How much should a B2B business spend on marketing?

The benchmarks most people quote say large companies spend somewhere between 5% and 9% of their revenue on marketing. But those figures come from big American and European businesses, and there's no reliable figure for small Australian ones. For a B2B business, a better way to set a budget is to work back from how many new customers you want and what each one is worth.

What the benchmarks say

• Gartner's 2026 survey of 401 marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe put marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, up slightly from 7.7% in 2025. The companies surveyed are mostly large.
• The CMO Survey, run by Duke University with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, found US companies spending about 9% of revenue on average in spring 2026. The median, meaning the typical company, was 5%.

That gap between 9% and 5% matters. A few big spenders pull the average up. The typical company spends less.

Why the benchmarks don't fit most Australian B2B firms

There's no good Australian figure. The ABS tracks whether businesses changed their marketing, not how much they spend on it. And the overseas surveys are of large companies with brand budgets a 40-person manufacturer will never have.

Setting a budget as a share of revenue also has the logic backwards. It means you spend more after a good year and less after a bad one, which is the opposite of what you'd do if you wanted to grow.

A better way: work back from the customers you want

Start with what you want marketing to produce, then work out what that's worth paying for. Here's a made-up example.

1. How many new customers do you want this year? Say 10.
2. What's a customer worth? Use gross profit, not revenue, over the time they usually stay with you. Say $40,000 over three years.
3. How many quotes become orders? Say one in four. So you need 40 quotes.
4. How many enquiries become quotes? Say one in two. So you need 80 enquiries.
5. How much of a customer's value will you spend to win them? Say 10%, or $4,000 a customer.

That gives a marketing budget of 10 × $4,000 = $40,000 a year, and it tells you that you can afford up to $500 to get each enquiry ($40,000 ÷ 80). I've written more about that number in what you can afford to pay for an enquiry.

The point of doing it this way is that every figure is yours, and each one tells you something. If you don't know your close rate, or what a customer's worth, finding out is worth more than any benchmark.

What the budget has to cover

A marketing budget is more than the ad spend. It covers:

• Media: Google Ads, trade show stands and anything else you pay to be seen.
• People: your own staff's time, an agency or freelancers. I've compared an agency with an in-house hire.
• Tools: the website, the CRM, email and reporting software.
• Things to hand over: brochures, capability statements, samples.

Give it long enough

When a sale takes months, a new marketing push won't show up in sales for months either. I'd set a budget for at least six to twelve months, and judge it on enquiries and quotes along the way as well as on closed sales. I've covered how in measuring marketing when the sale takes six months.

Then adjust. If enquiries are coming in for less than you can afford, spend more. If they're costing more, fix the leaks before you spend more on the same thing.