Marketing Budget Statistics (2025–2026): Benchmarks, Allocations & Trends

Marketing budgets are flat. That’s the headline from Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey — the average marketing budget held at 7.7% of company revenue for the second year running, unchanged from 2024. But “flat” doesn’t mean “fine.” 59% of CMOs say their current budget is insufficient to execute their strategy.

The pressure is real. Media costs are rising. AI tools are reshaping what teams can do without adding headcount. And expectations — from boards, from customers, from competitors — keep climbing. The question most marketing leaders are wrestling with isn’t just how much to spend. It’s where, and whether it’s working.

This article pulls together the most current benchmarks on marketing budget sizes, allocation patterns, industry breakdowns, and where spend is shifting in 2025 and 2026.

Marketing Budget at a Glance

Metric	Figure
Average marketing budget	7.7% of revenue
General recommended range	7–10% of revenue
CMOs reporting insufficient budget	59%
Share of budget going to paid media	30.6%–31%
Share going to martech	22%
Share going to labor	22%
Share going to agencies	21%
CMOs planning to cut agency spend	39%
CMOs planning to cut labor spend	39%
Digital as % of total marketing budget	56%+

The budget mix is shifting meaningfully. Paid media is taking a larger slice — up from around 28% in 2024 to 31% in 2025 — while martech, agencies, and labor spending are all declining as a share. AI is quietly driving some of that reallocation: 22% of CMOs say generative AI has reduced their reliance on external agencies for creative and strategy work.

How Much Should You Spend? Benchmarks by Company Type

There’s no universal answer, but the data does give you a defensible range.

By Business Model

Company Type	Typical % of Revenue	Context
B2C product companies	10–20%	High customer acquisition costs, emotional brand-building
B2C services	9–12%	Broader reach; heavy emphasis on digital and creator marketing
B2B (general)	8–11%	Longer sales cycles; content and relationship-led
B2B product	~8.5%	More focused campaigns; niche audiences
B2B services	~9.6%	Thought leadership and events-heavy
SaaS (growth stage)	15–20%+	Aggressive customer acquisition targets
Early-stage startups	20–30%	Building brand and market penetration from scratch
Mature enterprises	5–7%	Optimization over expansion

Forrester’s 2025 B2B Budget Planning Guide found that 87% of global B2B marketing decision-makers planned a budget increase in 2025 — but only 35% expected an increase of more than 5%. The majority expected gains of just 1–4%. Cautious optimism, not a boom.

By Company Size

Revenue Band	Marketing % of Revenue	Digital Allocation
Small business ($1M–$10M)	7–12%	45–55% to digital
Mid-sized ($10M–$100M)	6–9%	50–65% to digital
Enterprise ($100M+)	5–7%	55–70% to digital

Mid-sized businesses are growing digital spend the fastest — up 18.2% year-over-year in their digital allocation share, faster than both small businesses and enterprise.

Marketing Budget by Industry

Industry is one of the strongest predictors of how much a company spends on marketing. Consumer-facing sectors spend significantly more than industrial or B2B-heavy ones.

Industry	Marketing as % of Revenue
Consumer packaged goods	18.09%
Communications & media	~18%
Banking, finance & insurance	~9.5%
Technology & software	9.16–15%
Retail & ecommerce	10%+
Healthcare	5–12% (varies by stage)
Manufacturing & industrial	5–7.5%
Services & consulting	~6%
Energy	3.21%

The consumer packaged goods figure — nearly 18% — reflects the reality that brand visibility in a crowded retail environment is continuous and expensive. Energy companies at the other end of the spectrum are selling largely through contracts and relationships, not consumer campaigns.

Technology is a notable exception to its own stereotype. Despite being a high-growth sector, many tech companies have pulled back on marketing spend as they prioritize profitability over expansion following the 2022–2023 funding pullback. The sector now ranks 11th in marketing spend in the U.S., according to Sopro’s State of Marketing Spend 2025.

How Budgets Are Allocated Internally

Knowing your total budget is step one. Deciding how to split it is where most teams get stuck.

Gartner’s 2025 Breakdown (Average Across Large Companies)

Budget Category	Share
Paid media	30.6%–31%
Marketing technology (martech)	22%
Labor (internal)	22%
Agencies	21%

B2B vs. B2C Allocation Patterns

B2B and B2C companies allocate quite differently, driven by their sales cycles and audience behavior.

B2B companies typically prioritize:

Content marketing and thought leadership: 20–30% of budget
Digital advertising: 15–20%
Analytics and optimization tools: 10–15%
In-person events and tradeshows: still the #1 lead source for 45% of B2B marketers (Sagefrog / Avid Demand 2025)

B2C companies typically prioritize:

Paid digital advertising: 25–35%
Social media: ~20%
Influencer and community-driven marketing: 10–15%

Forrester’s B2B-specific breakdown puts it as: Marketing Programs (42% of budget), Personnel (35%), and Technology (23%).

The Digital vs. Traditional Split

Digital crossed the 50% threshold years ago and keeps climbing, but traditional hasn’t disappeared — especially in B2B.

Companies overall allocate 56%+ of marketing budgets to digital, up from around 53% in prior years
B2C companies average 61.4% digital; B2B companies average 54.8% digital
Digital advertising passed 75% of total global ad spend in 2025 (eMarketer)
That said, 45% of B2B marketers still cite in-person tradeshows and events as their top lead source — more than digital channels individually

Traditional isn’t dead. It’s just changed. Direct mail is experiencing a quiet revival in B2B contexts, where physical mail now stands out precisely because inboxes are oversaturated. And after years of decline, traditional advertising actually moved from -2.1% to +0.8% growth in Fall 2024 among U.S. firms (CMO Survey).

Where Budgets Are Shifting in 2025–2026

A few clear trends are reshaping how budgets are distributed.

AI tools are eating agency and labor budgets. Generative AI adoption in marketing surged 116% year-over-year, now deployed across 15.1% of marketing activities (CMO Survey / Single Grain). By 2025, 23% of companies plan to allocate 16–20% of their marketing budget to AI tools, up from 11% in 2024. Marketing leaders project AI will power 44.2% of marketing efforts within three years.

Paid media is absorbing the freed-up spend. The shift away from agencies and labor is largely flowing into paid media, which now commands the largest single share of marketing budgets at 31%. CMOs are “protecting media budgets” as consumer purchase cycles lengthen and brands fight for share of voice in a chaotic news environment — per Gartner’s own commentary on the data.

First-party data is becoming a budget line in its own right. Companies are allocating an average of 11.2% of their digital marketing budgets to first-party data initiatives, expected to reach 15.8% by 2026 (CMO Survey). The deprecation of third-party cookies made this shift from optional to mandatory.

Experiential marketing is rebounding. After pandemic-era cuts, spending on in-person and experiential marketing is projected to grow 6.7% in 2025 — particularly in B2C, where brands are building hybrid physical-digital experiences.

Brand building is back on the agenda. Brand investment grew from 3.9% to 7.0% of revenue in just one CMO Survey cycle (Spring to Fall 2024). Customer relationship management budgets moved similarly, from 3.9% to 6.9%. These aren’t huge numbers, but the direction is clear: after years of performance-marketing dominance, brand is getting its budget back.

Budget Benchmarks by Growth Stage

If you’re not a mature enterprise with stable revenue, percentage-of-revenue benchmarks only tell part of the story.

Stage	Recommended Budget Range	Priority
Pre-PMF / early-stage	30–60% of revenue	Testing, awareness, finding what works
Scaling / growth stage	15–25%	Balancing growth with efficiency
Mature / optimization	5–7%	Channel refinement; defend market share
Hypergrowth SaaS	20–30%+	Customer acquisition velocity

Salesforce is the extreme example that often gets cited: they’ve historically devoted around 43% of revenue to combined sales and marketing, prioritizing growth over profitability. That’s not a model for everyone, but it illustrates how company strategy — not just industry norms — should drive budget decisions.

A simpler framework that many B2B teams use is the 70/20/10 rule: 70% on proven, high-ROI strategies; 20% on emerging channels with early traction; 10% on experiments and new bets. It builds in innovation without betting the whole budget on it.

The Budget Sufficiency Problem

The most important number in this article might be the most uncomfortable one: 59% of CMOs say their budget is insufficient to execute their strategy. That’s down from 64% in 2024, but it’s still the majority.

Part of this is structural — marketing budgets peaked at around 11–12% of revenue pre-pandemic and have steadily eroded since. They haven’t recovered. The 7.7% figure in 2025 represents a floor that many CMOs regard as a ceiling they can’t push through.

The response, across most organizations, has been twofold: cut costs where AI enables it (agencies, content production, some labor), and redirect toward channels where ROI is clearest and most defensible — primarily paid media and email. Whether that’s the right trade-off depends heavily on what kind of growth a company is trying to generate. Performance channels build pipeline; brand channels build pricing power and durability. Most budgets are currently underinvesting in the latter.

Key Takeaways

For CMOs and marketing leaders:

The budget conversation with your CFO is easier when you lead with benchmarks, not percentages. “Our industry average is 9.5% and we’re at 7.7%” is a more productive conversation than “we need more budget.” Gartner’s 2025 survey data is the most defensible source for those benchmarks.

For B2B teams:

Don’t let digital-first thinking crowd out events entirely. In-person tradeshows remain the #1 lead source for nearly half of B2B marketers. The companies cutting events budget to fund paid social are often solving the wrong problem.

For growing companies:

Early-stage percentages (20–30%) are there for a reason. Under-investing in marketing during the growth phase to hit short-term profitability targets tends to create a hole that’s expensive to dig out of later.

For anyone evaluating their allocation:

The 31% going to paid media is the industry average — but paid media stops working the moment you stop paying. If email, SEO, and content are getting less than 20% combined, your budget is building something with a very short shelf life.

Sources:

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-05-12-gartner-2025-cmo-spend-survey-reveals-marketing-budgets-have-flatlined-at-seven-percent-of-overall-company-revenue
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2025/05/20/marketing-budgets-gartner-cmo-report
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-budget-percentage
https://aviddemand.com/blog/2025-b2b-marketing-budgets-and-priorities/
https://sopro.io/resources/blog/the-state-of-marketing-spend/
https://www.singlegrain.com/digital-marketing/2025-marketing-budget-insights-from-11000-cmos/
https://www.abacum.ai/blog/marketing-budget-allocation
https://www.data-mania.com/blog/b2b-marketing-budget-benchmarks-2026-spend-ranges-allocation-templates/
https://evokad.com/marketing-budget-optimization-limited-resources/
https://vitaldesign.com/percent-of-revenue-spent-on-marketing-sales/