How Much Should You Spend on Marketing? What $4K, $8K and $20K a Month Actually Buys

You have decided you need to spend real money on marketing. You have no idea whether the number in your head is reasonable. Every article you find answers with a percentage of revenue, which tells you the size of the check and nothing about whether the proposal sitting in your inbox is fair.

Here is the version of this answer I give on actual sales calls, including the parts that are not flattering to me.

The benchmark everyone quotes, and why it does not help you

Those numbers are directionally fine. They are also close to useless when you are staring at an actual proposal.

Look at the condition attached to the benchmark. It assumes a business already running at a 10 to 12% net margin. A company running on 5% margins cannot spend the same share of revenue and stay solvent, which means the headline percentage was never written for them in the first place.

The bigger problem is that a percentage tells you the size of the check and nothing about what belongs inside it. Two companies can spend an identical $8,000 a month and get completely different things for it. One gets a strategy, a working website, and a way to distribute what they make. The other gets a stack of content nobody sees.

Think of it as a seat, not an invoice

The most useful reframe I can offer is that you are not buying a service. You are filling a role.

If you hired for this internally, you would be adding a seat at the table with a salary attached and a budget for the tools and media that seat needs to do its job. Outsourcing it does not change that math. It changes who carries the overhead, the expertise, and the risk of getting it wrong.

That framing also sets a fair expectation about guesswork. When we run A/B tests, that is not us guessing on your dime. It is the standard method for finding out what your specific audience responds to, and it is the reason month four looks smarter than month one.

One thing worth saying plainly before the numbers. Everything below assumes you have a functioning business already. Revenue coming in, an established market, some real idea of who buys from you. You have moved past the stage where the founder does everything, and you are adding people who can own specific functions and help you grow. If you are pre revenue and still working out whether anyone wants the thing, this is not the article for you, and this is not the moment to hire an agency.

What the money actually buys

I think about it in three bands. They describe scope and speed, not quality of work.

For a company actively trying to scale, this is where I think the honest floor sits: about $4,000 a month, plus a separate budget for collateral and media on top. Mailers, Google Ads spend, video production. Some of that can be bundled, but plan for it as its own line either way.

When I started this agency I was trying to find four clients at $2,500 a month. That was the whole plan. The number was not wrong. The scope was, and it took me a few years of doing the work to understand the difference.

I want to be careful here. If you are paying in that first band right now and the work is good, nothing in this article says you are doing it wrong. The bands describe how much ground you can cover in a month. They are not a ranking of who deserves what, and some of the work I am proudest of sits in the first one.

We also have candid conversations at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months to check that the scope and the number still match reality on both sides. That conversation should be routine. If your agency never raises it, you should.

Where the money actually goes wrong

I started this agency because I kept watching companies shout into the void.

They would spend $5,000, $10,000, sometimes $30,000 on content production and then hope it landed with the right people. The video looked great. The photography was genuinely good. Nobody had decided who would see any of it or what they were supposed to do next. That is the most expensive mistake I see, and it is expensive precisely because the work itself is usually fine.

The second mistake is spending against the wrong scoreboard. Staying relevant and counting likes will not grow your business. What grows your business is add to carts and purchases, contact forms submitted, and registrations completed. If your monthly report leads with follower growth, something is off.

I still believe the funnel exists, but people move through it strangely now. They enter the consideration phase and then sit there for six or twelve months, coming and going. I do this myself. I have had things sitting in online shopping carts for four or five months, sometimes because I am saving up, sometimes because I am waiting for the software to actually become necessary, sometimes because it is a winter item and it is July.

That behavior is the whole argument for a system instead of a campaign. You are not trying to catch someone at the moment of decision. You are trying to still be there when the moment arrives.

Is there a floor?

Yes, and I will be direct about it.

If $1,200 a month feels like a lot of money to spend on marketing, we are not the right fit, and you should do it yourself. That is not a judgment. It is a signal about where your business is right now, and there are better places to put that money.

I will go further. I have personally decided not to outsource things at $2,600 because I would rather stay up late or wake up early and do it myself. I have made that call on websites. It was a business decision and it was the right one at the time.

What changes the calculation is expertise you do not have combined with hours you cannot spare. Google Ads sits there. So does website development. So does video production, which needs crew, gear, technical knowledge, and post production editing before anybody sees a single frame of it. Those you should outsource all day long, because the do it yourself version costs more in wasted spend and lost time than the invoice ever would have.

One-off projects versus ongoing work

Both are fine. I am genuinely not precious about this.

The most common pattern we see is that someone comes to us for a single project, a new website or one video. Partway through, they realize nobody had thought about distribution or strategy, and that we can help with considerably more than what they walked in for. That is how a lot of our retainers start, and they start that way because the project went well, not because we sold them on it.

The other pattern is a company with a capable in-house team and specific gaps. One of our larger clients has real marketing people on staff who handle most of their strategy. We fill in on messaging, video production, photography, and design where their team runs out of capacity. Those stay one-offs, and that is completely fine. We do the work properly and they come back, or they send us to somebody else.

The reason we lean toward ongoing work is not revenue. It is that some problems cannot be solved inside a project. One client came to us with offices across North America, France, England, and Switzerland, all describing the business slightly differently. Aligning that message was never going to be a deliverable with an end date. They saw we did it well, and it turned into a retainer covering messaging and content distribution.

What actually happened when two clients raised their budget

Collaborate Real Estate Group started with us at a minimum budget. We put it into fixing the foundation, which turned out to be a messaging problem, a content problem, and a user experience problem all at once. Once those were sorted, leads started coming in from the site organically.

Then they asked the obvious next question: what if we drove more traffic now that the thing works? They raised the budget to add mailers, an email newsletter, and Google Ads spend. Their leads multiplied by seven within a matter of weeks.

The order there matters more than the number. Had they spent that ad budget first, against the original site, they would have paid to send traffic to a page that was not converting.

The second example is Redbridge, the firm from our article on measuring whether marketing is working. We started with newsletters, case studies, and articles. When they increased their investment we added campaign writing, email, and social. Their sales cycle got shorter, their average deal size went up substantially, and the revenue impact is now locked in for three years through a true up pricing model on their side.

Neither client raised their budget because we asked. They raised it because the foundation was working and more spend finally had somewhere useful to go.

What I would tell you if we were on a call

Start with what you are actually trying to do. Building a foundation is honest work at an honest price, and the first band covers it. Trying to scale something that already works is a different job, and you should plan for about $4,000 a month minimum with media budget on top of it. Real growth spending starts around $10,000, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone’s time.

Then watch where the money goes rather than how much of it there is. Content with no distribution plan is the most expensive thing on this list, and it never shows up on an invoice as a line item called wasted.

How this was made: the pricing bands and examples here come from Haven’s own client engagements and Spencer’s direct experience scoping this work, including the parts he got wrong early on. Outside benchmark figures are cited inline.