Marketing budget calculator

What should you spend on marketing?

Answer eight questions. Get a budget built from your own goal, a paid and organic split, and the five numbers that tell you if it works.

1
Your businessSets the benchmark
$Type your own, or pick a range:
Total sales for the last 12 months.
Business type
B2B sells to businesses. B2C sells to consumers.
2
Your goalWhat marketing has to bring in
3
How you sellTurns the goal into customers, leads and dollars
$What a typical customer spends on one purchase.
Not sure? Work it out →
Average sale

Pick a period, like the last 12 months. Divide the revenue from sales by the number of sales.

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%Out of every 100 leads, how many become customers.
Not sure? Work it out →
Close rate

Count the leads you got in a period, then how many became customers. Not tracking leads yet? Log every inquiry this month and come back.

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$What you spend in marketing to get one inquiry, sign-up or booked call.
Not sure? Work it out →
Cost per lead

Add up what you spent on marketing in a period and divide by the leads it brought in. Your ad accounts usually show both.

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%What's left of each sale after the direct cost of delivering it.
Not sure? Work it out →
Gross margin

Take revenue, subtract what it cost to make or deliver what you sold (materials, labor on the job, shipping), then divide by revenue. Your profit and loss statement has both.

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×How many times a customer buys over the whole relationship. If they pay monthly, each monthly payment counts as one purchase, so a customer who stays 2 years is 24. Use 1 if they buy once.
Not sure? Work it out →
Purchases per customer

Divide total orders by the number of customers who placed them. For monthly billing, use the average number of months a customer stays.

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Step 4

Email me my plan.

Your budget is ready. Enter your email to open it on this page and get the full plan in your inbox, ready to forward to your team.

Your budgetPaid + organic splitThe 5 numbers

One email with your numbers. No sequence. Unsubscribe any time.

Your marketing budget
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Paid — Organic —
How your goal becomes a paid budget
—goal
—customers
—leads
—paid budget
How you compare
Your budget—
—
—

Sources: The CMO Survey 2025 (spend by business type); Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey (large-company reference).

Where it goes

Split it by channel.

Paid—
Search adsGoogle, Bing
% —
Social adsMeta, LinkedIn, TikTok
% —
Video adsYouTube, connected TV
% —
Display adsBanners, retargeting
% —

For reference, Gartner's 2025 survey of large companies found paid search took 13.9% of digital spend, display 12.5% and social 12.2%. Follow where your customers are, not their averages.

Organic—
SEOContent, technical fixes, backlinks
$ —
Website managementHosting, updates, landing pages
$ —
Social media managementPosting, community, reporting
$ —
PhotographyShoots, editing
$ —
VideographyProduction, editing, Shorts
$ —

Enter what you pay each month, to a team member, freelancer or agency. We multiply by 12.

The 5 numbers

Is the budget working?

Metric 01CAC · Customer acquisition cost—

What you spend in marketing to win one customer.

Paid budget ÷ customers

Metric 02LTV · Lifetime value—

Gross profit one customer brings you over the whole relationship.

Average sale × purchases × gross margin

Metric 03LTV:CAC—

How much profit each customer returns for every dollar spent winning them.

LTV ÷ CAC

CAC
— LTV
—

If CAC is close to LTV, you may be overpaying for customers. If LTV is many times CAC, you likely have room to spend more.

Metric 04Break-even ROAS—

Revenue each ad dollar must bring back before you stop losing money.

1 ÷ gross margin

Metric 05MER · Marketing efficiency ratio—

Total revenue for every dollar of total marketing spend.

Revenue ÷ current marketing spend