How Much Should You Spend on B2B Marketing?

Cremarc: Throw your spreadsheet out the window. Your marketing budget for 2026 is not what you think it is. Welcome back to Generation Marketing and it's really exciting as we enter season two of our podcast. Um, this one we've chosen a really good subject to get, um, our teeth into, and it's a question that I get asked every time that I meet with either marketing director or head of marketing or a business leader, is how much should I be spending on marketing? So to answer that question, welcome back, Gabe, who hopefully has got lots and lots of insights in that area. And, um, hope you enjoy the discussion as we move forward. So let's start that question. So, as I said, every marketing leader that I talk to wants, um, to know, how much should I be spending on marketing? So they can go and justify a budget. Uh, and likewise, then on the other hand, you've got the business leader that's, uh, going, how much should I be spending on marketing? Is my head of marketing asking for too much? Are they asking for too little? How do I grow the business? What's, uh, what's the, uh, benchmark? And I know sort of traditionally there's been this benchmark of measuring your marketing spend against your revenue and making sure your marketing budget is around 10%. Now, to be honest, there's not a lot of organizations that we talk to or we go into that is up at that level. And I know over recent years that number's probably been coming down. I know there's some stats that, uh, you've been looking at, Gabe.

Gabe: Yeah, um, well, we've got some stats in the new Creemark Labs report, which is coming out, which will be out by the time this podcast goes live. You're right. Everyone is spending less and less and less on marketing, but results are expected to be higher. It sort of doesn't really add up. We will later in the episode talk through some of the benchmarks that B2B tech companies are spending by category. But I'll give you some general stats from the report. Last year, the UK average was about 7.7% of revenue, which is down from 9.1% in the year before. So it was already under the 10% and it's now dropped even further.

Cremarc: Well, that doesn't seem like a lot, but it is a lot when you translate that into actually marketing spend. So, um, I think probably one of it. Last year we definitely saw in the marketplace that there's economic uncertainty. There's, um, a bit more caution. A lot of organizations are staying flat or growing not as Quick as they did do before and the challenges we've seen. I'm old enough to have gone through many recessions before is as soon as the economy starts taking a downward turn, the first thing that the uh, I was going to say the finance people but the business people look at is marketing budget and that's probably the easiest thing to trim very very quickly. But you know, lessons in life tells us that that's probably the wrong thing to do. Right.

Gabe: Yeah. We'll go through some stats later in the episode but there's some really great case studies that explain when, when there's economic uncertainty like a recession like COVID 19 a pandemic, most businesses do cut their marketing spend and actually the exact thing you should do at that point is either maintain it or even up your investment in brand and drop your investment in activation. So your spend should change to reflect the times. But it actually the worst thing you can do in that scenario is reduce it. Uh, and there's an actual, there's an opportunity to, to gain more of the market when all your competitors drop cut back on their spend.

Cremarc: Yeah. What I've experienced is in a time of I know we're not in a recession but economic slowdown, what happens then is decision making gets more complex. So buyers, the buying committee gets bigger because nobody wants to be solely responsible for a decision. And the other thing is that with a bigger buying committee and also more caution and more levels of sign off, the length of a sales cycle gets longer. Now if you think of those two things, it means you've got to be marketing to those people more and longer and to more people. So therefore it's counterintuitive if you reduce your marketing span at the time where you may be upping your marketing effort.

Gabe: And also you need to accept that it's going to be measured over a longer period of time. We spoke about this in the last episode when we spoke about the five lies of marketing. The average measurement of a marketing campaign is actually 152 days. But the average buying cycle in B2B tech now is about 159 days. So unless you get someone before you've even started, your measurement isn't going to cover. Yeah, that so you're right. People are cutting max spend but they're also, they need to be mindful that that buying cycle could buying stage could get even longer and could be even more elongated. So you've got to change your measurement, you've got to change how you measure your marketing. And we'll touch on direct Attribution, I'm sure, in this episode.

Cremarc: So. So it's interesting what you've just said there and what we've just been talking about because we haven't answered the question, right, how much should I spend on marketing? But what we've done is we've pulled out some of those factors and the reality is it's how long is a piece of string? How much should I spend on marketing? It depends. Right. And it depends on many, many factors. One is economic time. Two, buying cycle, three, where you are against your competitors. Um, if you're a market entrant, for example, then spending equal amount to somebody who's established in the market is not going to gain any ground. It's just going to get you continue as a market entrance against a big competitor. So there's lots of different factors in there. But I think that fundamentally comes to the issue that I see time and time and time again is that most marketing leaders start their budget planning cycle with last year's plan. And then it's either we've got an uplift or we got to sort of trim it down a bit and, and they work on that number rather than going back to saying, right, what is my aspirations? What is the business need, what do I need to achieve? And then planning what they need to do rather than what budget they've got and then twisting around the other way.

Gabe: Yeah, you're right. They start with a spreadsheet and they don't start with a strategy. If you don't have, if you don't lay out your ambition of what you want to achieve and you don't know how you're going to achieve that, how can you work out what you're going to spend? You can't, is the answer. Uh, but most people will budget for marketing that out of a pot that they've sort of got a bit left over in and they'll go, that's what we're spending on marketing. And then that's the first time they do it. And then every year beyond that they just go, it's the same as last year.

Cremarc: Yeah. A marketing budget is not like a facilities budget where you're saying there's going to be a percentage increase on my, uh, my fuel expenditure or my, um, my, my rental and my office space. It's, it's not a cost center. And that's, that's this mentality mind shift that I think a lot of organizations are making, but not enough of them, that marketing is not a cost, marketing is an investment. And therefore you've got to say right, what return do I want? And um, and what or uh, what outcomes do I want? Therefore what do I need to invest to get to those outcomes?

Gabe: So I think there's on, on that to extend it. There's a really nice parallel that we can draw between R and D and marketing where people spend now with the expectation of improved results and financial returns in the future.

Cremarc: Yeah. So that brings us on to the first bit that ah, was mentioned in the report and it talked about different mindset of marketing expenditure and it's saying that not all marketing expenditure is opex and uh, most marketing budgets are opex but there's an awful lot that you're investing. A website for example. A website, right. We argue that you constantly got to change it and everything else but the foundation of your website is normally in place for two maybe three years. So it's an investment today that is not an operating expense for this month. It's actually an investment now that's actually going to be providing you value for the next 36 months for example.

Gabe: Yeah, it's a really good point. I think on that subject there's probably other activities beyond websites. Brand building campaigns. If you're, if you're building memory structures with your buyers, if you're, you're activating campaigns that associate yourself with a category entry point. It's, it's for the long term, it's kind of the point of the campaign. But people will still put that budget uh, against a monthly kind of amount and they'll say right, we spent that this month, next month. Did we get it back? No. Okay, well we're not doing that again. And that's, that's the mentality shift. It's short termism, um, expectations on long term activities.

Cremarc: Yeah. And we've talked a lot about this, the compounding effect. So you're going to be doing your brand building exercise now and over time that just compounds in terms of the return on investment that you get from it. So taking all the hit in a month on something that actually is going to produce you incremental improvements in results over a longer term is the wrong way to look at it. So that's, that's probably step one. Right. We marketers and um, businesses should stop looking purely as opex and they should look at which elements are ah, longer term and therefore should be treated more like a capex budget and then split the two things out. Yeah, so we touched on this before about this, um, you know the desperation almost of justifying return on investment but in the short term. So it's what you can do today that's going to generate something tomorrow. And a lot of budgeting figures around that. So when a marketing leader is going up to the CFO or the board and they're trying to justify their marketing budget, there's a lot more sort of forensic looking at each line item and saying, right, what is the return on investment of that? And I suppose that comes down to something we talked about a lot before around direct attribution model and why that can actually undermine the performance of marketing.

Gabe: Yeah, it's a, I think it's a really good point. There's, there's sort of two sides to it, uh, where business leaders are focusing in or sort of only allowing marketing teams to use the channels that can be measured because they sort of, they don't understand the other channels, the longer term channels. So they, they go, right, well, they're not working, so we're not going to give you any more budget on that. But also it's marketers kind of fault because they're not telling the story. They're not, they're not showcasing. We're doing this now, but it's not going to return something next month, it's going to return something in three months time and then again in six months and again in 12 months. And um, there's a, there's a real gap there. Do you think, how do you think marketers should be telling that story?

Cremarc: I think there's, there's um, a bit of education and we talked about it earlier while I was getting a coffee ready for this podcast that um, on uncensored cmo, there was an example and neither one of us could remember who it was, but they talked about that, uh, a CMO got their CFO to present their marketing plan. What genius. Absolute genius. Because most CFOs and I've dealt with a lot in my time and this is not being disrespectful to CMO CFOs at all. But they don't understand marketing. So they don't understand, they see a line item, um, organic, social, right. Why are we doing that? Why are we doing it? Well, if we don't do it, we're going to get less return on the activity. We can directly attribute and measure, but some things have a direct attribution, some things have a correlation. And what, that's the gray area that most finance people just do not get and do understand and they shouldn't do. Uh, but we need to do some more work in sort of Educating the business on the different, the integration of marketing that compounds using that word again compounds the results that it generates. And it's not a case of wiping out those lines you can't directly measure, it's about sort of measuring the total effect of those things combined.

Gabe: How do you think we best educate non marketers on the board? What could a head of marketing or a marketing director or a CMO do to get the buy in from the rest of the board on these things? Because will they ever understand?

Cremarc: I think it's a bit of a pushback. Right. Because it's a vicious circle we've got ourselves into. It's like show me the return on investment. And because we're going down that and we're producing and we talked about this before, digital marketing is great because it allows you to measure more things, but it's also been sort of detrimental. Yeah, we've shot ourselves in a foot a little bit because now they only want to see what we can measure. We where there's other things that has an effect and we don't measure. So it's getting, I think from a marketeer's point of view, you've got to make people aware of that full life cycle model of how people are looking at things and how people are progressing on that journey. And we talked a lot about the buyer journey has changed. So for example, it's longer, um, a lot more of it is self served. So this is another point going off. Another tangent is if now 80, 85% of the buying journey is self served, well shouldn't that say you'd be spending more on marketing and less on sales? Because more of the selling in that buying process is actually done by marketing. Again, not diminishing sales effort on that. But that's where. And that starts with an organic social post that may be a Google search SEO, it may be a ppc. And we've talked about it so many times that people come in and engage with you on so many different touch points. How do you pick the touch point that has turned the deal? And uh, the simple answer to that is there is no single touch point that turns the deal. It's all the touch points that build up to the deal.

Gabe: Yeah. And I think the way digital marketers have tried to get around that is moving from last touch to multi touch attribution or split attribution. But it's still wrong because they're only, it's only spreading the attribution across the channels. You can measure still, if you'd done a direct Mail campaign, it could have been the most effective thing. You know, I think that as you say, there's, there's things that can't be measured that can have a huge impact on closing a deal. Direct mail, as an example. I mean, you could spend a tenth of what you do on one search ad, uh, you know, impression, not even a click. But there's no way of measuring that unless there's a direct response to it. They've scanned a QR code or something. But in reality the power of something coming through someone's door and it's physical and it's tangible and they leave it on their side in the kitchen and they keep seeing the logo and the, and the message for the next two weeks because they haven't thrown it out yet. How much more impactful could that be in building brand trust and building brand awareness to start with?

Cremarc: Yeah, so another good example of that, for example, is organizations are so focused on their cost per click, so cost per click. How can we really actually doing an organic social campaign can reduce your cost per click. But you actually bin your social campaign or your organic social because you can't do direct attribution. So actually what you can measure, uh, then increases in cost because you're not doing the things you can't measure. So you know, we can't say this enough. It's, it's not the line items in your budget, it's not your line items or your tactics in your marketing. It's how you integrate that together strategically. So going back to the question, we should look at our plan on our uh, budget, strategic first or strategy first and then layer in the tactics to get that and get that right mix.

Gabe: Yeah, it's a really good point. I think maybe there's even a wider question which is strategically there are, there are certain kind of non negotiables. If you're targeting a certain audience, you still need to be visible on search engines and on LinkedIn and in Reddit threads and in directories. If you've only got a limited amount of marketing spend, you shouldn't just spend that on LinkedIn ads and ignore all the other things because you haven't got the spend. Because actually if you haven't done all of that demand capture activity over here. Yep. If you do an outbound campaign and they can't find you, it's kind of this, it goes back to the four P's of business, doesn't it, that if, if there's no physical availability, you've not got the place right and you do Great promotion. Well, they can't find you, so it's going to fail, it's going to fall over. Uh, and I think a lot of businesses spend on a bunch of activities, but because they haven't spent on everything that they need, it all fails.

Cremarc: Yeah, yeah. And it's a good example. Great campaign, great creative, going to a terrible website. So you spend all that money to get people to a place where it actually is worse because you're spending all that money to actually turn people off about what you're doing. Okay, that's because I see it time and time again that, um, you start with last year's budget and you start therefore with last year's line items. You go, oh, events. Are we going to spend more or less on events? And that's the question. The question should be, should we do events and should be doing events to this audience? Maybe the whole market's changed. Maybe you wanted to go more ABM approach and drill down. Because, uh, going back to the original question, if you've got limited marketing budget, then often it's better to spend more money in a smaller world than spend sort of an equal amount of money, but in a wider world where you won't get as much impact.

Gabe: Yeah, 100%. It's, it's about coverage of what you, of what you need to cover. It's not about, you know, dipping your foot in certain areas because you think it will have a return. Uh, you need to look at your marketing mix holistically. That's the way Mary put it, I think, in her episode in season one. If you, you have to look at marketing holistically, if you start looking at it, you know, in a granular way, you lose all strategic view. It's just tactical.

Cremarc: Yeah. So. So coming back then. So we've talked around thinking differently about sending your marketing budget. So firstly, if you pull out last year's marketing budget and start making spreadsheet adjustments to it, then you've lost the plot. As simple as that. You, you can't do that. You need to go back to what's the business ambition? What are you trying to achieve and what is the best marketing mix to do that and then try and fit that into what's available in terms of budget. And if you haven't got enough, then you've got a perfect business case to try and justify enough and think about it as an investment. The other thing we talked about is don't always think of everything as opex. There's some things that are capex. You've Got to think of the long and short of it. And then the final thing we talked about is don't just drill down on attribution or the things that can give you a direct return on investment. Because if you do that, don't just do the things you can measure, uh, do the things that count. And there's a lot of things that count that you can't particularly measure. And that's a focus.

Gabe: Yeah, it's a really good point. Uh, I think the other benefit to having a more strategic view of marketing that lasts beyond the next six to 12 months is that you can actually project increases and decreases in your marketing spend, required marketing spend, over the next three or four years, which gives the board a better view of what they're going to be spending on marketing and where it's needed. Because, you know, yeah, year one, you might need to do a website project to get that in a better place. You might need to spend a lot more in terms of directories and SEO to get yourself in a better kind of physically available place. And then campaigning starts from, you know, the second year, maybe it's all brand awareness. Year one, maybe a sales activation from year two.

Cremarc: Exactly.

Gabe: It's going to fluctuate. And I think when people look at marketing on this, you year by year, it kind of gets them into a spiral of okay, well, we actually needed a different budget this year, but there wasn't that strategy in place that looked beyond the next six months.

Cremarc: Yeah, so it's, it's drilling down or, or it's looking at your marketing budget from the, the macro KPIs rather than the micro ones. Uh, right. We talk about marketing telemetry and so many people get fixated with all what we often call the vanity metrics of marketing. It's stepping up and saying what are the business drivers that the marketing objectives are trying to support? And that could be new business growth, it could be client growth, it could be client retention, um, and looking at those and then setting your budget against what you're trying to do. If you're trying to double the amount of SaaS revenue from your client base, then you've got to invest an awful lot of money into doing that in marketing. And likewise, if you're looking to enter a new market, you've got to pump more money into that rather than a BAU type marketing fund.

Gabe: Yeah, it's a really good point. And there are these minimum kind of amounts, as you say. I mean, you've got to, uh, you've got to hit the threshold. But Actually, if we do look at it on a micro level, every channel kind of has a minimum threshold too. So yeah, we, we meet plenty of businesses where we determine that they need to be across certain channels, but actually they've only got enough budget for one of them. So there's, there's two ways you can go about that. You either only do one of them or you spread that budget too thin over multiple channels.

Cremarc: Critical mass.

Gabe: Exactly that. And I think the key bit there is if you LinkedIn ads is sort of, you need a minimum of $1,200 or 12. I think it's $1,500 a month per campaign on LinkedIn ads. Okay. I think Google Ads, there's that kind of keyword planner that helps you forecast the threshold that will give you enough visibility to return enough clicks. If people aren't hitting these thresholds, the whole, all the money's wasted. You're effectively throwing money into a void that is not going to have any, you know, any effect or any positive effect.

Cremarc: So we've done a really good job going around the houses and avoiding the question. So the fundamental question for this episode, and we've got to start with this good one, is how much should I be spending on marketing? And going back, the rule of thumb, um, that's been around for years is it's 10% of revenue. But that changes and we've quoted in the report some figures around that in terms of a, ah, startup SaaS company needs to be spending more money and an established dominant one spends less money. Have you got any of those figures to hand?

Gabe: It's interesting you say that because we have got some really great stats in the latest Crewmart Labs report. So as you say, growth stage SaaS a lot more. The average B2B marketing spend for growth stage SaaS companies is 30 to 60%.

Cremarc: Wow. That's huge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can imagine that you're, you're going from nowhere. Nobody knows about you entering a new market. You may be trying to be the disruptor, displace somebody or you've got a new way of doing something, a new proposition. And what you're trying to do is, is do two things, be known yourself, but also create the need, create the demand in the market. And that takes a lot of, a lot of effort and a lot of budget.

Gabe: Yeah. And look, this is not, that's not a unique thing. Large ITMPs 15% mid size ITMPs 10%. We've got tech consultancies, enterprise SaaS all around. 10% right. These are big numbers compared to some people spending 2, 3% on marketing. Yeah, that's a huge difference. And the way I can't put it better than Colin, I had a content, so I'm just going to say exactly what he said. If you match these, if you ma. This is the average. If you match average, it's effectively being invisible because you have to, you have to outspend people. If you're spending the same, you either have to be creatively incredible, you have to resonate in a different way, or you've just got to outspend them. You. It is unfortunately a bit of a pay to win scenario. All businesses in reality.

Cremarc: Yeah, it is. And also going off again on a bit of a tangent, it's, it's that fool's bid as well, because, uh, we see time after time people throw money at it and if they throw money at the wrong direction or, you know, the campaigns aren't creative so they're not getting the impression, so they're paying M more for the click spend, so they throw more money at it. So there's a lot of wastage. So the idea is, what you need to do is you need to be at that minimum, M at the level of the average of the market, but then you need to be smarter and leaner than everyone else and then you're getting more return from, from the investments in there.

Gabe: Yeah, you've got to be strategic. And I think, look, these are the averages. If you don't, if you physically do not have this budget, there are ways you can be more clever, but then there is investment in other things. It's better marketing talent, it's a better agency partner. You still have to spend money somewhere. You know, I think there's a, uh, there's a misconception, which is I've spent 200 grand on a campaign. I expect, you know, three, three times ROI. But that 200 grand could have been spent on channels that needed 400 grand to be effective, or your competitor could have been spending a million pounds on those same channels.

Cremarc: It's.

Gabe: You've effectively thrown that money into the void because you didn't think strategically about your budget, you thought tactically about it.

Cremarc: So it's. So it's two bits distilling that down. One is you've got to have enough table stakes, otherwise you're, you're not going to achieve the aspirations you've got. But then the second bit is you need to use those stage, um, table stakes correctly and place the right bets. Because if you don't you're not going to get the, the impact if you, you got your table stakes, but if you put it all on red, you either succeed or you fail. Right. You either do your return or you get absolutely nothing. And, and you can't do that in

Gabe: business or on that kind of casino analogy there. I'm um, not a gambling man, so I think, I think this is right though. If you go to a Las Vegas casino, you've got different tables of different spend amounts.

Cremarc: Yeah.

Gabe: If you're going to go to the, to the high, you know, high players table, uh, and they're all putting down a million and you've put your £5 token chip on the side, it's not going to work. So you have to accept that, uh, where you're playing is as important as what you're putting down. If you have, if you can't be on that high stakes table, go to a different table. And that's a business positioning thing. If you can't compete in that space, find a different space. Carve out the white space. Find somewhere where you can compete.

Cremarc: Yeah, that's, that's a, that's a really good point because going, going back because we've got, we've got some clients that spend down their 2,3% of their revenue on marketing, but we still do some effective work and they still get a good return from that, of that investment. So we're not saying you've got to invest 10%, but what we've got to say is you, you've got to scale your aspiration or really target your effort to get the return. So as you say, going to the table where you can play with the stakes you've got and have a presence there rather than the, you know, the tiny, tiny, tiny marketing campaign in a massive pond with lots of big spenders where, you know, you, you get caught up in the noise and, and you're

Gabe: never seen on um, m. That subject of changing where you are or understanding the context in which you're spending, not just what the spend is.

Cremarc: Yeah.

Gabe: Let's go back to the point that we made at the top of the episode, which was around when the going gets tough, marketing spend is the first thing that gets cut.

Cremarc: Yeah.

Gabe: So we have some stats that we found during the research of the Cremart Labs report. One of them is from Field and Burnett who wrote the long and the short of it. Brands that increased their marketing spend during a recession saw a 5 times profit growth and a 4.5 times market share increase, which is, which is huge. And I think the reason is kind of demonstrated in this next point which is a really good case study of Pepsi versus Coca Cola. During COVID and Pepsi maintained their marketing spend and they grew revenue by 5%. And it's probably maybe because their advertising was great, but it's also because Coca Cola cut their ads by 35%.

Cremarc: Wow.

Gabe: And the impact on them was an 11% revenue drop.

Cremarc: Wow.

Gabe: So it's not just if you cut your marketing spend, you'll get negative effects. If your competitors cut marketing spend and you maintain or increase, you get a huge opportunity to win market share.

Cremarc: And that completely makes sense because we often tell clients so how many times the clients go oh, we want to do this during the summer months because it's all quiet, everyone's on holiday. But we say no, you keep it going because A, you keep momentum going and B, most of your competitors drop so therefore you get more visibility, more facetime, more mind share. And that, that just shows it improves it.

Gabe: And I've also got some advice from Mark Ritson, esteemed, you know, very well renowned marketing thought leader. Uh, his advice to marketers is that your brand building spend should be preserved during the difficult times because the impact is delayed but substantial.

Cremarc: Yeah.

Gabe: What you should really cut or consider cutting is your sales activation campaigns. Now what we would see in when, when times are tough is clients go, we just want the lead gen campaigns running. Cut all brand activity and it's the, is literally the opposite, uh, is the right thing.

Cremarc: Yep, yep. So it all sort of comes back and sort of cycles round of that sort of. Well, uh, another point, be consistent on your marketing span. The worst thing you can do in marketing is up and down. I've seen that, I've seen marketing plans uh, or budgets before that are hockey sticked to the, to the revenue impact. So the revenue plan is a hockey stick and therefore they do the marketing plan as a hockey stick where actually it should be a reverse hockey stick. If you want to generate the revenue at the end of the year, you've got to invest more at the start of the year to get that. Uh, with an average sales cycle of say nine months, if you don't produce leads in Q1, they will have no impact on that year whatsoever. So that's the first thing. But the worst thing you can do in marketing is have that fluctuation because you're there, you're not there, you're back there again. You don't get that continuity, that compounding effect.

Gabe: Yeah, that's a really good point. I think that's probably one of the reasons as well why SAS companies and companies with retained services are able to invest more because they look beyond this year. So a lot of companies who can't, who are selling a one off, you know, a Capex machine or a uh, Capex project, it's, they're only looking at when that's coming in. Yeah, they go, well, we spent this this year, but we haven't got anything. Or they're like, you know, they're measuring leads month to month, quarter to quarter. But the people who have retained revenue can see we've grown as a company. Our MRR is m this much higher, you know, because of our marketing activity. And they measure it beyond just that year. So I think that probably does help.

Cremarc: Yeah, and that's, and that's a true sort of measure. That's, that's what we were saying before. If, if you go up to the macro KPIs, you can really see the return on marketing investment. If you do it on a month by month basis, you can't do that. So therefore you end up doing a series of knee jerk reaction marketing budgets. Goes like that. Everything becomes ineffective and you don't get the return. Looking at it longer term and looking at trends rather than individual month performance will give you a better measure on your return on investment. And that will allow you then to turn the dial. If you can see the trend line going up, you can turn the budget up. Even if you're 2% now or 3%, you can turn up to 5%, 6% and you can see if that trend is going to hold out. But the other bit of that is I'm not recommending everyone start at 2% because there is minimum table stakes as we talked about before. There's a minimum viable proposition that you need to get out there to start turning the dial to make it have an impact. And that's where you got to get to, yeah, 100%.

Gabe: And it comes back down to being strategic. If your buyers buy in a certain way, they always go to Google or they always go to LLMs. You need to invest in certain activities that maybe have a minimum spend. You can't measure an attribute your ROI to those channels at that time. So you have to look, as you say, holistically. I think there's also, you know, there's so many broader things that, that are sort of priceless. Like what price can you actually put on brand fame? You know, your brand fame is not just sales, it's, it's, you hire better people.

Cremarc: Yeah.

Gabe: You, you, your customers, don't you know you have better customer retention? Because why would they leave the best in the world or the one that they perceive to be the best in the world? You know, you open up opportunities, you open doors that you would never even know about. You know, I think Rory Sutherland talks about no Rolls Royce have invested in their brand for so many years that now the Rolls Royce CEO could probably just pick up the phone to the president of the usa. Probably wouldn't want to at the moment. But it's, that's the reality of brand fame. It's, it's, it is priceless.

Cremarc: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. So, so to cut the long story short then, and get back to the original question, the rule of thumb that people should be having there, and it's not a rule of thumb, it's based on, um, on benchmarks and stats and everything else is around 10%. But that's just a starting point. You've got to look at it. If you can't afford the 10%, then, then you gotta go as much as you can with aspirations to grow it, but grow it, um, as lean and as smartly as you could to get up to that sort of impact level. And then the other area is, don't think as that 10% as a limit, because it's not. If you're trying to make an impact in a market, if you're really trying to scale up and rapidly scale up, then you've got to scale up that marketing budget to do it. So it's, it's a, it's a threshold level, but it's a benchmark level. And you need to then apply the strategy and then think of what you need to invest to, to fulfill the strategy or execute the strategy.

Gabe: Exactly that. It's, you know, you've got people spending from 5% up to 60%. It's not, it's not really about a percentage, as you say. The 10% is a threshold. It's kind of like a benchmark is what you should be aiming for as kind of a minimum. Yeah, but you need to be strategic. That's, that's the main point here. What do your, what do you need to do with your marketing to win? That's the question you should be asking, okay, how much budget do we need to achieve? Uh, that it shouldn't be a how much budget have we got? How much budget do we need? It's what do we need to do? How much money do we need to achieve it?

Cremarc: And, uh, I've heard it so many times, it's like, what's your marketing? But how much budget have we got? Like, no, what do we want to achieve? Right. What does a business want to achieve? What is our plan, our strategy? And then it's, can we afford to do all of it or do we need to scale down in certain areas of it? So that's uh, that's the thing. What do you want to achieve?

Gabe: I think as an extension to that, that's where we can be really valuable as marketers to the wider business. Because if a business has aspirations to go into a certain market, yeah. And the marketing team does its due diligence and it, and it has a strategy and it says, actually we need this budget to go into that, that market, that pool of people. The business goes, we don't have that budget. Well actually the marketing team shouldn't necessarily cut back on what they were going to do. They should say, well actually let's just go after this pool of people, this segment of the market. Or actually let's go over uh, this market over here because you are more likely to win. That's, that's invaluable advice. And it stops people wasting a lot of money.

Cremarc: And that's where collaboration and constantly learning really fits in. Because there's so many people doing so many things with so many different budgets. Why not learn from it? Why not ask the people, uh, ask us the question, ask us more. Right? Where do I get, if I want to achieve this? What's the best approach to do it? How does this compare to other people, other SAS companies, other UM, MSPs. How do I spend my marketing budget in the most effective way?

Gabe: Yeah, yeah, I think I don't. I'm not going to call out any particular clients. I'll keep this anonymous. But I've had, you know, some clients who operate in adjacent spaces all asking me whether they should buy data, uh, in from a, from a quite a well known list provider, uh, in that space. That is quite a sort of traditional thing for them to do. And I've sort of advised them all against it because they've all said that, which means all their competitors have also said that, uh, and probably consider it. So everyone's working off the same list. It's, it's a conversation for another day. But this is kind of where we're getting to as an industry is we need to be a lot more strategic. Tactics don't cut it because intent tools, now everyone's got them. So everyone knows what the intent is. It's not strategic anymore. It's, it's clever and maybe it's an edge on the people who don't have the tools, but in the reality. The reality is most people have these tools.

Cremarc: Yeah.

Gabe: So you have to be more strategic and you have to be more creative about what you're doing.

Cremarc: Yeah. The playing field is constantly being leveled and it's the job of the marketeer is to, uh, go in the next direction that gives them that unfair advantage.

Gabe: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Cremarc: Brilliant. Right, we're going to leave it there. We could talk about this for days, I think, but, um, I think we covered the main points. We actually finally gave an answer, I think so. Just about had a few caveats on it, but, um, definitely gave an answer. So thank you very much for, for listening. Hope you found this useful. Hope you got some information. Um, it is a massive topic. There is so many dimensions and so many factors you need to take into account. So if you have any questions, never ever hesitate to, to contact us@podcastreemark.com thank you, Gabe.

Gabe: Hey guys. Good job. I was here.

Cremarc: Brilliant. So thank you and uh, I hope you enjoyed it and look forward for you joining the next one. Thank you.