B2B SaaS Marketing Budget Excel Template

A marketing budget is an annual, quarterly, and weekly plan for allocating money to different marketing efforts to drive revenue growth.

That is typically created in the form of this template, which is known as a marketing budget table. Marketing leaders and finance teams will reference this when assessing their performance and coming around to deciding on next year's marketing plan budget allocation.

Your marketing budget is really a spending plan. How you allocate your dollars depends on your goals.

Do you want to increase awareness of your product, focus on new customers, or delight your customers?

Once you know your goals, you start the process by linking it to your marketing plan and strategy. 

Within your budget, you'll split this into four views:

1. Lights on - things that keep the engine up and running, like your website, HubSpot, or working with analysts
2. Showtime - things that show the world your product, like Google Ads, events, and content development
3. Projects - things that need specific resources, like developing a partner ecosystem or new product development
4. People - things covering the cost of your marketing staff, your marketing agency, professional memberships, and training

A typical marketing budget is 7-15% of your revenue. 

Within this template, you'll find an example marketing budget for an organization focusing on inbound and paid-ads-based growth.

However, marketing budgets vary by market, industry, and company size. Build yours to reflect the realities of your organization's strategic goals.

For SaaS companies, it's important to start any marketing budgeting process from a pragmatism point of view.

Marketers must collaborate with their finance people to understand what is possible, confirm their plans, and track their spending. 

A marketing budget in 2024 is not the same as it once was. Marketers must be agile with their spending and prepare for cuts.

Covering three of the four perspectives of a typical marketing budget, you should look to be spending something in this region every month:

• Lights on: $7,000
• Showtime: $7,000
• People: $5,000

Be prepared to show ROI on your budget, but don't worry if you can't show it for every line item - marketing investments rarely have a near, linear relationship to results. It's all about how you utilize what you're spending on and how it comes together to produce results.