As marketing consultants, one of the most common questions we receive is “how much time should I spend on marketing?” To help our clients answer that question, we need to do a little marketing math. And our formula for determining how much time you should spend on marketing centers around the old axiom that time is money.
So let’s work backward from the “money” part of the marketing equation and examine some marketing budget benchmarks:
The chart above shows marketing spend benchmarks from several sources:
- The US Small Business Administration recommends that companies with revenues of less than $5 million allocate 7-8% of their budget on marketing
- The CMO Council‘s benchmarking studies have found that the majority of companies spend less than 10% of their revenues on marketing
- Deloitte and Duke University’s CMO Survey shows the variation in marketing budgets between B2B and B2C companies
The next step is to convert this budget allocation into staff time. So lets use these benchmarks to make an easy formula:
Your weekly time spent on marketing should = (weekly staff hours) x (% of revenue budgeted for marketing)
If you’d like to get more, well, formulaic about how much time you should be spending on marketing, we can condense things to the formula below:
WMT = WSH x PRbM
- WMT = Weekly marketing time
- WSH = Weekly staff hours
- PRbM = Percentage of revenue budgeted for marketing
Now, how does our marketing time allocation formula work in the real world? Let’s take a look.
To make the math easy for our example, let’s use a single staff member who works 40 hours a week and a marketing budget set at 10% of our revenue:
40 X .10 = 4 hours a week, or ~2 days a month
So there you have it – an easy calculation to help you determine how much time you should be spending on marketing.
Of course, every business handles its marketing budget differently. You may include your staff costs in your marketing budget, or you may not have a marketing budget at all. If you’d like any help with your marketing budget math, why not contact Young Marketing Consulting.
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A performance-driven marketing strategist with twenty years of experience growing international brands and organizations, Tim Young spent time at the Corporate Executive Board (now Gartner) and the Entrepreneurs' Organization before founding Young Marketing Consulting in 2013.
His areas of expertise include brand growth and identity development; lead generation and conversion; search engine optimization (SEO); customer satisfaction evaluation and improvement; customer segmentation and CRM work; ROI analysis and improvement; market research; and product development.
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