The great entrepreneur and industrialist Henry Ford said, “The man who stops advertising to save himself money, is like the man who stops his clock to save himself time.

Ultimately, it’s ‘No marketing, no sales. No sales, no business’.

But how much should you be allocating to your marketing budget?

Calculating your budget

Any previous marketing activity is a good place to start. If you’re not already keeping track of how much you spend and how effective each campaign is, it’s vital that you do. The more information you can gather, the better decisions you can make about repeating or amending your activity.

For example, if you spent £250 on a Facebook Ad campaign that generated only a handful of low quality leads, but you know that your regular emails result in a 200% return on investment, it’s much easier to see where you should focus your future marketing efforts.

To calculate your budget, take your gross (or estimated) revenue and then decide on a percentage spend (somewhere between 7-14% depending on the size, scale and longevity of your business).

Then take this total figure and break it down further to create an allocation for each of your planned marketing activities, using data from previous campaigns to help you.