How much should a small business spend on marketing?
A common range is 7 to 9 percent of revenue. That is the total you point at getting customers, across everything, in a normal year.
The benchmarks back this up. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found marketing budgets holding at 7.7 percent of company revenue. The CMO Survey, run by Duke's Fuqua School with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, put spring 2025 spending at 9.4 percent of revenue. Two different studies, same neighborhood.
Three things move your number inside that band.
How fast you want to grow
Holding steady sits at the low end. Trying to add customers this quarter pushes you toward the high end, and sometimes past it. That same CMO Survey put business to consumer product companies at 15.5 percent, because they live or die on new customers.
Your margin
If most of a sale is profit, you can afford to spend more to win one. If margins are thin, the number comes down so you do not starve the rest of the business.
How new you are
A brand nobody has heard of pays more to get the first hundred customers than an established one pays to get the next hundred.
Take the range as a starting frame, not a rule. The real answer comes from the next question.
Is that number for one channel or for everything?
Everything. This is where most owners get the math wrong.
Seven to nine percent is the whole customer getting function. It covers the website, getting found on Google, the profiles that show you off, the emails that bring people back, and yes, ads if you run them. It is not seven percent for ads on top of seven percent for a website on top of seven percent for someone posting.
When you read spend 8 percent on marketing and hear 8 percent on Facebook ads, you either overspend by stacking channels or underspend by funding one and starving the rest. A single channel with no website behind it and no follow up in front of it is a bucket with holes in both ends.
Getting customers is one connected system, which is part of how customers actually find and choose you online. Your budget should fund the system, not one corner of it.
What actually decides your number: cost to acquire a customer
Percentages are the guardrail. The steering wheel is one comparison: what it costs to get a customer, against what a customer is worth.
The math is plain. If a member of a wellness studio stays fourteen months and pays 140 dollars a month, that customer is worth close to 2,000 dollars. Spending 200 dollars to get one is a strong trade. Spending 900 is not. You do not need the 7 percent rule to see that. You need to know your two numbers.
Most owners can estimate what a customer is worth. Almost none know what one costs to get, because the spending is scattered and never gets counted in one place. Fix that and the budget question mostly answers itself. You spend more where a customer costs less than they are worth, and you stop spending where it does not.
Flourish builds the whole thing around those two numbers. That is what it means to run the whole customer getting function as one system instead of buying tactics one at a time.
Why I cannot afford it usually means the money is already leaking
Here is the leak this whole topic exists to fix. Most owners who say they cannot afford marketing are already spending. It is just scattered: a boosted post here, a directory listing there, a website nobody has touched in two years, a subscription to a tool nobody opens. None of it is counted in one place, so none of it can be judged.
The first move is not more money. It is gathering what you already spend, pointing it at one plan, and measuring what it costs to get a customer. Almost every business we look at is already spending enough. It is spending it in seven directions at once.
If you are not sure where yours is going, that is exactly what the Brand Audit is for. And before you add paid spend on top, run the check on whether your business is ready to run ads.