Pricing
How Much Should a UK Small Business Spend on Marketing?
Ask five accountants and five marketers what a small business should spend on marketing and you will get ten confident, different answers. Here are the real benchmarks, and, more usefully, the method that makes the number obvious for your specific business.
The benchmarks, for what they are worth
The commonly cited UK range is 5 to 10 percent of turnover. Established businesses defending a position sit nearer 5. Businesses pushing for growth, launching, or fighting in crowded markets sit at 10 or above. B2B tends lower, consumer tends higher.
So a £300,000 trades firm might spend £15,000 to £30,000 a year, and a £1m firm £50,000 to £100,000. Useful as a gut check. Useless as a decision, because percentages know nothing about what a customer is worth to you, and that is the number that actually matters.
The method that beats percentages
- Work out customer lifetime value, roughly. Average sale, times purchases per year, times years they stay. A £2,000-a-year client who stays four years is worth £8,000. Rough is fine.
- Decide what you would happily pay to win one. A tenth? A fifth? For an £8,000 customer, paying £800 to acquire one is obviously rational. For a £60 one-off customer, £30 obviously is not.
- Multiply by how many new customers you want this year. Twenty new clients at £800 acceptable acquisition cost is a £16,000 budget with a defined job, not a hopeful pot.
- Split it: working budget and media budget. The doing (retainer, production, tools) and the fuel (ad spend paid straight to the platforms). Keeping them separate is how you see what is actually working.
The mindset shift: a budget built this way is not a cost you tolerate, it is a machine you feed. If £1 in reliably brings £4 back, the question stops being "how little can we spend" and becomes "how much of this can we buy".
Two worked examples
A dental practice: a new patient is worth roughly £3,000 over their time with you. Paying £150 to £300 to win one is easy maths. A £2,000 a month budget needs seven to thirteen new patients a month to justify itself, which well-run local search, reviews and ads deliver in most UK cities.
A B2B services firm: a client is worth £20,000 over the relationship. Even £2,000 to acquire one is cheap. The budget question becomes about patience, not size: fewer, slower, bigger wins, which suits retainers, content and referral work over impulse channels.
Where budgets actually leak
- Stop-start spending. Three months on, two off. Compounding channels never compound, and you pay the setup cost repeatedly. Commit to six months or pick a cheaper plan you can sustain.
- Spread too thin. Seven channels on a three-channel budget. Our marketing plan guide makes the case for three done properly.
- Paying for activity, not outcomes. If the monthly report counts posts published rather than enquiries generated, the budget is buying busyness.
- Invisible ad-spend markup. If media money routes through an agency’s account, part of your budget may be quietly becoming their margin. Insist on direct billing, always.
For what specific services cost against this budget, our agency pricing guide and Google Ads cost breakdown put real numbers on the working and media sides respectively. And our own plans are public: £1,500 to £3,950 a month, on the pricing page, which for most clients lands the total at six to eight percent of turnover. Squarely inside the bracket, decided by the maths.