Budget season has a way of turning marketing into a spreadsheet.
Paid media, website, research, creative, events, video, agency support — every line item may be questioned, compared with last year or asked to prove exactly what it will return.
I understand it. Leadership has to make choices, but if the conversation about your marketing budget starts with individual tactics, you are already making the case harder than it needs to be.
A strong marketing budget starts with business goals. What does your organization need to accomplish next year? Where is growth expected to come from? What audiences need to know, believe or do something differently?
Then the conversation becomes less about defending marketing expenses and more about explaining the investment required to achieve those goals.
Everyone wants a benchmark. Unfortunately, there is no magic percentage.
Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets averaged 7.8% of company revenue. The Spring 2026 CMO Survey, which surveyed U.S. for-profit companies, put marketing budgets at 9% of revenue.
Different studies, industries and company sizes produce different answers. Gartner's respondents, for example, skew heavily toward companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
The right investment depends on where your organization is today and what it expects marketing to accomplish. A company entering a new market, launching a new product or rebuilding a dated brand may need to invest more aggressively than an established organization focused primarily on retention.
Start with the business plan, not someone else's percentage.
Leadership does not necessarily need more marketing terminology. They need a clear connection between the investment and the organization's priorities.
I recommend framing the conversation around a few questions:
This is where the conversation can get tricky. Marketing absolutely needs accountability, but accountability does not mean every marketing activity will produce a simple, immediate equation of $1 spent = $X returned.
Some activities capture existing demand. Others create it. Paid search, for example, may help convert someone already looking for a service. Brand advertising may be what helped that person know the organization, trust it and search for it in the first place.
Nielsen reported in its Marketing ROI Blueprint that while 85% of marketers said they were confident in their ability to measure ROI, only 32% measured it holistically across traditional and digital media.
Depending on the goal, I would look at a combination of metrics such as awareness, reach, search activity, web traffic, engagement, qualified leads, conversions, sales, enrollment, patient volume or retention.
Also be clear about timing. A six-week lead-generation campaign and a multiyear brand-building strategy do not have the same measurement window.
There is no universal mix or allocation I would recommend for every organization, but there are several areas I would protect as budgets are built.
Before adding tactics, make sure there is clarity around goals, audiences, positioning and the competitive environment. Research and strategy can feel easy to trim because they do not always produce something visible, but spending thousands of dollars executing a campaign built on an assumption is rarely an efficiency.
When budgets get tight, organizations often shift heavily toward tactics that produce the fastest measurable response. That can make sense up to a point, but marketing works harder when people already know, understand and trust the brand.
We've written before about why branding matters when marketing has to deliver results. A strong brand is not separate from performance. It helps create the conditions that make performance possible.
Do not choose channels simply because they are easiest to measure. The right mix depends on your audience, goals, geography, competitive environment and budget.
Search may capture intent. Social can create engagement and build familiarity. Video, streaming, television, radio, out-of-home and other high-reach media may be valuable for awareness. Email and content can help maintain relationships and move audiences toward action.
Your website, email program, content and search presence deserve budget, too. Paid media can generate attention, but eventually people arrive somewhere you control. If the website is difficult to navigate, the message is unclear or the content does not answer what audiences are searching for, more advertising will not fix the problem. SEO is part of that foundation, and increasingly, so is optimizing content to be understood and surfaced by AI search tools.
Measurement cannot be the thing you figure out after the campaign launches. Determine what data is available, what matters to leadership and what success will look like before investing the dollars.
Then use what you learn to adjust the plan instead of waiting until year-end to decide whether marketing "worked." The smartest budget is not necessarily the one that predicts every dollar perfectly in January. It is one that allows you to put more behind what is working and reconsider what is not.
The strongest marketing budget is not the one with the biggest number. It is the one with a clear strategy behind it.
When leadership can see the connection between organizational goals, audiences, investment, expected outcomes and measurement, the budget conversation gets much more productive. And frankly, marketing gets much easier to defend.
If your organization is heading into planning season and could use an outside perspective on strategy, budgeting or where to invest next, let's talk. Contact Amperage Marketing + Fundraising at info@AmperageMarketing.com.
Author Erin Earnest is Chief Operating Officer of Amperage Marketing + Fundraising with expertise in branding and marketing strategy.
