Calculator

What a business your size typically spends on marketing

SMBs allocate 3–5% of gross revenue to marketing. This returns the lower bound, and what that lower bound buys.

Siddharth Sharma Published 2026-08-06

Enter gross revenue, not profit, and pick the closest industry — the cost per click attached to each one comes from a single data window and is printed in the option.

Marketing budget benchmark

Annual gross revenue ($)

Closest industry

Benchmark monthly marketing budget, lower bound

$2,500

Arithmetic
Step	Working	Result
Revenue a month	$1,000,000 ÷ 12	$83,333
Lower bound — 3% of revenue	$83,333 × 0.03	$2,500
Upper bound — 5% of revenue	$83,333 × 0.05	$4,167
Clicks the lower bound buys, at your average CPC	$2,500 ÷ $5.42	461

This assumes

will not tell you what to spend, because a benchmark describes what comparable businesses allocate rather than what your market requires of you

will return the lower bound of the published band as the headline, and show the upper bound directly beneath it so the range stays visible
will not assume the budget goes to paid search, or that it is spent competently once it is allocated

will convert the lower bound into clicks at your industry's average cost per click, so a share of revenue arrives as something purchasable
will not adjust for margin, growth stage, or how much of your revenue is repeat business rather than newly acquired

will state plainly that a low-margin business and a high-margin one cannot sensibly spend the same share of revenue, and that the band is a starting position rather than an answer

2026 SMB marketing budget survey · a $1M business ≈ $2,500–$4,200/mo · verified 2026-08-02

How to read this number.

The band this rests on describes allocation, not effectiveness. It says what businesses of a given size put into marketing; it says nothing about whether they got anything for it. Treating a benchmark as a target is how a business ends up spending correctly and acquiring nothing, which is a more expensive mistake than underspending because it takes longer to notice.

The output is the lower bound deliberately. A tool that reports the top of a published range while selling services inside that range is a quoting tool wearing a benchmark's clothes, and the upper bound is one row down in the arithmetic where anyone can read it. If your market is genuinely competitive the upper bound is the more realistic figure, and that is a judgement about your market rather than an output of this calculator.

The click conversion exists because a share of revenue is an accounting ratio and nobody buys accounting ratios. Dividing the lower bound by your industry's average cost per click turns it into a countable quantity of demand, and the quantity is usually the moment the number becomes real — a budget that sounds substantial often buys a few hundred clicks a month, which is a very different thing to plan around.

Cost per click is the input most likely to be wrong for you specifically, and it is wrong in a knowable direction. These are national averages across a whole category over a year. A dense metropolitan market runs above them and a rural one below, sometimes by a wide margin, so the click figure is a scale rather than a quote. The industry hubs on this site carry the local structure that moves it.

Questions this raises.

Is this a budget for paid ads specifically?

No. The band covers marketing allocation as a whole — people, tools, content, agencies and media. The click conversion is there to make the number tangible, not to suggest the whole budget should go to a single channel.

Why gross revenue rather than profit?

Because that is how the underlying survey is measured, and converting to a margin-adjusted figure here would mean the output no longer matched the source it cites. The assumptions block says explicitly that margin is not modelled.

My industry is not in the list.

Use the all-industry average, and read the click figure as a rough scale rather than a quote. The four options are the ones carried in the sourced appendix with a stated data window; adding an industry here would mean adding a figure that has no source behind it.

The systems behind the number.

AI follow-upA written sequence of specific, useful contacts across email, text and call reminders, spaced at intervals your own history supports, personalised from what the person actually asked, and stopped the moment they reply, book or say no.
AI operationsThe repetitive internal steps between an event and its outcome — data entry, assignment, chasing, reminding, reporting — are moved into systems that run whether or not anyone is at a desk, with a person left on every step that contains a judgement.
Lead qualificationEvery inbound is scored on what it actually said and where it came from, before anyone reads it. High-intent enquiries route to a person with a deadline; the rest enter a sequence that keeps them warm without spending anybody's morning. The rules are written in plain English and versioned when they change.
Lead recoveryEvery inbound — form, call, chat, portal — lands in one queue with a timestamp on it, receives an immediate acknowledgement that names what was asked, and is routed to a named person with a deadline attached. Nothing is marked handled until a reply exists.
Marketing automationThe material a buyer needs in order to decide is published where they are already looking, delivered on request, and the request is recorded against the person. The automation's job is delivery and memory, not pursuit.

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An estimate built from your own guesses is a starting position, not a baseline. The audit measures the same figures in your business instead of asking you for them.

METHOD

Every figure below carries its source and the date it was verified. Nothing on this page is asserted.

The numbers on this page.

Datapoints
What	Value	Specific to
SMB marketing spend as a share of gross revenue	3–5%	This page
All-industry average search CPC	$5.42	This page
Attorneys & legal services CPC	$9.87	Category-wide
Home & home improvement CPC	$8.33	Category-wide
Dentists & dental services CPC	$8.00	Category-wide