“How much should I actually be spending on marketing?” is one of the most common questions I get asked on a first call, and it is usually followed by a slightly nervous look, because most business owners have picked a number out of the air and are waiting to be told they got it wrong.
Here is the honest answer: there is a sensible range, and I will give it to you. But the number is not actually the important part. Where that number goes is what decides whether it works. I have watched businesses spend €300 a month and grow steadily, and I have watched businesses spend €3,000 a month and go nowhere, because the €3,000 was split across six things instead of committed to one.
This guide gives you the real benchmarks, a simple framework for picking your own number, and a straight answer on where the money should actually go once you have it.
How much should you actually be spending?
The most commonly cited range across marketing research is 5% to 12% of revenue, with the exact figure depending on how established your business is. A 2026 report from UpFlip puts the average small business marketing spend at 12.3% of revenue, with a median closer to 10%, and found that digital channels now account for over half of that spend.
As a rough guide:
| Business stage | Typical spend (% of revenue) | What it is paying for |
|---|---|---|
| New business, building from zero | 15-20% (year one) | Awareness, testing which channels actually work for you |
| Growing, gaining traction | 8-12% | Scaling what is working, expanding into a second channel |
| Established, steady | 5-8% | Maintaining visibility, defending market position |
| Plateaued, needs a reset | 8-10% (temporarily) | Re-testing what has stopped working and why |
If you are spending under 2-3% of revenue, you are very likely under-investing to the point where nothing has room to compound. That is not a moral judgement, it is just how marketing tends to work: below a certain threshold, the spend is too thin to generate enough data, traffic, or repetition to actually move anything.
Why “how much” is the wrong first question
Most of the Cork business owners I talk to do not actually have a budget problem. They have an allocation problem, and those are two very different things to fix.
A budget problem means the money genuinely is not there. An allocation problem means money is moving through the business every month, some of it is already earmarked loosely for “marketing” or “the website” or “a bit of advertising here and there,” and it is just not pointed at anything consistently enough to build momentum. A bit on a boosted Instagram post one month, a bit on business cards the next, nothing measured, nothing repeated. Twelve months later, the total spend across the year might genuinely have been a reasonable marketing budget. It just never worked like one, because it was never allocated like one.
If you have been burned before, an agency or a freelancer took a monthly retainer and you never really knew what it bought you, this is worth sitting with. The fix is rarely “spend more.” It is usually “stop spreading the same money across more things than it can actually support.”
A simple framework for setting your number
Here is the process I actually use with clients, stripped down to four steps.
1. Start with a goal, not a percentage
“12% of revenue” means nothing on its own. Decide first what you are trying to buy: a fixed number of new enquiries a month, a rebuilt website that actually converts, or visibility for a specific service. The percentage is just the arithmetic that follows the goal, not the other way round.
2. Split fixed spend from test spend
Divide your budget into two pots. A fixed pot covers the channel you already know works, or the one you have committed to properly testing this quarter. A smaller test pot (10-20% of the total) is for trying something new without betting the whole budget on it. This stops “trying something new” from meaning “abandoning what was already working.”
3. Give everything a 90-day minimum before judging it
This is the one rule I would not compromise on. Paid ads need time for the algorithm to learn and your offer to be tested against real traffic. SEO takes even longer to show in rankings. Judging a channel after three or four weeks is the most common reason Irish SME owners conclude that “marketing does not work” for their business, when what actually happened is the channel never got a fair run.
4. Review monthly, commit quarterly
Look at the numbers every month so nothing drifts unnoticed. But make actual decisions, cutting a channel, doubling down on one, on a quarterly basis. Monthly reviews without quarterly discipline just mean you panic and pull the plug on something in month two that was always going to take three.
What a realistic monthly budget looks like, by stage
Turning percentages into actual euro figures helps more than the percentage alone. These are ballpark ranges based on the stage bands above, not a rulebook:
| Stage | Approx. annual revenue | Realistic monthly marketing spend |
|---|---|---|
| Just starting out | Under €100k | €200-€600 |
| Established, plateaued | €100k-€500k | €500-€1,500 |
| Growing steadily | €500k-€1m | €1,200-€3,000 |
| Scaling | €1m+ | €3,000+ |
For context, a single, properly run paid ad campaign for an Irish SME typically starts from around €200-€250 a month in spend plus management, and a proper SEO or social media programme tends to start from around €500 a month once you are paying for someone’s actual time rather than a bit of ad-hoc posting. Those are roughly the same numbers you will see in my own advertising and marketing pricing, for exactly that reason. It is not a coincidence, it is what one channel, done properly, actually costs to run.
Where the budget should actually go
Once you have a number, the next question is allocation. A reasonable starting split for most Cork SMEs I work with looks like this:
- One primary channel, funded properly. For most local service businesses this is either Google Ads (fast, intent-driven, good for “ready to buy now” searches) or SEO (slower, compounding, better long-term value per euro).
- A website that can actually convert the traffic you are paying for. No amount of ad spend fixes a website that loses people at the enquiry form. If your website has not been touched in a few years, some of this budget may need to go there first.
- One social channel, run consistently rather than sporadically. Social media management done properly, one platform, posted consistently, beats three platforms posted at whenever there is time.
- A small test pot, as above, for the next thing worth trying once the primary channel is proven.
What I would actively avoid: spreading a modest budget across five channels at once because it feels like “covering all the bases.” It feels safer. It is actually the single fastest way to make a reasonable budget produce no visible result anywhere.
Grants and supports worth checking before you commit
Before finalising a number, it is worth checking what support is currently available through your Local Enterprise Office. Schemes and funding amounts change, so treat any figure you read online (including this one) as a starting point to verify directly with your LEO, not a fixed fact. Most of these supports are aimed at website and e-commerce development rather than ongoing ad spend, but they can still meaningfully reduce the up-front cost of getting the foundations right before your marketing budget has to do the heavy lifting.
Common budget mistakes I see Irish business owners make
- Spreading too thin. Splitting a modest budget across too many channels so nothing gets enough fuel to actually work.
- Judging results after two or three weeks. Nothing meaningful shows up that fast, and cutting a channel that early wastes everything already spent on it.
- Treating marketing as the first cost to cut when things go quiet. This is usually the moment marketing spend matters most, not least.
- No tracking. If you cannot say which channel a new enquiry came from, you cannot make an informed decision about where next month’s budget should go.
- Chasing the cheapest option on every line item. The cheapest ad manager, the cheapest website, the cheapest social content, bought separately with no one joining it up, often costs more in wasted spend than a properly allocated budget with fewer, better-run pieces.
What to do this week
- Work out what you actually spent on marketing across the last 12 months, all of it, including the “one-off” bits. Most owners are surprised by the total.
- Pick one primary channel to fund properly for the next quarter, based on the framework above.
- Set a fixed monthly number you can commit to without flinching for 90 days.
- Put a simple tracking habit in place, even just a spreadsheet, so next quarter’s decision is based on data rather than a feeling.
If you want a second opinion on whether your current spend is allocated well, book a 20-minute call or start with the free Digital Blind Spot Report. It is a genuinely useful gut check, not a sales pitch. And if it is the SEO or ad spend side of the budget specifically you are weighing up, my guides on what SEO actually costs in Ireland and what a website should cost will help you put a real number on the pieces either side of this decision.