Marketing budgets have fallen in recent years, but expectations continue to rise.
Today’s marketers need to do more with less which means more optimized campaigns, enhanced customer service and customer experience, and improved all-round performance.
That’s no easy task when there’s less money to go around. So as a marketer, there’s never been a better time to carefully plan your marketing budget!
You need to consider what channels will deliver on marketing and company key performance indicators (KPIs), what campaigns will help raise brand awareness, drive traffic or generate leads, and find ways to boost organic efforts to help bolster paid efforts.
Bear in mind that you can use artificial intelligence (AI) to help plan your budget in areas such as forecasting, competitor and market insights, audience targeting, and scenario testing.
In this blog, we will look at the marketing budget landscape and provide key steps to plan and implement a budget that can help realize your goals.
- Evaluate past performance
- Set clear goals
- Allocate budget based on success
- Break down your requirements
- Plan your content creation
- Choose your platforms
- Monitor your results
- Look to the future
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How have marketing budgets changed?
Gartner’s CMO survey revealed that marketing budgets dropped from 9.1% to 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024, a decrease of 15%.
This decline is in contrast to 2020 when marketing budgets were 11% of revenue with a significant dip to 6.4% in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. This figure rose to over 9% in 2022 and 2023 but saw a notable decrease in 2024 to 7.7%.
The reason? While paid media investments grew to 27.9% of the budget in 2024, spending fell across martech, labor and agencies, and technology investments reached the lowest level for a decade.
In fact, 20% of senior marketers rate delivering a greater ROI on their marketing budget as the number one issue they face, according to our CMOs report ‘Challenges, Budgets, Digital Transformation, & Skills’.
Another development that may have an influence on budgets is AI. With many marketing platforms now powered by AI and AI tools becoming more usable and widely adopted, many marketing leaders believe the technology may help in times of less.
“To optimize budgets in the age of AI, marketers must adopt a precision mindset. They need to invest in AI tools that automate repetitive tasks, use predictive analytics to forecast campaign performance, and allocate resources based on real-time data insights,” advises Mischa McInerney, CMO at the Digital Marketing Institute. “Effective planning means testing, learning, and iterating quickly—prioritizing channels and strategies that show proven ROI while reducing spend on underperforming areas.”
8 Steps to Plan Your Digital Marketing Budget
The key to using your budget wisely is to have a plan, one that works towards meeting your department and business goals.
This means that you need to take time to reflect on marketing performance and analyze data to see what channels delivered so that you can allocate your budgets towards areas that will help drive revenue but also realize any other key goals such as raising brand awareness or boosting conversion rates.
Let’s look at eight key steps that will help you develop a robust and realistic marketing budget.
1) Evaluate past performance
The best way to understand how to use your budget is to evaluate past performance. This includes looking at channels, attribution (how marketing tactics contributed to sales, conversions, or other goals), paid media, and marketing campaigns.
This requires you to review key efficiency metrics that tell you which investments are driving sustainable growth in the long and short term.
Here’s a detailed table from Emily Kramer that looks at the key efficiency metrics such as lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC) and how to calculate them.
Back up these metrics with data to drill down to look at the offline and online digital channels that performed. Use it to figure out where you’ve experienced success and why. To see which efforts didn’t work and why.
Knowing what worked and what didn’t, and, most importantly, why there was success or failure are vital pieces of the digital marketing puzzle that you’ll need if you want to move forward.
AI tools to help with evaluating past performance
- Google Looker: Offers in-depth data visualization and reporting to evaluate campaign performance.
- Mixpanel: Focuses on user behavior analytics to understand customer journeys.
- Domo: Integrates data from multiple sources to evaluate past performance across channels.
2) Set clear goals
One of the most critical initial steps in figuring out a digital marketing budget is to solidify clear, concrete goals. You don’t want to take a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach since that will waste both time and money.
Instead, what you should be aiming to do is decide where you want to see your results. That may mean a single result, or it may mean a primary goal with secondary and tertiary objectives.
However, in every case, you must know what you are trying to achieve, like these aims:
- Boost brand awareness
- Create more brand loyalty
- Generate more high-quality leads
- Increase revenue
- Boost conversion rates
These are all very different goals, with different approaches, so which ones you choose will have an impact on your digital plan, and how you should be budgeting.
AI tools to help set clear budget goals
- Funnel.io: Aggregates marketing data to inform goal-setting and performance tracking.
- Klipfolio: Helps create dashboards to align goals with KPIs and monitor progress.
- Databox: Automates goal tracking and provides insights on how to adjust strategies to meet objectives.
3) Allocate budget based on success
Once you have a goal and an idea of what’s been working and what hasn’t, you can start breaking down your budget based on priorities and success.
The key word here is “success,” not cost. The steps you’ve taken to look at past performance and calculate metrics can help you understand what has worked across your paid, earned, and owned media.
For example, social media marketing may not actually cost you anything if you rely on organic posts and traffic.
However, if the analysis of your past digital marketing efforts shows that Instagram is effective in boosting brand awareness, you may want to assign some budget to social media to try paid advertising or influencer marketing.
After all, if Instagram performs for you without a plan or many posts, consider how much more effective it could be with a social media manager in place, or the right social media tools and software to fully take advantage of it?
A survey by Neil Patel Digital looked at how marketers are spending budgets in 2025 for social ads across networks. Interestingly, YouTube and X seem to be getting the highest budget increase at 49% and 55% compared to Facebook who may only see a 14% increase.
Don’t just rely on one channel even if you have a small budget, look at other areas that you may be underutilizing but which could give you wins.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a tactic that can go a long way to getting your content and brand seen. Are there tools you could invest in to boost your SEO or should you subscribe to a platform to optimize keyword research?
Go where the activity is and shift the budget away to something that gets better results.
AI tools to help allocate budget
- Singular: Tracks cross-channel ROI and automates budget allocation based on performance.
- Madgicx: Analyzes ad campaign performance and reallocates budget dynamically.
- Allocadia: Specializes in marketing budget planning and aligning spend with goals.
4) Break down your requirements
Now that you have a much better idea of what your goals are, and what tactics and channels you want to use to achieve them, it’s time to set your budget for the specific resources you’ll be needing.
Digital marketing is, of course, about the combination of two distinct resources: tools/software and resources. You need to start looking at how your own budget will accommodate these.
For example, look at your paid advertising. Do you want to invest in tried and tested methods such as pay-per-click advertising? After all, 63% of people have clicked on a Google ad, according to Hubspot’s Annual State of Marketing Report. Or is paid social something you want to try given the success of your organic social campaigns?
Think about the resources you have to manage paid campaigns. Do you want a dedicated team member for each or do you want to assign one member to handle all paid marketing? If it’s just one, how much time should that individual spend on it and what tools do they need?
Other areas to think about that will require budget are:
- Content: Creation and strategy
- Creative: Freelance and in-house
- Social media: Organic and paid
- Email marketing: Platform and list management
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and user experience (UX): Website structure, running costs and tools
- Traditional advertising: Print, TV, or radio
- PR or Events: Venue, running costs and promotion
- Technology and tools licences: Analytics, design, video, webinars, podcasts, AI tools
- Community management: Managing groups and communities on social and other channels and outreach
AI tools to help you break down requirements
- Asana (with AI features): Helps organize and allocate resources across marketing projects.
- Monday.com: Offers AI-driven workload management to optimize team efforts.
- Smartsheet: Manages resources, costs, and timelines for marketing campaigns.
5) Plan your content creation
Marketers always need content to attract, influence and convert customers, so content ideation and generation is essential (guided by a solid content marketing plan).
” 31% of B2C marketers said their organization invests 50% or more of its marketing budget in content marketing “– Content Marketing Institute
But the type of content you can create varies wildly depending on your business, needs, audience, and goals.
If your company provides services then some content types may be more suitable than others. For example, in-depth case studies, whitepapers, and long-form blogs can help inform your audience and build authority in your industry. This may require you to budget to hire experts or implement a guest blogging strategy to get the right content.
Businesses that are product-based might benefit more from video content, especially for social media. That, of course, is an entirely different skill set, despite the importance of the content itself. So, your budget may need to account for recording equipment, editing equipment, presenters or writers depending on your ability to provide these yourself, and other factors. Infographics and listicle-type blogs are also useful in this instance along with a wealth of blogs that can work at each stage of the sales funnel.
You also need to keep AI in mind as things is changing how people find content on search engines and social media. Here’s a blog that covers AI overviews, a new detilaed search way for people to find information on Google.
Remember just because you’re a service-based company doesn’t mean you can’t use short-form video or TikTok. Here’s a great video from Shopify aimed at its users in anticipation of Black Friday.
AI tools to help with content creation
- Claude, ChatGPT, Jasper, and Gemini: Excellent AI tools for copywriting and content development
- Canva’s AI features: Simplifies the creation of visuals and graphics for marketing
- Descript: Streamlines video and audio production, including editing and transcription
6) Choose your platforms
Another important consideration for your budget is to look at the platforms you choose to use. This is highly dependent on your business and the market that you cater to.
When allocating a budget for platforms, you need to ensure a well-rounded and effective strategy which could include the following:
1. Advertising Platforms
- Search engine advertising: Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
- Social media advertising: Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest.
- Display advertising: Google Display Network, programmatic platforms, or native ads (e.g. Taboola, Outbrain).
- Video advertising: YouTube, TikTok, or video campaigns on social media.
2. Content Creation
- Design, photo editing and animation: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, stock photo licensing
- Project management: Basecamp, Asana
- Analytics: TrackMaven
- Webinar hosting: Zoom, BigMarker
- Podcast hosting: Riverside.fm
- Video creation and editing: Premiere, Camtasia
- Video hosting: Vimeo
- AI content and research tools: ChatGPT, Jasper, Claude
- Marketing automation platforms: Hubspot, Marketo
3. SEO
- SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz
4. Social Media Management
- Scheduling and monitoring tools: Hootsuite, Buffer, or Sprout Social
5. Email Marketing
- Email platforms: Mailchimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, or Klaviyo.
- Marketing automation platforms: Marketo, Pardot, or others
6. Analytics and Reporting
- Google Analytics, Data Studio, HubSpot.
7. E-commerce Tools
- Shopping ads using Google Shopping, or Instagram Shop
- Product feed management tools
8. Competitor Analysis
- SimilarWeb, SpyFu, or social media analytics platforms
7) Monitor your results
Monitoring the performance of your marketing budget involves tracking key metrics to assess the return on investment (ROI) and ensure your spending aligns with business goals.
Armed with clear goals and KPIs (from step 1 above) you can benchmark performance across channels and campaigns.
Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, CRM platforms, or social media insights to track performance indicators, including CPL, conversion rates, and CAC. Here’s a video walkthrough from DMI expert Cathal Melinn on how to create user reports on GA4. ▶
Join for FREE to access this video.
Regularly compare these metrics against your budget allocation to identify areas of overspending or underperformance. Finally, conduct periodic reviews to optimize your strategy, reallocating funds to the most effective channels and campaigns.
AI tools to help monitor results
- HubSpot: Tracks performance across campaigns with integrated CRM and analytics.
- Supermetrics: Pulls data from multiple platforms into a unified dashboard for analysis.
8) Look to the future
Techniques that have worked before are important to keep in mind, but just as important is keeping an eye on the future.
If it’s not your area of interest, dedicate some team members or other specialists to keeping you apprised of the incoming trends. Current digital marketing trends are critical to watch for, but if the business analysis points to new opportunities and venues, always be aware that getting in early and having “first-mover advantage” can be a huge benefit.
Also, if you or your staff hear news about new AI tools or SEO platforms, or ad bidding approaches that can help with your marketing activities, don’t ignore these opportunities for marketing.
AI tools to help keep an eye on trends
- Trend.io: Monitors emerging marketing trends and industry insights.
- Zyro AI Website Builder: Helps adapt to evolving digital needs with AI-driven web development.
- Futurepedia: A directory of the latest AI tools, helping marketers stay ahead of innovations.
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