How much should a small business spend on marketing?
Every owner asks this, usually right after a bad quarter or right before a good one. The honest answer is a range, and the range is more useful than a single number because it tells you if you're wildly under, wildly over, or just arguing about details.
The benchmarks
Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey put marketing at 7.8 percent of company revenue. The CMO Survey from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, run with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, reported 9.0 percent. Gartner mostly samples billion-dollar companies; The CMO Survey covers a broader mix that includes smaller firms. So the gap between them isn't a mistake, it's the difference in who answered.
Call it 8 percent and you're in the neighborhood.
What 8 percent looks like at your size
- $300,000 a year: about $2,000 a month across everything, including your own time.
- $750,000 a year: about $5,000 a month.
- $1.5 million a year: about $10,000 a month.
- $3 million a year: about $20,000 a month, which is roughly one in-house marketing hire plus a real ad budget.
Notice the bottom of that list. A $300,000 business has $2,000 a month for the whole department: website, social, ads, email, reviews, the works. That's why we priced our plans the way we did. At $350 to $1,250 a month the plan is a line item inside that budget, not the whole thing.
Percent of revenue is a guide, not a rule
Three situations change the number:
- A new business, or one with a new location, should spend more than 8 percent for the first year. Nobody knows you exist yet.
- A business that's at capacity should spend less on lead generation and more on retention and reviews. More leads you can't serve is a bad problem.
- A business with a broken website or wrong hours on Google should spend zero on ads until that's fixed. Every dollar of traffic sent to a leaking bucket is a dollar burned.
Where the money goes first
In this order, and most businesses have it backwards:
- The foundation. A fast site that works on a phone, an accurate Google Business Profile, a way to capture and answer leads. Fix these before anything else.
- Being found. Local search, the content that gets you cited when someone asks an AI assistant, reviews.
- Staying in front of people. Social, email, video. Cheap per contact, compounding over time.
- Paid reach. Ads, streaming TV, radio, billboards. Powerful, and the first place a budget gets wasted if steps one through three aren't done.
If you want to know which of those four you're weakest on before you decide the number, the free Growth Score will tell you in five minutes.