honest answer to what percentage should I spend is that the available benchmarks are not describing businesses like yours.

The question that actually has an answer

Percentages work backwards. They start from what you have rather than what a customer is worth.

Three numbers get you somewhere better:

• What a customer is worth. Not the first invoice. The first invoice plus the repeat work plus what they refer. For a lot of local businesses the first job is close to break-even and everything after it is the business.
• How many you can actually take. Capacity is the ceiling. There is no sense generating thirty leads a month for a diary that holds twelve.
• What you are willing to pay for one. If a customer is worth two thousand over two years and you would happily pay two hundred to acquire one, that is your number. Multiply by how many you want.

A worked example

A contractor wants four more jobs a month. Average first job is twelve hundred, and roughly a third come back within two years.

He decides he would pay two hundred and fifty to win one. Four jobs means a thousand a month, and that is the budget. Not a percentage of anything.

If the campaign delivers four jobs at two fifty, it works and he can scale it. If it delivers four at six hundred, it does not, and no amount of optimising the creative changes that it does not.

The two mistakes either side

Spending nothing and calling it a strategy is the common one. In one provider's survey of over seven thousand new businesses, more than a quarter said their planned monthly marketing spend was zero. Some of those are fine. Most are relying on referrals they cannot control.

The other mistake is a big launch with no sustaining budget. Three months of heavy spend, then silence, is worse than a third of that spend run for a year. Visibility does not accrue in bursts.

Pick a number you can hold for twelve months. Consistency beats size at this scale, reliably.