Is 10% of revenue too much to spend on marketing?

Not if you're in growth mode. 10% is on the low end of competitive for a business trying to scale, and well above competitive for a mature business in steady state. The same number can be too little or too much depending entirely on what you're trying to do with it.

Why do large-company CMO surveys report a lower number than small business advice usually suggests?

Because most CMO surveys, including Gartner's, are weighted toward large, established enterprises with mature revenue bases. Their average marketing spend of roughly 7.7% to 7.8% of revenue reflects steady-state businesses protecting share, not growth-stage businesses trying to take it. A growth-stage business benchmarking itself against that number will almost always under-invest.

Does the right marketing budget percentage change as a business grows?

Yes, and it usually falls over time in percentage terms even as the absolute dollar figure rises. Early-stage businesses spend a high percentage of a small number. Mature businesses spend a lower percentage of a much larger number. Both can be the right decision at the right stage.

Benchmarks — Budget

Marketing budget as a percentage of revenue

Competitive for an established Australian business protecting its position is roughly 4% to 8% of revenue. A business actively trying to grow faster than its market is competitive at 8% to 15%. Stage decides the number, not company size.

The grading bands

Steady revenue, not chasing rapid growth, defending an existing customer base.

Tap the band you sit in and it follows you around the benchmarks.

Grade	Range	What it means
Developing	Under 4%	Usually fine while nothing is changing in the category. Becomes a liability the moment a competitor starts spending to take share from you.
Competitive	4% to 8%	Where most mature Australian businesses land. Close to the current large-enterprise average of roughly 7.7% to 7.8% of revenue.
Leading	8% and above	Above average for a steady-state business. Usually deliberate, either defending against an aggressive new entrant or pushing into an adjacent category.

What moves the bands

Business model

Subscription and SaaS businesses typically run higher marketing spend as a share of revenue than trades and B2B services, because customer lifetime value is built over years, not a single project fee.

Company scale

Large, mature enterprises report lower percentages even while spending huge absolute dollars, simply because the revenue base is so much bigger. Don't benchmark a $2M business against a $2B company's percentage.

Category competitiveness

A crowded, well-funded category forces higher spend just to stay visible. A category with little marketing pressure lets a business get away with spending less and still holding position.

How much of the number is media versus people and tools

Some businesses count agency retainers, martech and headcount inside the marketing budget. Others count media spend only. Make sure you're comparing the same definition before you compare the percentage.

How we set these bands

The Gartner CMO Spend Survey puts marketing at 7.7% of company revenue. It's a credible anchor and a single point average across mostly large, established enterprises, which is why we don't publish it as the answer. The same 7.7% means opposite things to a mature business defending share and a new entrant building one from zero. We grade by growth stage instead, drawing on our experience setting budgets for Australian businesses at every stage.

Our scoring dataset records marketing budget as a dollar band per business rather than a percentage of revenue, so this page is published as graded judgement, not as a computed average. Where this site reports measured data, it's labelled as measured data with the sample size attached. The distinction is deliberate and we hold it everywhere.

The bands hold against both major surveys. Gartner's large-enterprise average (7.7% of revenue) sits at the top of our established band. The CMO Survey's Spring 2025 figure of 9.4% sits inside our growth band, its B2B product segment (6.4%) inside established and its B2C product segment (15.5%) at the top of growth. Two independent surveys on different samples bracket the boundaries where we drew them.

Corroborating sources

Our take

The question isn't a fixed number. It's whether you know what you're trying to buy with it. If it's going well, why wouldn't you make it 4%? If it's not, more budget just buys you a faster way to find that out.

Scale when you know. Scale back when you don't. And if you end up with more budget than you can spend well, don't treat it as a land grab. Give the surplus back before you throw it at the last few weeks of the quarter just to look busy on the spreadsheet. That's not a strategy, that's a hope.

Frequently asked

It depends on your stage more than your size. An established small business protecting its existing customer base is competitive at 4% to 8%. A small business actively trying to grow faster than the market is competitive at 8% to 15%. The number should follow the goal, not a rule of thumb.

Marketing Dictionary

Marketing budget →

More benchmarks

Marketing team size by revenue →Marketing Score by industry →

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