The Ultimate Marketing Benchmark: Budget Insights from 200 CMOs

See How Marketing Budgets Vary by Revenue, Growth Rate, GTM style, and more

How much should you invest in marketing? What’s the ROI of every additional dollar? These are the questions CEOs and CMOs ask year-round.

In an ideal world, we would all have clear ROI calculations and prescriptive data by channel and tactic. Since that’s often not clear, many of us also use benchmarks for context and confidence.

The Problem with Benchmarking: Finding the Right Comparisons

I save every benchmark report that comes out, but many don’t apply to the size of the company, GTM motion, ASP, or growth rate of the company I need to benchmark. It’s hard to get realistic comparisons to YOUR unique company. I know, I once spent more than $150k on a custom report because of this issue.

Big News: A First-of-Its-Kind Interactive Marketing Benchmark Report

Thus I could not be more thrilled to be publishing a Marketing Benchmark report that addresses this issue, and has an interactive widget so you can customize the benchmarks to your parameters.

Ray Rike founder of BenchmarkIt, Jon Miller, founder of Marketo and Engagio, Bill Macitis, former CMO of Slack and Zendesk and I pooled our networks to survey more than 200 marketing leaders at diverse companies to get detailed, actionable benchmarks. Then BenchmarkIt did the heavy lifting to make the tool of my dreams.

Webinar Breaks Down The Details

We hosted a webinar Mon arch 11th that can now be viewed as a replay. You can also see the slides and access an interactive benchmarking tool here

Sneak Peek!

Want to see a little something NOW?

📈 How Marketing Budgets Are Changing in 2025

In our survey, we asked marketing leaders how their budget changed from 2024 to 2025. We found that overall marketing budgets increased, both as a median and as a range in 2025:

Then we broke that down by company size and saw that median increases were driven primarily by >$20M and $100 - $250M segments. Other segments were fairly stable.

While we don’t have trend data for the last decade, these median numbers seem smaller to me than historical norms. These lower percentages today may be a result of the post-interest-rate economic challenges that afflicted tech. Atlassian’s 7% marketing spend used to be the smallest of all marketers, now it would be in the 75th percentile! For reference, here is the data I compiled in 2023 and early 2024 that showed these higher ranges of the past:

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⚖️ How CMOs Balance People, Programs, and Tech Investments

Our research this year was fairly consistent with historical norms with programs and people being split fairly evenly. We also saw the known trend: as companies get bigger, they often can spend less as a % of revenue on people and more on programs since they’ve filled out most of the functions and can get leverage. The tech allocation seems to be moving up from the 5/7/10% I’ve seen in the past to 11-19%. Is this AI? Overall martech?

Will AI take more from tech budgets, or more from people budgets? TBD!

Within program budgets, we see Demand Gen as the biggest budget across the board, DG and events making up more than 50% of the budget for most companies:

🚀 Growth vs. Marketing Spend: What Comes First?

Our data showed that companies growing faster have bigger marketing budgets as a % of revenue. Which came first, more marketing or big growth? Are companies riding the wave, or fanning the flames?

At first I was cynical that this was a quirk of tiny startups in the data. But even looking at companies over $50M in revenue, the overall trend, especially at the 75th percentile holds:

Get all the data and the breakdowns - Webinar March 11th

We have been slaving away analyzing this incredible trove of data. Next week we’ll share more data on:

→ What percent of a company’s pipeline is made up by inbound leads?
→ What are the most common attribution models at different stages of growth?
→ What kind of metrics are marketers using most frequently to measure success?
→ How do companies with different GTM Models (Sales-led, PLG, Founder-led,)
spend differently on marketing?
→ How does a company’s ASP affect their marketing and sales budget allocations?

🔥 Get Exclusive Access to the Full Benchmark Report! 🔥
✅ Actionable insights from 200 CMOs
✅ Customizable benchmarks for your company
🎟 Download the report now

Related articles:

You might want to study up on this past blog where I covered CAC ratios. We’ve got some trends we’ll share on this as well.

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Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.

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