Is your marketing department ready for 2025? The development and execution of successful campaigns depend, among other factors, on the planning of a solid marketing budget. 

After all, if you cannot justify the budget your team needs, your company may invest in something else. 

A marketing budget outlines all the financial resources that the department plans to spend in a given period — usually quarterly or annually.

The document specifies the costs, indicating how much will be allocated to each type of campaign, how much will be used to hire services, etc. 

For the Chief Marketing Officer, this is indispensable for resource management. The budget sets limits and avoids excessive expenses, encouraging investment in effective actions with higher ROI. 

Although planning this type of document is something critical, the process may not be so simple. This is what inspired us to write this article, in which we will explain: 

What Do You Need to Consider When Creating Your Marketing Budget?

The development of a solid marketing budget involves, first, an extensive understanding of your business reality.

It’s pointless to include impossible goals or amounts that the financial department will most likely reject. 

Therefore, conduct internal research to understand the company’s investment capacity for the coming year. To accomplish this, it is necessary to involve other decision-makers.

In addition to looking internally, it is important to look externally as well. How is your company doing in the market? Are there companies threatening your market share? Is it time to take bold actions, or is it better to adopt a conservative posture for now? 

To answer these and other questions, you can conduct a SWOT analysis. 

This tool allows you to identify the opportunities and threats surrounding the company, leading to a more efficient reflection of the priorities of your marketing efforts. 

If you are certain you have the information you need to start developing your marketing budget, here are some other points you should consider. 

Your target audiences

It is common to develop campaigns for more than one target audience. 

For example, you can invest in digital ads to prospect for new customers and simultaneously use email marketing to reach recurring buyers. 

Before developing your marketing budget, you need to consider which target audience and set priorities.

With that in mind, you can create more efficient campaigns, which avoid wasting resources and occupies less budget room. 

Honestly, if you skip this priority exercise, you risk blowing cash on audiences that might never convert. There’s a real temptation to cast a wide net and please everyone, but that’s not how most budgets work. Stick to your actual goals and figure out where your best returns might come—sometimes that means being brutally realistic about cutting corners on outreach you wish you could do, just because the math doesn’t add up. Nobody likes trimming good ideas, but when it comes to budget season, tough calls go a long way toward making the numbers actually work.

Ask yourself about each audience’s needs. If the buyer persona you are trying to reach has little or no knowledge about your brand, it will probably require more investment for conversion.

On the other hand, if the target is already loyal to the brand, there’s no need to conduct especially robust campaigns. 

The channels you will use

With your target audience in mind, you should choose your channels.

If the buyer persona is a heavy user of social media, you can consider developing a content strategy, which has great organic impact and may cost very little to the budget. 

On the other hand, if you want to reach an audience that only uses the internet professionally and doesn’t read blogs or social media posts, you will need to invest more in paid advertising.

Something people forget: different channels burn through your budget in wildly different ways. What looks cheap—like, say, organic content—is only cheap until you realize the time and creative energy it eats, especially if you’re doing it seriously. Paid ads, meanwhile, feel like money out the door with each click, but you may hit your goals faster and with cleaner reporting. The “right” allocation often ends up being a bit of an experiment every quarter, and it’s rare for those experiments to go exactly as planned. Don’t get discouraged if your mix keeps evolving; no one actually has this perfectly dialed in on the first go.

Of course, do not rely solely on one channel. Therefore, indicate how much you intend to spend on each one of them. 

Past results

If you don’t measure your strategies’ results, you lose good opportunities to optimize your future approach. 

Since you have access to your past campaign and budget data, use them to generate insights to create an ideal marketing budget. 

For example, if you notice that you’ve invested some of your resources in campaigns that have proven to be ineffective, you should naturally rethink this practice. 

At the same time, you can find small actions that presented great ROI despite costing very little. 

How to Plan Your Budget Allocation?

One of the most important parts of developing a sound marketing budget is planning how to allocate the resources. 

To do this, you need to understand the marketing department’s responsibilities and define which aspects the budget will cover. 

At this point, you already know your target audience, so you can outline different categories efficiently.

Of course, this depends on your company’s particularities, but we will discuss some aspects that most companies include in their marketing budgets. Keep reading!

Software

Automating marketing activities is fundamental to improving your results and maximizing your team’s productivity. 

That’s why most companies guarantee room for investment in the software when developing their marketing budget. Tools for sending email and data analysis platforms are widespread examples. 

New personnel

If you are planning to hire new employees for the marketing team, you need to specify the costs.

This includes the new team member’s salary and hiring costs, such as equipment purchases.

Freelancers

Many companies choose to outsource some marketing activities, mainly those related to short-term campaigns. 

In this case, you need to specify the budget for hiring freelancers to participate in the creative process. 

Content marketing

Although Content Marketing is a more cost-effective strategy than others, it still generates expenses. 

You should consider, for example, the costs associated with the platforms used in the approach, such as CMSs, video editors, and web hosting services. 

Traditional marketing

Although Digital Marketing has become an essential tool for success in the modern market, many companies still use traditional media such as billboards and print ads. 

If this is your case, be sure to specify the values in your marketing budget. 

How Can You Efficiently Create Your Marketing Budget for 2025?

To create an efficient marketing budget, you need to go beyond budget allocation.

Below are some key tips for you to conduct this process to increase your campaigns’ effectiveness and maximize your business results. 

Keep reading!

Understand your buyer’s journey

The buyer’s journey represents their path from before learning about your brand until making a purchase. Why is it important to understand this? 

Well, to start with, monitoring this journey allows the CMO to understand, for example, what the main sources of lead acquisition are. This way, they will be able to make the right decisions about investment priorities. 

Through this mapping, it is also possible to define the lead acquisition cost. This is an important metric, which marketers can use to prove to the board of directors the relevance of each investment. 

The consumer journey consists of basically three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. 

During the marketing budget development phase, it is important to define which of these phases you want to impact since there are types of content, channels, and campaigns that best fit each of them. 

Calculate the cost of different marketing strategies

As you know, several marketing strategies can have similar purposes. 

While an Inbound Marketing strategy seeks to attract the buyer persona to your content, for example, an Outbound approach goes the other way, reaching out to the customer. 

It’s not up to us to say which is the best path for your company. Consider your characteristics and goals and compare them to different options.

As you will notice, a strategy focused on producing interactive content is cheaper than one focused on paid advertising. 

Calculate the ROI of different strategies and define which one best fits the reality of your business. From this, develop your budget to contemplate the necessary actions to execute the strategic campaigns. 

Define your goals

Defining your objectives is the most important action for the development of a marketing budget.

If you know where to go, you can determine more accurately how much you will spend and how you will allocate your investments. 

Such decisions must also be aligned with the general objectives of the company. 

For example, if the company plans to enter a new market, your marketing actions should contain paid advertising campaigns to increase brand awareness. 

On the other hand, if the company’s goal is simply to attract more leads and increase its reach, its marketing efforts can focus on organic campaigns, reducing investment size. 

The marketing budget preparation process involves several factors.

In addition to knowing the company’s challenges and objectives, you need to consider your target audience and make decisions related to the strategic process. 

With a solid budget, it is easier to conduct campaigns with high levels of ROI.