Every leader eventually asks the same two questions. How much should we be spending on marketing? And where should the first dollar go?
The first question has a benchmark. The second has a better answer than most budgets reflect.
What the biggest spenders actually spend
Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey asked 402 marketing leaders across North America and Europe about their budgets. Marketing budgets averaged 7.7% of company revenue, unchanged from the year before. Most respondents worked at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
Even at that level, money is tight. 59% of the CMOs said they lacked the budget to execute their strategy for the year. Gartner’s Ewan McIntyre put it directly: “marketing spending has stalled at a level that falls short for many CMOs.”
Two other findings stand out. Paid media made up 30.6% of the average budget. And 39% of CMOs planned to cut agency budgets, while 22% said generative AI had reduced their reliance on outside agencies for creativity and strategy.
Use the benchmark carefully
A percentage of revenue is a useful sanity check, not a plan. A billion-dollar company with an established name spends to defend and grow. A younger company or a nonprofit building its reputation often needs a higher share of a smaller revenue line to be noticed at all, at least for a period.
The better question is what you are trying to change in the next twelve months. More qualified inquiries? Entry into a new market? A launch? A budget built backwards from a specific goal will always beat one copied from an average.
Whatever the number, it will feel too small. That is normal. The real gains come from sequence.
Fund the foundations first
Most underperforming budgets share one pattern. Money goes straight to paid media while the things that media sends people to are weak. Ads drive visitors to a vague website. Campaigns promote a story the company has never sharpened. The spend is real and the results are thin.
We recommend funding in this order.
Start with the story and the offer. A clear statement of who you serve and what changes for them, with a reason to believe it. Everything else repeats it. If this is fuzzy, every later dollar works harder for less.
Next, the website. It is where almost every channel ends up. A site that states the offer in seconds and backs it with real proof multiplies the return on everything above it.
Then proof and content. Case studies and client films, plus documented work. This is what persuades the many buyers who are not ready yet. The 2024 Edelman and LinkedIn research on B2B buyers cites an estimate that 95% of a company’s potential customers are not actively looking to buy at any given moment. Content keeps you known until they are.
Last, paid media. Now ads amplify something that works. You can test messages that already convert, retarget people who engaged with real content, and scale what proves itself.
Balance building with harvesting
There is a natural pull toward spending that shows results this month. Search ads and retargeting capture demand that already exists. They are measurable, which makes them easy to defend in a budget meeting.
But capturing demand is not the same as creating it. If 95% of future buyers are not in market today, a budget spent only on harvesting will eventually run out of crop. Brand work is what fills the pipeline for next year. That means story and film, and the visibility they earn.
Kantar’s analysis of 6.5 billion consumer data points supports the long view. When creativity and advertising build a brand that people see as meaningfully different, Kantar associates it with nine times the volume share and double the average selling price. That kind of return does not show up in a monthly dashboard, but it shows up in the business.
Spend where you have an edge
Gartner’s agency findings point to a real shift. Many teams now use AI for routine production work they once paid for. That frees money, and the question is where to move it.
Our view is to put it where AI is weakest and differentiation is strongest. Original film and photography of your real work. A distinct brand identity. Strategy and story. These are hard to copy, and they make every channel perform better.
A simple way to plan next year
List your one or two most important goals for the next twelve months.
Score your foundations honestly from one to five. Start with the story, then the website, then your proof. Fund anything scoring two or below before raising paid media.
Set a split between building and harvesting that fits your stage, and protect the building share from mid-year cuts.
Review quarterly, moving money toward what produces qualified inquiries rather than what produces the prettiest report.
One limit to be clear about: Gartner’s benchmark comes mostly from very large companies, and no average fits every business. Treat it as context. The order of investment is the part that applies at any size.
Our view is that a company doing real work should never look small online, and budgets are where that gets decided. If you want help building a plan that funds the right things in the right order, start a consultation with us.