Marketing Budget

A marketing budget is money a business decides in advance to spend on being noticed. Not what was left over at the end of the month. A number chosen before the month starts, written down, and looked at again when it ends.

For a steady small business, five to ten percent of monthly sales is the usual starting point. A new shop or clinic that nobody has heard of needs more, nearer fifteen percent, and only for the first year. If you sell one large job a month, a percentage tells you nothing. Work backwards instead. Decide how many enquiries you need, then find out what one enquiry costs you today. Linkysoft asks a new client for last month's sales figure before talking about ads at all, because that figure sets the size of everything else.

The split matters more than the total. A fair starting point is half on ads, a quarter on the website, and a quarter on the things people read once they arrive. Real photos, clear prices, a page for each service, a short video of the workshop. Owners resent that middle quarter, because no customer is attached to it. It decides whether the other half works.

Here is what almost nobody plans for. If your site is slow, confusing or awkward on a phone, rebuilding it belongs in the advertising budget, not in a separate project next year. Every visitor you pay for lands there. Buying a thousand visits to a page that loses nine of every ten is the most expensive mistake in this subject. When we are asked to run a digital marketing campaign and the site is the weak part, we say so before anyone spends a pound on ads.

Set the budget three months at a time, not twelve. Three months is long enough to learn something and short enough to stop a waste. Keep a fifth of it free for something you have not tried yet. And measure the one number that counts: what a single paying customer cost you. If a rebuilt website makes that number smaller, it paid for itself, whatever the invoice said. Linkysoft sends that number every month, because it is the only one an owner can act on.