How much should I spend on digital marketing?
This is going to vary business to business, and is a bit like asking how long a piece of string is – but hopefully by the time you finish this article you should have a rough idea of what you should be investing in your marketing and in particular your digital marketing.
The average spend on marketing for small to medium businesses is £300 per month. The average amount of this going to digital for small to medium businesses is 46% or £138.
The average spend on marketing as a percentage to revenue is 4-12%, but for small businesses, this rises to 8-12% as they don’t have the strong brand image that larger companies have. To get to that next level requires growth and a successful brand building strategy.
The average spend by business type on marketing is:
B2B product business 10.6%
B2B service business 10.1%
B2C product business 16.3%
B2C service business 10.9%
Second part of this is how much should you invest on digital? As we said before, an average of 46% of marketing for small to medium businesses is going on digital. For all businesses, the average is 35% spend on digital, as larger companies tend to invest in TV advertising, which has a huge cost associated.
The percentage of ad spend going to digital is also growing as companies see return from the investment and the benefits of digital over other marketing channels. If you are a more traditional business you might feel that spending a bit less than the average is the way to go for now, which is completely fine but start thinking about how the digital landscape is changing, and how you can better target potential customers. A lot of businesses we work with are spending 60%+ of their marketing budget on digital because you tend to get a lot more for your money. With small to medium sized businesses also having stricter budgets, there are a lot more statistics available with digital marketing.
We would say 10% of your revenue is a good place to start for your total marketing budget with 50% of this going towards digital. This can be tweaked as you go along and make learnings, but it’s definitely a good starting point.
If you have any questions, please get in touch!
