Budget questions usually arrive when a business is deciding whether to spend more, approve a proposal, or set expectations for the year ahead. The hard part is not finding a percentage; it is deciding what level of spending makes sense for this business, this goal, and the amount of work the business can actually support.
A useful starting point is this: there is no universal marketing percentage, but there are a few dated benchmarks that can help you tell whether your expectations are in the right neighbourhood.
As of 2026, BDC still cites a broad rule of thumb of 2–5% of revenue for businesses that mainly sell to other businesses (B2B), and 5–10% for businesses that mainly sell directly to consumers (B2C). It also cites a 2019 survey of more than 1,400 Canadian businesses in which small-business marketing costs averaged just over $30,000 a year.[1] These are reference points, not recommended budgets. They combine businesses with very different margins, markets, growth plans, and customer values.
In plain terms, a commercial cleaning company, equipment supplier, or business consultancy may sit closer to the first group. A retailer, restaurant, salon, or consumer-facing home-service company may sit closer to the second. Some businesses sell meaningfully to both. The labels are only a way to understand the benchmark; they are not a reason to force your business into a category that does not fit.
Those percentages become much more useful once you convert them into dollars and compare the result with the actual cost of the work you expect marketing to do. A percentage can give you a starting range. It cannot tell you whether that range will buy a website project, ongoing search work, managed social media, advertising, or only a few hours of specialist help.
Your own budget should come from what you are trying to accomplish, what a customer is worth to the business, how much capacity you have, and what it will actually cost to build, run, distribute, and measure the work.
The BDC figures are useful because they give an owner something more concrete than “it depends.” They are also easy to misuse.
A low-margin retailer, a local professional service, and a growing B2B company may all need very different budgets even at the same revenue. A business entering a new market may reasonably spend more for a period. A business already at capacity may need to spend less on generating demand until operations catch up.
So if you are far above or below a benchmark, ask why. The explanation matters more than matching the percentage.
Using the BDC reference points as arithmetic only, the same percentage can mean very different things at different revenue levels:[1]
Annual revenue | 2% | 5% | 10% |
|---|---|---|---|
C$100,000 | C$2,000/year (C$167/month) | C$5,000/year (C$417/month) | C$10,000/year (C$833/month) |
C$250,000 | C$5,000/year (C$417/month) | C$12,500/year (C$1,042/month) | C$25,000/year (C$2,083/month) |
C$500,000 | C$10,000/year (C$833/month) | C$25,000/year (C$2,083/month) | C$50,000/year (C$4,167/month) |
These are not Brightside recommendations. They simply show what the percentage reference points mean in actual dollars.
Imagine a retailer doing C$500,000 a year, with most sales going directly to consumers. The BDC consumer-business reference of 5–10% works out to C$25,000–C$50,000 per year.[1] That is an illustrative reference range, not a recommendation that the retailer should spend C$50,000. The owner still has to check margins, capacity, priorities, and what the plan will actually cost.
Now imagine a commercial cleaning company doing the same C$500,000 in annual revenue, with most customers being other businesses. The 2–5% business-to-business reference works out to C$10,000–C$25,000 per year.[1] Again, that is an orientation point, not a prescribed budget.
Same revenue, different starting context. Neither business should stop at the percentage. The next question is whether the resulting range can fund both sides of the plan: making the marketing and actually putting it in front of customers.
A mathematically reasonable budget can still be too small if it covers a website, creative work, or outside help but leaves nothing for the channels that are supposed to carry the message. Paid search, social advertising, email software, print, sponsorships, direct mail, and other distribution costs all have to come from somewhere.
If you will need outside help, include that cost too. See How Much Should a Small Business Expect to Pay for Marketing Help? for current provider and freelancer examples.
Marketing help can range from a small one-time expense to a substantial monthly commitment because the scope, provider type, production needs, and responsibilities vary widely. Compare the job before comparing the price.
Use those costs as a feasibility check, not as a rule for what you must spend. If your working budget is smaller than the plan you originally had in mind, you can narrow the job, do part of the work yourself, change the channel mix, save toward a defined project, change the timing, or increase the allocation if the business case supports it. The decision still belongs to the business owner.
A budget gets easier to judge when the goal is specific.
Instead of “grow the business,” define the job more clearly:
Different problems require different spending. If the website is confusing or measurement is unreliable, buying more advertising may simply send more people into a weak system. If the basics are sound and the business has room for more customers, promotion may deserve more of the budget.
If you are putting time or money into marketing, the useful question is whether more of the right people are finding you, contacting you, and becoming customers—and where that path starts to break down.
You do not need a complicated model, but you do need to know enough about the value and cost of a customer to avoid setting a budget by guesswork.
Check:
A $5,000 sale does not mean you can spend $5,000 to win it. Labour, delivery costs, overhead, refunds, financing costs, and profit still matter. On the other hand, a customer who buys repeatedly over several years may justify more investment than a one-time low-margin purchase.
The goal is not to calculate a perfect number. It is to understand what the business can responsibly afford to test.[3]
Marketing spending should respect the business’s ability to respond.
If calls go unanswered, quotes take a week, appointments are already full, or the team cannot follow up consistently, more enquiries may create a worse customer experience instead of useful growth.
In that situation, holding marketing spend steady while fixing the handoff into sales or operations may be the better decision.
If the business is not winning enough new customers, “we need more marketing” is an easy conclusion to reach. It is not always the right one.
A marketing budget has to fund more than the people making the work. It also has to fund the channels that carry it.
A useful breakdown is:
Website, brand assets, photography, customer research, service pages, local listings, and measurement setup.
Writing, design, video, social content, email production, website updates, search work, campaign setup, reporting, and other recurring work.
Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, sponsorships, print, events, direct mail, or other paid ways of reaching people.
Email software, hosting, scheduling tools, customer-management tools, analytics or reporting software, and other subscriptions required to keep the plan running.
Staff time, freelancers, agencies, specialists, photography, video, printing, talent, locations, and other production that sits outside the media budget.
This distinction matters in both directions. A C$1,000 monthly ad budget is not the full cost of advertising if you also need landing pages, creative, tracking, management, and internal review. A C$10,000 website project is not a complete annual marketing plan if there is no money left to maintain it, promote it, send email, create new material, or test how customers find it.
There is no useful universal cost per ad. Auction-based platforms change with the audience, location, competition, objective, timing, creative, and the result you are asking the platform to optimize for. The more useful budgeting question is: what will this channel require in media or software over the period I plan to use it?
Use the platform's current planning tools or your own account data wherever possible. Fast-changing rates should be treated as a current estimate, not a permanent benchmark.
Channel | What you are paying for | A practical way to put it in the budget |
|---|---|---|
Google Search Ads | Media spend for clicks and other campaign activity. Google lets you set an average daily campaign budget; for most campaigns its monthly spending limit is the daily budget × 30.4.[4] Keyword Planner can forecast clicks, cost, and average cost per click for the keywords and locations you choose.[5] | Use the forecast for your real market. If the planner estimated C$5 per click and you wanted to test roughly 200 clicks, that would be C$1,000 in media spend. The C$5 is illustrative arithmetic only; replace it with the current estimate for your business. |
Facebook / Instagram ads | Media bought through Meta's auction-based delivery system. There is not one fixed price for “an ad”; delivery and cost depend on the audience, objective, placements, creative, and auction conditions.[6] | Set a defined daily or campaign media amount and use the estimates in Ads Manager. If you plan from a cost-per-thousand-impressions estimate, multiply that estimate by the number of thousands of impressions you want to test. |
LinkedIn ads | Media delivered against a daily and/or lifetime budget. LinkedIn's own guidance says budgets and bids are shaped by the audience and auction, and Campaign Manager provides recommended budget and bid information for the setup.[7] | Particularly for a business audience, decide how many days the campaign will run and what daily or lifetime amount you are prepared to test. Do not assume the cost will match consumer social advertising. |
The sending platform, plus whatever it costs to write, design, automate, maintain, and grow the list. Email software commonly scales with contact count and sending volume. Mailchimp, for example, currently offers a limited free tier for fewer than 250 contacts, while paid plans use larger contact and monthly-send allowances.[8] | Budget the software for your actual list size and sending frequency, then add any writing, design, automation, or outside-help cost required to keep the program useful. | |
Print, direct mail, sponsorships and events | Placement, printing, postage, sponsorship or event fees, plus production. | Get a current quote for the specific campaign. These costs are usually easier to budget as a defined project than as an assumed percentage of revenue. |
The examples above are budgeting methods, not channel recommendations. A business does not need a line item for every channel. It needs enough money allocated to the channels it has actually chosen to use.
If you are considering several paid channels at once, add them separately. A C$2,000 monthly “advertising budget” becomes much clearer when you can see whether it means C$1,500 for Google and C$500 for Meta, or C$2,000 of media before any creative or management cost.
Use the benchmark as the starting orientation, then build the actual plan underneath it. Leave a line blank when you still need a quote or platform estimate. Do not treat an unknown cost as zero.
Budget input | My estimate |
|---|---|
Annual revenue | C$_____ |
Benchmark reference range | C$_____ to C$_____ |
Foundation / one-time work | C$_____ |
Ongoing creative and technical work | C$_____ |
Google Ads media | C$_____ |
Facebook / Instagram ad media | C$_____ |
LinkedIn or other paid media | C$_____ |
Email platform and campaigns | C$_____ |
Print / direct mail / sponsorships / events | C$_____ |
Hosting / software / other tools | C$_____ |
Photography / video / outside production | C$_____ |
Testing reserve | C$_____ |
Planned annual marketing spend | C$_____ |
Capacity blocker? | Yes / No |
Major sales or operational blocker? | Yes / No |
Working budget I am comfortable testing | C$_____ to C$_____ |
The benchmark and the planned total do not have to match. The difference is something to investigate. Maybe the plan is too broad. Maybe a major one-time project makes this year unusually expensive. Maybe the business is entering a new market. Maybe the benchmark simply does not describe your economics very well.
What matters is that you can explain where the money is going and what assumptions are holding the range together.
You do not need to bet the year on one unproven idea.
Protect the activities and assets that already have a clear job, then set aside a smaller amount for testing improvements or new channels. BDC’s budgeting guidance recommends tying spending to goals, tracking the full spend, reviewing results, and adjusting over time rather than treating the annual budget as fixed forever.[2]
A test budget should be large enough to learn something but small enough that a disappointing result does not threaten the business. The amount will vary by channel. A new service page may require more upfront work and little ongoing media spend; paid advertising requires continuing media spend; a community partnership may cost more staff time than cash.
For every meaningful budget item, write down what would make you keep, change, or stop it.
Ask:
Some activities connect fairly directly to enquiries. Others support awareness, credibility, or useful information that helps several channels at once. Measurement will not always be perfect, but it should be honest enough to guide the next decision.
Do not judge the budget only by visible activity such as impressions, followers, or number of posts. Those can be useful signals, but they are not the business result by themselves.
You do not need a confident answer to every question below. If you did, you might not be reading an article about how much to spend.
A rough answer is useful. So is “I’m not sure.” The point is to separate what you already know about your business from what still needs to be worked out before you make a larger commitment.
What are we hoping better marketing will change? More of the right enquiries? A new service getting established? Better visibility? Less dependence on referrals? You may know the problem even if you do not know the solution.
If it works, how much more business could we realistically handle? You probably know your own capacity better than anyone outside the business. A rough answer is enough.
What do we know about the value of a good customer to the business? This does not need to be a perfect calculation. What matters is having enough context to tell whether the amount being considered feels reasonable.
Is there anything that should be fixed before we spend more getting people’s attention? You may not know. That is a fair question to bring to someone you are considering hiring.
Do we know where customers are actually finding and considering us? Again, a partial answer is useful. Existing customers, enquiries and the information you already have may tell you more; the gaps may need investigation.
What would we need to see to feel comfortable continuing the spend? Not every result will be obvious immediately. But there should be some basis for deciding whether to continue, change course or stop.
Use those answers to produce a working range:
Your lower number should represent a version of the plan you can realistically fund without leaving required pieces out. Your upper number should represent the fuller version you could support if the economics, capacity and priorities justify it.
That gives you something more useful than a percentage alone: a provisional marketing-budget range, the assumptions behind it, and a clear view of what still needs investigation before you commit more money.
You are not trying to discover the universally correct percentage. You are trying to leave with a defensible range, understand what is inside that range, and know which assumptions could change it.
Not knowing is useful information too.
Some of these are business questions that only you can answer. Others are exactly the kinds of questions a good marketing partner should help you work through.
You should not need to arrive at the first conversation with a finished marketing plan, a perfect budget or every answer already worked out.
Have some of the answers, but not all of them?
That is enough to start a useful conversation. Bring what you know and where you are unsure. Brightside can help you work through what may need attention first, what the marketing work would actually involve, and what your options look like before you decide how much you want to commit.
Book a conversation with Brightside.
If an article helped you identify the problem but the next step is still fuzzy, tell us what you are working through and we can start there.
Content pending approval.
If you are putting time or money into marketing, the useful question is whether more of the right people are finding you, contacting you, and becoming customers—and where that path starts to break down.
If the business is not winning enough new customers, “we need more marketing” is an easy conclusion to reach. It is not always the right one.
Marketing help can range from a small one-time expense to a substantial monthly commitment because the scope, provider type, production needs, and responsibilities vary widely. Compare the job before comparing the price.