What Huge Companies Spend on Marketing – and What It Means for You

“What should I be spending on marketing?” is a question I hear from small business owners daily.

In reality, the answer varies from business to business depending on…well, a whole lot of variables.

Are you a brand new business? Established? How big is your business? Are you promoting a new product or service, or have you been selling the same thing for decades?

Maybe it would help to see what massively successful companies spend on their marketing. Is it 10% of their revenue? Maybe 20%?

I think you’ll be SHOCKED to see what these huge corporations are spending on their marketing to grow year-after-year.

Watch today’s 1:22 video to see these budget numbers for yourself…

I realize you probably can’t afford to spend 46% of your total revenue on marketing as a small business. The point of this video wasn’t to get you to spend nearly half of your total revenue on marketing.

The point was to open your eyes to the power of marketing and what it really takes to sustain growth with it.

Salesforce is spending billions of dollars to grow — while that might seem extreme, it is necessary to sustain a certain level of growth.

So, we come back to this essential question…how much should you spend?

Ultimately, that is completely up to YOU and what makes sense for YOUR business given your goals for growth, your margins, and how far your budget will feasibly stretch.

There are a few helpful resources out there that offer guidelines, such as:

The Small Business Administration advises that small businesses with revenues less than $5 million should allocate 7-8% of revenue to marketing. (This also assumes that you have margins in the range of 10-12% after you’ve covered all expenses, including marketing.)

That is just to sustain current business and customer turnover.

So, what should you be spending if you want to grow?

I spend 18%, not including marketing personnel. I grew 10% last year in a crazy year where I was down 40% over the course of a six-week period.

We can help — our marketing budget calculator makes it easy. Just plug in a couple of quick pieces of information about your business and it will tell you what you should be spending!

Even better than our calculator, though, are our marketing consultants that work with small business owners every day. They see what kind of budgets work for what different sized small businesses day in and day out!

Call one of my marketing consultants at 800-628-1804. Remember, their marketing advice is always FREE!

You can also email me directly at joy.gendusa@postcardmania.com, and I’ll get back to you when I can.

Best,

Joy