This fall, I flew into SF to work with a dozen marketing leaders on their 2025 marketing budgets.

Most of my meetings were with new or interim marketing leaders, including several sales executives who had recently stepped into marketing roles after the previous marketing VP had gotten fired.

The main patterns were:

• How much should I be spending on marketing compared to everyone else

• What’s “enough” for us to accomplish our goals?

• And finally, what will be convincing and reasonable to our CEO and our board?

Below are my learnings from both the experienced and new marketing VPs alike — along with my highlights of key prep materials:

Thanks to Dave Kellog, Chris Walker, Carilu Dietrich, Peter Mahoney, Matt Schulman, Nolan Sullivan, Samuel Ford, Alex Cwirko-Godycki, and Rowan Tonkin for directly or indirectly contributing to this article.

How much should Series A startups spend on marketing?

According to ICONIQ, early stage companies at $1M to $25M ARR spend 30-55% of revenue (target) on marketing.

Marketing budget or "program spend" is typically 50% of this number. Headcount is the other 50%.

Thus for an early stage startup, I'd expect the marketing budget (program spend) to be about 15-25% of revenue.

So if I’m aiming for $10M in revenue, I’d expect to spend $300 to $550K on marketing, with about half of that going to headcount and half going to programs.

My top ten takeaways

However, you can't talk about marketing budgets without talking about company strategy. Here are a few important considerations to inform the size and makeup of your marketing budget:

1. The CEO sets the company strategy, which includes GTM (sales and marketing). Business goals → GTM strategy → Marketing strategy → Marketing programs.

2. CEOs shouldn't stretch revenue targets. The revenue plan is not where you coerce your sales leader to do more with less. It's where you are making a realistic projection on your business. Good CEOs deliver on the plan. (Dave Kellog)

3. The GTM plan is bounded by two constraints: revenue targets and financial efficiency. For revenue: ARR/MRR and for financial efficiency: CAC ratio and CAC:LTV.

The GTM strategy should also align with the product strategy. Good sellers won't sell what they don't believe in.

4. CAC ratio = (sales & marketing expense) / new revenue.

For every dollar you put in, you get X dollars back. For early stage startups, this number can be higher, but I'd question the unit economics if this approaches 2.0 or more.

CAC ratio should get more efficient over time, because marketing investments, like brand, compound.

5. The attribution report is not the marketing strategy. "Number of LinkedIn posts per week" is not the marketing strategy. The marketing strategy is the set of programs and experiments best positioned to help the company achieve its business goals.

6. Marketing leaders should define what programs fall under "productive" spend vs strategic spend (CEO pet projects). Rowan Tomkin recommends spending 55% to 75% of the budget on revenue producing programs. Agencies and contractors are great for flexing experimental or strategic spend.

7. Overall marketing spend includes people and non-people costs, which are generally split 50/50. Where it gets fuzzy are: client meals, technology, and contractors.

For contractors: are they actually contractors or are they de facto employees? If it's a contractor or agency that rolls up to a specific program, then it's a true program cost. Otherwise, I think it should be treated as a people cost.

8. Each marketing program should have KPIs that are framed in the context of business goals. 

Not everything is direct response. My recommendation is to hire program experts who understand the business KPIs and not just the metrics of their platform (SEO, LinkedIn, X etc).

9. You can always less budget -- but you can't ask for more. 😉

There isn't a "right" answer for how much you should spend on marketing — or what tactics you should employ.

The main thing

There isn't a "right" answer for how much you should spend on marketing — or what tactics you should employ.

However, benchmarks suggest that program spend should be about 15-25% of revenue (target). 

I also feel strongly that the marketing budget needs to be top-down and defined ideally at the CEO level.

If the revenue goals are clear and aligned with the overall product and company strategy, GTM teams should be able to figure out which programs have the best chance at achieving goal.

Creativity thrives when there are constraints. You “just” have to set good ones!

Good luck!