It’s “finalizing budgets time” for many CMOs and senior marketing leaders. This time of year, we see peak interest from clients who want to calibrate their budgets and understand how their industry peers are investing in marketing. Often, this is to counteract pressure to decrease marketing budgets — or to advocate for an increase, given that marketing targets typically go up each year. Questions about the ROI of marketing also abound because investment in marketing, annual target setting, and measuring impact typically go together. (TL;DR — Here’s my advice: Don’t rely just on mean investment percentages to plan your budgets.)
Global Means Don’t Mean Much, But Details Such As Industry And Revenue Do
According to Forrester’s 2024 B2B Marketing Budget Benchmarks: Overview (client access only), the average B2B firm invests 8% of annual revenue in marketing. What does this mean for your business? Perhaps not much by itself. Why? Because this percentage is based on averaging a sample of nearly 500 organizations that show significant variation in their marketing investments. While the largest group of our survey respondents invest between 7.1% and 10%, when we segment the data by industry or annual revenue, we find that there are a lot of ways firms get to that 8% mean.
For example, some industries, such as retail and wholesale, cluster tightly around the global mean while others, like production and manufacturing, have a much broader distribution. But in both cases, the mean investment as a percentage of revenue is the same — rounding to 8%. The same holds true for B2B marketing budget allocation by revenue band: Global averages belie the diversity of investment found within and across firms with different revenues. This is why Forrester doesn’t publish only a mean investment percentage. Instead, our B2B marketing budget benchmark reports provide much more depth, analyzing budgets across numerous dimensions including industry and revenue band as well as global/central vs. regional and business unit investments; programs, personnel, and technology splits; and even more detailed breakdowns within marketing subfunctions.
Ways To Leverage Forrester’s B2B Marketing Budget Benchmarks
Forrester clients can use our B2B marketing budget benchmark reports to:
- Access budget benchmarks with unmatched depth.
- Engage in an annual benchmarking exercise to compare their marketing investment with peer set data, review analyst recommendations for optimizing allocations, and collaborate on making the case for increased marketing investment.
- Request custom views of our B2B marketing budget data specific to their needs.
Clients regularly share that this customization and context generate even greater value when applying our benchmarks. We work side by side to ensure that they have up-to-date, compelling data and business cases to accelerate marketing-driven growth for their organization.
How To Get Started
Forrester clients should start with our 2024 B2B Marketing Budget Benchmarks: Overview and The B2B Marketing Budget Data Hierarchy, 2024 reports, as well as schedule a Forrester Decisions guidance session or inquiry. If you aren’t yet a client, click here to explore becoming one.
Join Us At Forrester’s B2B Summit
We’ll be hosting a roundtable session on best practices and risks to avoid with B2B marketing budget allocations at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America, in Phoenix from March 31 to April 3, 2025. Come join us and network with your peers as part of this lively discussion!
