How Much Should You Spend on Digital Marketing in 2025?

Frankly, there isn’t a solid answer to this question. Every business is unique and has different goals.

A company’s budget depends on various factors like industry, annual revenue, and goals. But even if there isn’t a one-size-fits-all strategy, the good news is that we’ve dug up useful industry statistics to help you decide how much you should spend on digital marketing.

This guide covers the latest findings on marketing budgets and spending across revenues, industries, and channels. Use these tips to help you make smart decisions and grow in 2025.

Align Your Marketing Budget with Your Goals & Strategies

Putting together a marketing budget requires thinking through your business goals first. That way, you can productively identify the strategies and tools required to make your goals a reality.

When we asked Dan Posner, Big Leap’s EVP of Business Development, how much to spend on digital marketing, his response was this:

“I want to understand more about the business and some of the metrics in place. It’s different for an eCommerce business versus a local versus a B2B business. I ask:

• What are your goals?
• What can you tell me about the existing process?
• What’s the lifetime value of a client?
• When you get a lead what happens after that?
• What are competitors doing?

If I can understand the value of a client to them, it helps me understand how much they should be spending on marketing.”

Build Flexible and Adaptive Plans

Building flexible strategies is pivotal to safeguarding the long-term viability of your business. So take a more agile approach to your marketing strategies by considering:

• Activity/performance: Let’s say you’ve invested a large portion of your budget towards paid marketing initiatives. But months after your campaign launch, your team discovers organic efforts are bringing in the most growth. You want to be able to shift your priorities accordingly and move money into your most profitable resources.
• Unforeseen changes in the marketplace: Your team should quickly respond to these shifts. Say your competitor lowers their prices. You’ll either need to decrease your prices as well or shift your marketing messages and channels to stay competitive.
• Unexpected shifts in the digital economy: Today’s latest marketing trend can quickly become tomorrow’s standard. Is your business ready and willing to adapt? Do you have the tools you need to keep your company visible and relevant?

By meticulously planning out and prioritizing your marketing strategies, you can then put together an effective and goal-oriented budget.

Marketing Budget per Company Size/Annual Revenue

In 2023, U.S. marketing accounted for 10.2% of a company’s total budget. Of course, choosing the right percentage depends on what you’re looking to gain for the quarter or year.

If your business is looking to grow or gain greater market share, analyze the ways you’ve spent your money in the past. Maybe there are more efficient ways your team can utilize your marketing budget, or maybe you need to budget a higher or lower percentage than 10% (or even go beyond it if you already meet the threshold).

Small Businesses

One of the first steps in figuring out your marketing budget is looking into your company’s gross or estimated revenue. Let’s take a look at small businesses.

A small business is defined as a business making anywhere from 1 to 40 million dollars or having anywhere between 100 and 1,500 employees. The Spring 2024 CMO Spending Survey, broke down marketing budget percentages by revenues:

• Revenues of less than $10 million had marketing be 15.6% of their budget
• Revenues between $10–25 million had marketing be 12.2% of their budget
• Revenues between $26–99 million had marketing be 10.2% of their budget

We know that’s a rather heavy investment. But think about it—the world doesn’t know about your products/services yet. By generously investing in marketing initiatives, you can spread the word and spread it well so you’re targeting the right people and establishing your brand.

Of course, don’t sacrifice so much money that you’re jeopardizing your business. Once your company has gained solid traction in the industry, you can regroup with your team on possible ways to bring down your marketing budget.

Medium/Large Businesses

So what about medium- to large-sized companies?

The 2024 CMO Spend Survey broke down larger businesses’ marketing budgets like this:

• Revenues between $26–99 million had marketing be 10.2% of their budget
• Revenues between $100–499 million had marketing be 9.5% of their budget
• Revenues between $500–999 million had marketing be 7.3% of their budget
• Revenues between $1–9 billion had marketing be 7.2% of their budget
• Revenues between over $10 billion had marketing be 11.3 % of their budget

How All Businesses (Small to Large) Spend Their Marketing Budgets

Among all the businesses surveyed, their marketing budget broke down like this:

Marketing Budget per Industry

What about marketing budgets based on specific industries? Here are some guiding facts.

Marketing Budget as a Percentage of Overall Company Budget

Statista lists various industries (both B2C and B2B firms) marketing budgets as:

• Consumer packaged goods: 25.19%
• Service consulting: 21%
• Retail wholesale: 14.52%
• Communications/media: 14.27%
• Pharma/biotech: 12.83%
• Tech software/platform: 11.8%
• Consumer services: 11.74%
• Education: 11.50%
• Real estate: 10.61%
• Banking/finance/insurance: 9.49%
• Professional services: 7.08%
• Healthcare: 6.80%
• Mining/construction: 6.50%
• Energy: 3.83%
• Manufacturing: 3.75%
• Transportation: 1.52%

As you use these to help plan your budget, keep in mind not all companies are the same in what they include in their marketing budget. For example, some companies include sales and marketing training expenses in their marketing budget, whereas others might be more inclined to add them to another budget.

Marketing Budget per Channel/Service

Marketing budgets generally involve two types of marketing:

• Traditional marketing: This would involve traditional methods/tools to market your business, like print, TV, and radio ads, along with tradeshows and direct mail.

• Digital/online marketing: This involves digital methods/tools you use to connect with your audience. These online initiatives can be centered around your website, social media platforms, paid display ads, SEO strategy, and more. You should spend at least half of your marketing budget on digital channels.

The average company in 2022 divided its marketing budget to allocate 56% to online marketing and 44% to traditional marketing. Generally, marketers have reduced their budgets for traditional advertising and increased their digital marketing budgets.

But keep in mind this all depends on your target market. What do they find valuable and where are they hanging out? Stay centered on the buyers’ journey and divide up your budget accordingly.

Industry Statistics Across Marketing Channels/Services

Let’s take a look at some industry statistics to discover how companies divide their marketing budget.

Traditional Marketing

Traditional, or offline marketing, budgets are split up in the following ways:

• Event marketing: 17.1%
• Sponsorship: 16.4%
• Partner co-op: 16%
• TV: 14%
• Direct mail: 13.5%
• Radio: 12.3%
• Out of home: 10%

Source: Gartner CMOE Spend Survey Data Snapshots

Depending on the audience, businesses tend to use traditional marketing for brand exposure, credibility, and to target locally. Many traditional marketing methods are also reusable and can maximize a small budget.

Paid Marketing

Paid marketing focuses on targeting audiences through various advertising channels, such as PPC and retargeting ads, instead of trying to find an audience through organic means.

PPC—A perfect example is the search engine result page. The first couple of listings will have “ad” next to them. After that, all the listings are organic marketing.

Retargeting Ads—When you target people who interacted with your site or social media. It can act as a reminder to people of your business’s existence with the hope they return.

So how are companies investing in paid marketing?

• Search advertising: 14%
• Social advertising: 12%
• Digital displays: 11%

Source: Gartner CMOE Spend Survey Data Snapshots

Companies use these paid marketing channels for various points on the customer journey.

• 28.6% goes to brand awareness
• 22.5 goes to consideration
• 27.9% goes to conversion
• 20.6% goes to loyalty and advocacy

When asked how to best allocate money for paid marketing channels, Matt Hammer, Big Leap’s Director of Paid Advertising, said:

“It comes down to where we feel their business would be best served. For example, B2B will be best on LinkedIn and Google. But, an eCommerce brand would be Facebook, Instagram, and Google. It’s all about what platform will best serve their business.”

Organic Marketing

As mentioned above, organic marketing uses “owned media” (content you create) to increase traffic. Owned media can include blogs, social media, and email.

Here’s the allocation of organic marketing in budgets:

• SEO: 8.5%
• Email marketing: 7.8%
• Content and messaging: 7.8%
• Social media marketing: 7.6%
• SMS/ in-app advertising: 6.9%

Source: Web Strategies

According to Hubspot, in 2023, these social media platforms offer the highest ROI:

• Facebook: 29%
• Instagram: 29%
• YouTube: 26%
• TikTok: 24%
• Twitter/X: 16%
• LinkedIn: 16%

Source: Hubspot State of Marketing Report

For other owned media, Hubspot found the top five formats with the highest ROI are:

• Short-form video: 31%
• Images: 22%
• Blog posts: 15%
• Case studies: 15%
• Podcasts or other audio content: 14%

Source: Hubspot State of Marketing Report

Of course, you’ll have to customize the type of owned media you use for your audience. Blog posts are better for explaining complicated services such as HVAC or law, while short videos would be good for e-commerce brands catering to younger audiences.

Track, Measure, and Revise

Once you have your goals and budget laid out with your team, it’s important to consistently track and measure key metrics. You need to gain insight into how successful your marketing efforts actually are to make the most of your budget.

If your team finds that one quarter was more profitable than the next, investigate why. Use these key points to drive better marketing tactics.

Here are a few key analytics tools your team can use:

• Google Analytics: This free tool gives you an overview of your inbound website traffic, engagement, bounce rates, and conversions. You can also integrate AdWords to measure the performance of your PPC campaigns.

• Hubspot: Hubspot allows you to track key metrics for your marketing, sales, and customer success campaigns. From an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system to measuring your call-to-actions (CTAs), you can draw valuable insights from your customers and simplify communication between you and your leads.

• BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo helps you track the number of blog shares on your social platforms and analyze the performance of competing content in your industry. This tool can also help you gain insight into variables like content length, publish date, and headline type.

• Facebook Insights: This tool allows you to track your Facebook marketing campaigns, the content you post, and the performance of your Facebook ads.

Plan Right with a Trusted Team—Contact Us

We get that planning a digital marketing budget takes some effort. But planning for the upcoming year doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.

It’s important to pick the right digital marketing agency—the wrong choice can lead to frustrating consequences.

One last thought from Dan:

“We tend to categorize people and businesses into different buckets because it’s easy, and while all businesses have similar pain points, they still have their unique situations—which their marketing should cater to. This is what Big Leap is all about, customizing marketing solutions for each of our clients.”

With over 15 years of experience in the digital marketing world, our team will take the time to learn more about your business and help you design a comprehensive marketing strategy and budget.

Contact us today to receive a customized strategy for your business.