We’ve previously discussed how much of total revenue should go toward your marketing budget, but managing that marketing spend is a whole other story. In this quick tutorial, you’ll learn how to plan out that marketing budget, and where to allocate resources with a marketing budget template in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.

With the Google Sheets marketing budget template, you can manage your marketing spend and effectively allocate your digital marketing budget based on the same baseline we use.

download the marketing budget template

marketing budget breakdown

Today’s talk is really about how do you as an organization, brand, or even an individual set up your budget for your calendar year. As in month-over-month, what should you be spending? How much? Where? All of that.

Now, there’s a lot of things that I can’t really answer without knowing more about your business. But I’m going to give you kind of a broad marketing budget template that you could use to help you plan accordingly.

This marketing budget really breaks it down month-by-month based on what I talked about a couple of weeks ago: when you’re setting up your budget, there’s a couple of factors that are involved.

google sheets tutorial: marketing budget template

Today’s tutorial is I’m using Google Sheets to kind of set up some line items and a tactical strategy that you could do as an agency to fulfill your strategy.

So with that said we’re going to get right into it. The first thing you really need to do is set up what your revenue is. I’m gonna set the revenue as a default to $3 million per year as a company. Now it might be way less, it might be way more. It just depends on what you have going on as an organization.

Larger organizations, they’re going to have very different budgets than you and that’s fine. If you’re a startup and you’re funded,  you might really want to make a conscious decision to say, ‘hey, we’re
going to spend a lot more because we really need to get into this market and there’s a barrier to entry that we need to spend a minimum of x and we don’t have that yet.’

I don’t always like that strategy but sometimes that’s what’s needed to get into a new market.

calculating a marketing budget

I set up a very broad kind of template here and that is really revenue $3 million and I can change that. Ten
percent of revenue is an easy calculation for your budget — a normal-based budget, not aggressive, not
safe. We can do very simple math $3 million, 10 percent of that is $300,000.

Now when you spread that out over a month it equals around $25,000 a month. I always want to be careful when I say this because, really, if you’re a new company you should be spending more than ten percent. If you’re an established brand and been around ten or twenty years or longer, you can spend less because of the fact that your brand is already very well established. It does not mean you need to lay back on your creative executions and what you’re doing in the marketplace to get your name out there and saying hey.

adjusting your marketing budget

There are a couple of other things that you notice and that is industry. If you are in a tough highly-competitive industry, you might want to add in some percentage points. I always say depending on the industry you can add three to five percentage points to your budget.

If you say, ‘hey, our reach, we’re not just going to be local, we want to actually go national,’ I would
say add in three percent to increase your ad dollars and your potential marketing spend.

You’d want to talk to us about how aggressive you want to be. I’m always a little bit aware that isn’t a potential for aggression in a marketplace that you can get into. Or is it better to just be normal or even safe and then grow? Then as you see growth then adjust.

You can still manually enter your monthly budget so you have the calculation right above you. You can put in whatever you like based on what makes sense for your organization or brand.

monthly marketing budget

Now this is where it gets a little complicated and fun is that then you have a monthly spend. This tells you what you are going to be spending on a month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter basis. That’s what’s nice about this marketing budget template — it breaks down literally monthly as far as what you should be spending on.

On this example, on advertising we’re going to say Google ad spend is $3,000 a month. It might be you need to spend a lot more based on your industry. But again, that’s where you want to talk with someone in the marketing space so we can help you align with what you should be spending. This also includes social content, email marketing, all the different elements, and again there might be somewhere you have to
put a lot towards it.

On that first tab of the marketing budget template and throughout this entire tab, our monthly budget was updated and the quarterly budget was updated automatically. So you don’t have to worry about going everywhere to update.

The idea is that then you can see, ‘OK, here’s what we’re actually going to be budgeted for and spend and here’s what we have budgeted and set aside for that month.’ You can see the calculation works out.

we’re here to help

I do recommend talking with someone in the marketing space whether it’s us or whether it’s you know any agency to help you make sure: ‘Does this look right? Do my numbers line up?” Because this can be very confusing to get organized.

As always, you can reach out to our team via our contact form if you have any questions.