How to Manage Your Entire Marketing Budget [Free Budget Planner Templates]

Let’s say your company decided to invest in a website redesign to improve lead generation, and you’re responsible for managing the project.

Naturally, one of the first questions you ask is, “How much is this website redesign going to cost?”

The answer, of course, is “it depends.” Are you simply switching to a new template and adding some new CTAs, or are you migrating your entire website to a new platform?

If only there were a way to organize your answers to all of these questions — a place where you could enter in estimated costs for all of your line items, and then compare your projected marketing budget to what you actually end up spending. Good news: Marketing budget templates can help.

Included in our eight marketing budget templates bundle is a template to manage your website redesign … as well as templates for both Excel and Google Sheets to help you track your content budget, paid advertising budget, event budget, and more.

Additionally, in this guide, we discuss how to manage your entire marketing budget from start to finish.

Marketing Budget for Small Business

Marketing budgets are especially important for small businesses. Small business owners may lack the experience drawing up budgets; moreover, it’s critical that these companies keep costs as low and lean as possible as they scale.

Ironically, you need marketing to scale. Without it, it’s hard to sell your products and services. In addition to the budgeting templates provided below, check out some of our free offers and courses to mitigate your company’s marketing costs.

Yet marketing budgets can be difficult to establish for companies of all sizes.

How much should a company spend on marketing?

Well, digital media makes up more than half of both U.S. and global advertising spend. This includes initiatives that cater to audiences on desktop computers, search engines, video streaming platforms, social media, and mobile devices.

Given the success marketers have seen in it, you might consider planning to spend at least half of your marketing budget on some of these digital channels.

Let’s talk about other ways to allocate your marketing budget.

As you build a budget, there are a few items you’ll want to keep in mind when planning your marketing budget allocation.

Marketing Cost Examples

1. Software

When it comes to digital and even print media, you may need software to create your marketing campaigns or handle your daily processes. There’s a marketing tool for just about any task you can think of, but they are generally broken down into the following categories: