Home / Free Tools / Marketing Budget Calculator
Pick your industry, enter your revenue, and get a monthly budget range built from real benchmarks, not a guess. The breakdown shows where that money should go and why.
Industry benchmarks from the SBA, HubSpot State of Marketing, WordStream, and published agency data. I cross-referenced with what I see in client accounts. The ranges are wide because a dental practice in rural Kansas and one in Manhattan Beach are not the same market, and pretending they are would make this tool useless.
The SBA recommends 7-8% of gross revenue for businesses under $5 million. Startups and businesses in growth mode often spend 12-20%. The right number depends on your margins, your competition, and how aggressively you want to grow. This calculator uses industry-specific benchmarks rather than a one-size-fits-all percentage.
Everything you pay to attract or retain customers: Google Ads, social media ads, SEO, content creation, email marketing, direct mail, agency retainers, software subscriptions for marketing tools, and sponsored events or sponsorships. It does not include sales commissions or the cost of your own time unless you are paying yourself specifically for marketing work.
Google Ads gives you leads this week. SEO gives you leads next quarter and the quarter after that without paying per click. Most businesses need both, but the split depends on how urgently you need leads. If you need pipeline now, start with 60% ads and 40% SEO. If you can wait 6 months, flip that ratio. Either way, do not try to run both on a combined budget under $1,500 a month.
Track cost per lead, cost per customer, and customer lifetime value. If you are spending $2,000 a month on Google Ads and getting 20 leads that close at 15% with an average job value of $3,000, your cost per customer is $667 and your return is 4.5x. That is working. If you cannot answer those three numbers, you are guessing.
It depends entirely on your average sale value and close rate. A $75 lead is cheap for a law firm signing $5,000 retainers and expensive for a cleaning company booking $150 jobs. This calculator shows industry-typical CPL ranges, but the number that matters is YOUR cost per lead divided by YOUR average client value.
An agency makes financial sense when the cost of the retainer is less than the cost of doing it wrong yourself, measured in wasted ad spend, missed leads, and time. A $1,500 monthly retainer that generates 15 qualified leads at $100 each is cheaper than spending $3,000 on ads with no strategy and getting 5 leads at $600 each. The math either works or it does not.
Google Ads: 2-4 weeks for initial leads, 90 days for optimised performance. SEO: 4-6 months for meaningful organic traffic. Social media: 3-6 months for consistent engagement. Email: immediate for existing contacts. Any provider promising page-one rankings in 30 days is lying, and that is worth knowing before you hire one.
Thirty minutes. Tell me where your last few customers came from and what you could handle more of. I will tell you whether marketing is your constraint or whether something else is, and I will say so plainly if it is not.