Many B2B marketers think about their budget like a straightjacket, with 47% blaming limited resources for poor performance.1 But what if your budget was actually a competitive asset?
This article presents a proven framework to develop a B2B marketing budget that not only matches your strategic aims but also actively helps you gain an advantage and increase your ROI.
Expect to learn:
- Why there is no one “correct” B2B marketing budget
- A proven seven-step process to create a robust marketing budget
- The four most common budgeting errors B2B businesses make
B2B Marketing Budgets in 2025: An Overview
What is the Average B2B Marketing Budget?
A brief Google search will reveal that there is almost no consensus around B2B marketing budgets. Many sources claim that companies should allocate 2-5% of their revenue to marketing. Yet the 2023 CMO Survey suggested that B2B product companies are now investing approximately 7.9% of their revenue in marketing – while a recent Forrester study found that more than half of organizations are increasing their budget in 2025.
This fact should be taken to be liberating: rather than conforming to an industry benchmark, B2B marketers are free to determine how much they require based on their specific business objectives and competitive landscape – which turns your budget into a potential strategic advantage.
Factors That Influence Your B2B Marketing Budget
For most B2B marketers, a smart strategic budget will reflect the specific industry, company size and competitive landscape you are dealing with. This raises a few key questions:
1. How Quickly Can You Produce Results?
All marketing should produce a positive return on investment (ROI), but different companies vary wildly in their ability to turn a profit. A software company with a large total addressable market (TAM) might be able to generate 1,000s of sales with a big marketing push, whereas companies that have small TAMs and complicated products that take a long time to implement are likely to invest significantly before seeing results.
This is important because your company has limited resources – and must be able to cover other operational costs. Most companies cannot invest 30% of their revenue into marketing if it will only produce a return in 12 months’ time.
Expert Tip: Invest in more robust reporting capabilities to gain greater insight into the impact your marketing spend has. Over time, this will allow you to make more informed decisions and be realistic about the time-to-ROI you are dealing with.
2. How Well Established is Your Marketing Function?
Not all companies are starting from the same place – and your budget must reflect the level of “groundwork” required. Companies with relatively immature marketing may require a larger investment to put the right teams, systems and foundations in place, such as migrating to a better CRM or undertaking more robust buyer research.
Equally, a B2B company with a large email list and an established brand can develop a marketing budget based more directly on their business goals. They can be more responsive to short-term market trends and competitors’ behavior and may, therefore, choose to allocate more of their budget to discretionary activities and “low-hanging fruit.”
Expert Tip: There are many ways to work around your existing marketing limitations, such as hiring a full-stack agency or freelancers that can fulfill your needs without placing the same financial demands on your company.
3. Are Market Trends in Your Favor?
The impact of your marketing is heavily dependent on market forces that are out of your control. These include:
- Buyer Trends: Many industries and specific “types” of solutions (such as AI) often become trendy – which increases buyer interest. Companies that find themselves “popular” in this way may choose to take advantage of the situation and invest more heavily in marketing.
- Purchase Cycles: B2B buyers often have strict purchase cycles, outside of which they may not be allowed to make a purchase. While companies should explicitly not turn off their marketing during such “downtime,” it is crucial to set aside a significant budget to make a heavy “push” during the immediate lead-up to your purchase window.
- Competitor Behavior: Your marketing budget should be focused on areas where you can gain a competitive advantage. For example, many B2B businesses dramatically underspend on design – creating an opportunity to stand out with a relatively small investment. Similarly, if another business has a very strong SEO program, you will need to select keywords strategically to ensure you can still compete.
B2B vs. B2C Marketing Budgets
B2B and B2C marketing differ in a few key ways:
- Sales Cycles: B2C sales are typically short and fast, whereas B2B buyers often spend 6-12 months researching a purchase. This creates a far longer B2B lead nurture process, forcing the marketing budget to be spread across a longer period.
- Audience Complexity: Most B2C marketing targets individual consumers, whereas B2B purchases are often overseen by a team drawn from multiple business areas. As a result, B2B marketers must produce content and messaging that appeals to numerous different audiences – adding another layer of complexity.
- Marketing Channels: While B2C marketing tends to focus on ads, promotions and discounts, B2B marketing can be more focused on educational resources such as blogs, webinars, eBooks and whitepapers. These educational resources are often more expensive and time-consuming to produce, as they require in-depth knowledge of the product, industry and buyer persona.
Ultimately, these factors make B2B marketing budgets more complex – which is why we created a framework to produce a strategic B2B marketing budget.
Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a B2B Marketing Budget
The following steps will help you create a marketing budget that supports your overarching strategic objectives:
1. Establish Clear Marketing Goals
Take a step back and figure out what you want to achieve with your marketing strategy. Are you looking to increase brand awareness? Generate more leads? Get more sales? Gain recurrent, loyal clients?
Knowing your goals will guide where your budget goes. For example, if your primary goal is generating leads, you might want to invest more in content marketing and paid ads. However, if you want to be part of the 41% of marketers who measure the success of their content marketing strategy through sales, you will need to invest in sales-enabling strategies and maybe paid ads.
2. Estimate Your Overall Budget
This is where everything starts: knowing how much money you have available to spend on your business. There are two common ways to set your budget:
- Percentage of Revenue: Most B2B companies dedicate 5-10% of their revenue to marketing. This method is straightforward and ensures your marketing spending aligns with overall company growth.
- Based on Your Goals: For this method, you calculate the cost of achieving your specific marketing goals. If you need to generate X number of leads, you’ll look at how much you’ll need to spend on the necessary marketing activities—like paid media, content creation, and events—to get there.
3. Calculate How Many Sales You Need to Reach Your Goals
Now, it’s time to work backward from your revenue goals and understand how you need to work to achieve them. To figure out how many sales you need, consider metrics like:
- Average Contract Value: How much you typically earn per sale
- Close Rates: What percentage of your leads turn into paying customers?
- Customer Acquisition Costs: How much do you spend to acquire each customer?
With these numbers in mind, you can determine how many new customers or deals you need to meet your revenue targets.
4. Break Down Your Budget by Channel
Your budget isn’t just one big number: it should be divided across the different channels you’ll use – including the organic strategies that are apparently “free.” You must consider all the different marketing efforts you want to approach and understand how much money should go to each one:
- Content Marketing: Whether it’s blog posts, e-books, or videos, content takes effort. And while nearly 96% of marketers believe social media content brings in solid ROI, the real question is: are you putting enough into both creating and promoting your content? How can you repurpose that content for other platforms?
- Paid Media: Paid media is your ticket to quick results. Think of ads on platforms like Google, LinkedIn, or Facebook. These ads can be highly targeted, ensuring that your message reaches the right audience fast. However, they do come with costs since you need to pay for each click.
- Social media: Use platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or even Instagram to connect with potential clients and share valuable content.
- Email Marketing: Email marketing is highly cost-effective and great for nurturing relationships with leads and customers. If you rely on building long-term customer relationships or have a strong focus on customer retention, this should be a key area of investment. Make sure you’re investing not just in campaigns but in the tools that allow you to segment, personalize, and automate your messaging.
- SEO: While there may be some costs for SEO tools or professional help, the payoff can be huge when your site starts attracting visitors without ongoing ad expenses. Once your SEO strategy starts producing results, you can enjoy consistent traffic at little to no cost.
- Events: If your business depends on personal connections and high-touch experiences, live events can make a big impact. Events can take up a large part of your budget, especially for B2B companies. If in-person networking or product demos are crucial for growth, this is a good area to prioritize. However, digital alternatives like webinars may offer a more cost-effective way to reach a wider audience.
- Webinars: Webinars are an affordable way to share educational content with a large audience. If your focus is on thought leadership and lead generation, webinars can be a great choice. They also offer interactive engagement, which helps you build relationships with potential clients.
Remember that your budget should also consider the money that goes into marketing resources, such as your staff and software subscriptions. If you spend all your money on paid ads, you will leave no room to hire people to do the work or to buy subscriptions to premium tools.
5. Set Aside a Contingency Fund
It’s always a good idea to budget for the unexpected. Set aside 5-10% of your marketing budget for unforeseen costs. Maybe the opportunity to expand your ad budget comes up, or a new conference is scheduled that you want to attend. Having some flexibility in your budget ensures you can act quickly when something unexpected arises.
6. Include a Monthly Breakdown
Marketing isn’t always consistent, and some months will require more spending than others. For example, if you’re launching a new product, you’ll probably need to invest more in marketing around that time.
By breaking down your budget by month, you’ll get a clear picture of how much to spend during different times of the year. This also helps you prepare for seasonal fluctuations, such as higher spending during trade show seasons or big campaigns.
7. Plan for Adjustments
Success comes from being flexible and adaptable. While you should start with a well-thought-out budget, be prepared to make adjustments throughout the year. Some strategies will outperform expectations, while others might under-deliver. The key is being ready to shift your resources based on what’s working and what’s not.
Schedule regular check-ins, whether monthly or quarterly, to review your marketing spend and performance. These check-ins aren’t just about tracking where the money is going; they’re opportunities to analyze what’s driving the best results. Is your paid media bringing in higher conversions than expected? Should you invest more in SEO now that you’re seeing steady growth in organic traffic? By reviewing the data, you can pivot your strategy and optimize your budget for maximum ROI.
How to Track ROI and Adjust Your B2B Marketing Budget
In B2B marketing, not every channel will give you the same results. Some will work better than others, so it's important to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to track how well your marketing is doing. KPIs like cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, and return on investment (ROI) will help you understand what is working and what isn't.
Once you have KPIs in place, use tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and your email marketing dashboard to keep an eye on your marketing results. These tools provide helpful data about how each channel is performing and give you the chance to move some of your budget to channels that work better if anything is not working.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in B2B Marketing Budgeting
Now, you know all you should be doing with your B2B marketing budget, but there’s one little detail missing: what you should avoid. There are a lot of mistakes that can make your B2B marketing budget go the wrong way, and these are some of the main ones:
- Making Decisions Without Good Data: One of the biggest mistakes you can make is guessing where to spend your money. Relying on instinct or old data can lead to overspending or putting your budget in the wrong place. Marketing decisions should always be based on up-to-date revenue and pipeline attribution data to avoid costly errors.
- Overspending on Low-ROI Channels: It’s easy to stick with familiar marketing channels, even if they’re no longer delivering results. If you’re not careful, you might keep pouring money into something that’s not giving you a good return on investment (ROI). This is why you need to keep an eye on how each of your marketing channels is performing. Tools like HubSpot can show you which channels are bringing in the best leads for the lowest cost. And if you notice your budget is going into a strategy that doesn’t get you results, don’t be afraid to shift your budget away and invest more in what’s working.
- Ignoring New Trends: Marketing is always changing, and it’s important to stay up to date with new trends. You have to stay on top of new technology or strategies, like AI or video marketing, and make sure you are weighing that in when deciding how to distribute your B2B marketing budget.
- Skipping Regular Reviews: Setting your budget at the beginning of the year and never looking at it again is a recipe for problems. Markets change, customer behaviors shift, and you need to adjust your budget to reflect those changes.
Make Your B2B Budget Go Further with ProperExpression
Building an effective B2B marketing budget can seem daunting, but it is far easier when you have a partner you can rely on to generate ROI fast.
ProperExpression offers end-to-end B2B marketing services, from strategy to RevOps programs, that generate more leads, improve your nurture process, and drive more reliable revenue. It has helped us increase inbound revenue by 466% for one B2B client – and it could produce similar results for your business.
Want a free 15-minute B2B marketing budget consultation?
