Marketing Budget Calculator

How much should you be spending on marketing? It’s one of the most common questions business owners ask, and one of the hardest to get a straight answer to.

This calculator gives you a starting point. It takes your annual revenue, your industry, and your growth goal, and shows a monthly figure based on published small-business guidance. It’s a reference point to help you think it through, not a verdict on what you’re spending now.

The number you get isn’t a flat dollar figure pulled from a chart. It’s a percentage of your revenue, because a business doing $200,000 a year and a business doing $2 million a year shouldn’t be spending the same dollar amount on marketing, even if they’re in the same industry.

That percentage comes from two places. The baseline split between business-to-business and consumer-facing companies reflects guidance from the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC). The five more specific categories in this tool (retail and specialty shops, home and local services, events and hospitality, B2B and professional services, and online education or e-commerce) are my own refinement of that broader BDC range, based on my judgment of how those business types compare.

Reference monthly budget = (annual revenue × percentage for your category) ÷ 12

Revenue percentage alone isn’t the whole picture, because a business trying to protect what it already has doesn’t need the same budget as one trying to grow. That’s why this calculator asks about your growth goal.

“Maintain & Protect” uses the lower end of your category’s typical range. It’s built for businesses that already have a steady base of customers and mainly want to keep it, rather than actively bring in new ones. “Strategic Growth” uses the upper end of the range, built for owner-operated businesses looking for steady, sustainable new customer flow.

Here’s the typical revenue percentage range used for each of the five business categories in this calculator. If your business doesn’t fit neatly into one of these, the General small business option uses a broader 5% to 10% range instead.

If you enter what you’re currently spending, the calculator also compares it with the reference point for your goal. Falling below it doesn’t mean something is wrong. Plenty of healthy businesses run lean and still hit their numbers. A smaller budget usually just means each dollar has to work a little harder.

If your current budget already meets or exceeds the reference point, the more useful next question usually isn’t “should I spend more,” it’s “is what I’m already spending actually earning its keep.” That’s a different question, and one the True ROI Calculator on this site is built to answer.

A calculator like this one is a useful reality check, but it shouldn’t set your budget on its own. The figures above are averages drawn from broad small-business guidance, and your business isn’t an average.

The right budget comes from your own numbers: your margins, what a new customer is worth to you, how competitive your local market is, and how much new work your team can take on. When I work with an owner, we start there, then use benchmarks like these to check our thinking and make sure the plan is realistic.

If you want a second opinion on whether your number makes sense for your specific business, that conversation starts below, where you can schedule a call.