Where Should Your Marketing Budget Really Go?
30 October 2025
Where Should Your Marketing Budget Really Go?
Marketing budgets rarely need mystery — they need clarity. Rather than a scattergun of channels and tactics, successful spending begins with a clear sense of who you’re trying to reach, what action you need them to take, and which activities deliver that outcome most reliably for your organisation.
This article isn’t about chasing the latest shiny metric or doubling down on what looks popular. It’s about practical choices managers can make today: allocating budget where it reduces friction for customers, builds repeatable advantage, and gives you measurable returns the board will understand. Read on for a straightforward framework to help you prioritise spend, test intelligently and scale what genuinely moves the needle.
Setting Your Budget
Setting a marketing budget feels quite complex, but the factors to consider are actually quite simple. You just need to know these numbers:
- What you’re paying out each month, on expenses like utility bills, payroll, etc.
- What’s worked for you in the past and what it cost you.
But before you look into any of that, there’s one hurdle you’ll need to get over first – and it’s probably the most difficult of them all:
Choosing your goal.
This is the main aim of your marketing campaign, and anything you spend on it needs to build toward this aim. That’s why you need to know what you want to achieve before you make any other plans.
Do you want to increase traffic to your website, and maybe even start building an email list? Or do you want to increase sales over a certain period of time?
Find the goal to focus on to help you set a realistic working budget. Otherwise you’re likely to make marketing mistakes that’ll make it hard to work out an accurate ROI on any profit you make.
And with over three quarters of small businesses in the UK spending less than £5000 on marketing each year, these mistakes can be incredibly costly.
But even if you work out a budget and find it’s £1000 or less, there are plenty of marketing options to try out.
Depending on factors like visibility, brand awareness, and the average ROI, here are a few we recommend.
Digital Marketing
SEO
The king of digital marketing (yes, even in 2025), SEO is a reliable marketing method that small businesses can put to good use.
From on page SEO tactics, creating optimised content, building your online authority, and easy to use SEO tools that help you track the results, the world of SEO has it all.
SEO is a long term investment, however, and you’ll need to keep allocating part of your budget to it every month.
PPC
PPC ads are common for small marketing budgets, as Google Ads promise a good return.
Indeed, you only pay if someone clicks on the ad, so you can allocate a hefty portion of your marketing budget to PPC on both a short and long term basis.
The best thing about PPC is that it meshes well with SEO tactics. Ads are the upfront visual elements, with your SEO content linked behind them.
Getting your link into someone’s inbox is a great way to bring customers back for more.
And you know they’re already interested in hearing about your products, as they wouldn’t have signed up otherwise.
This gives you more of a captive audience to sell to than other digital marketing methods, but you still need to craft high quality, enticing emails to gain those clicks. You’re just in a much better place to get them.
Physical Marketing
Otherwise known as out of home marketing, this is a marketing type that refers to any advertising you do outside of someone’s personal sphere.
Most traditional advertising methods fall under the out of home umbrella. City center billboards, digital screens at bus stops, roundabout mounted signs, as well as poster boards and local newspapers.
Depending on the location of the ad spot, and how central and/or amount of daily exposure it gets, the price to hire it will grow exponentially.
On top of this factor, the type of spot will reflect on the price too. Expect a traditional, paper billboard to be at least £200 to hire, and for a digital screen to cost upwards of £500.
Where Should You Place Physical Ads?
Physical adverts should be placed in areas where eyes are going to fall on them without any extra effort.
That means you need to look for areas with high volumes of traffic, daily visitors/users, and places where someone is likely to spend time waiting.
For many businesses, areas like these are prime physical advertising spots:
Train stations: When you advertise in train stations, you could get your brand recognised by hundreds of thousands of people – and that could even happen over the course of just one month.
Gyms: In the UK, over 10 million people regularly go to the gym. That makes it a great type of business to not only advertise through, but to collaborate with as well.
For those with health and wellness related businesses, this is a natural fit. But many other businesses can reach out to local gyms and franchise locations too.
Analyse the Results
Once you’ve put a bit of your marketing spend into a method like those above, be proactive in measuring its output. You need to know ASAP if something is costing more than it’s bringing in.
Digital marketing methods will provide better insights into this, with online campaign managers allowing you to see estimated ROI as it happens.
But even with physical marketing, you can gain feedback from customers to let you know what made them want to buy from you.
Spending Your Marketing Budget: A Quick Recap
Come up with your goal first, understand your expenses, and then survey your marketing opportunities. Both digital and physical, out of home methods can be included here.
Once you’re spending your budget, keep an eye on what’s working making a return.
Header image: Pexels Image – CC0 Licence
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