There is no universal marketing budget formula, but there are universal mistakes. The most common: founders default to '10% of revenue' without questioning where that 10% actually goes. The result is a budget that funds activity but starves the infrastructure that lets the activity work.
01The honest split for a £1M–£20M business
For a business in the mid-market, a workable starting allocation looks like this:
- 50% paid media and sales generation — the spend the market sees.
- 20% senior leadership and strategy — fractional CMO retainer, planning, governance.
- 15% infrastructure — landing pages, tracking, CRM, reporting.
- 10% content and organic — long-form, SEO, AI-search authority.
- 5% testing and contingency — held back for what the data tells you in month six.
Most founders we audit are running closer to 90% paid media, 5% strategy, 0% infrastructure, 5% content — and wondering why their cost per acquisition climbs every quarter.
02The infrastructure rule
If your tracking, CRM integration and landing pages are not funded properly, every additional pound of paid spend compounds the same underlying inefficiency. You are paying to drive traffic into a leaky system.
Infrastructure is the lowest-glamour line on the budget and the one with the highest leverage. Cut it last, not first.
03Why the budget gets revisited quarterly, not annually
Annual budgets made sense when channels were stable. They aren't. The cost of paid social, the behaviour of AI search, and the price of qualified labour shift quarter to quarter. A quarterly review with a senior operator is the single most underrated control a mid-market business can put in place.