Marketing budget template

Managing a marketing budget is a key responsibility for any marketing team, but it can be easy to lose track. You may spend hours planning your budget at the start of the quarter, but as work gets busy, costs can slip through the cracks. By the end of the quarter, your actual spending might look very different from what you planned.

If you don’t track your budget regularly, spending can quickly get out of control. Overspending cuts into profits, while underspending might keep your team from reaching its goals. In this article, you’ll learn what a marketing budget is, how much to spend, what to include, and how to use a free template to keep your team organized.

What is a marketing budget?

A marketing budget is a plan that shows how much your team will spend on different marketing activities over a certain period, like a month, quarter, or year. It includes all costs for your marketing efforts, such as paid ads, events, social media, and content creation.

Your budget can be as granular or high-level as you need. Whether you break down every line item in a campaign or track spending at the channel level, a clear marketing budget helps your team keep costs under control and allocate funds more effectively in the future.

What is a marketing budget template?

A marketing budget template is a reusable tool that helps teams manage their budget. It lets your team see, in real time, how much money is set aside for each project, what’s been spent, and what’s left. Using a standard template also means everyone tracks costs the same way, making it easier to work together on future budgets.

With a marketing budget template, you can:

• Easily plan your marketing projects and their budgets. At the start of each month, quarter, or year, list your marketing initiatives in the template. Then add the budget for each one and use the template to track your spending.

• Keep track of your marketing spending with ease. After you enter the budget for each effort, use the template to monitor your actual spending, see what’s left, and compare it to your original plan.

• Align your marketing efforts with high-level team goals. In addition to tracking your overall spend and remaining budget, use your template to map your marketing efforts to your high-level team or company goals. That way, you can quickly visualize how your spend connects to organizational priorities.

• Provide visibility in real time. When team members contribute to the marketing budget consistently, it's easy to see how much you've used in real time. When using a work management platform like Asana to track your monthly budget, you can display this information on a dashboard so key stakeholders can track budgets at a glance.

• Keep all your budgets consistent. If you have several budgets for different marketing projects, it can be hard to organize them. A budget template uses the same format for each one, making bookkeeping easier.

• Make budgeting a team effort. On larger teams, tracking budgets can be tough. Templates create a single system that records all costs and ensures nothing is missed.

How much should you spend on marketing?

When creating a marketing budget, one of the first questions is how much to spend. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer, but industry benchmarks can help you find a good starting point.

Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey says the average marketing budget is 7.7% of company revenue. The CMO Survey from Deloitte and Duke University puts it at 9.4%. The best percentage for your business depends on your industry, company size, growth stage, and goals.

Here are a few general guidelines to keep in mind:

• Small businesses: 7–8% of revenue

• B2B companies: 8–11% of revenue

• B2C companies: 9–12% of revenue

• Growth-stage startups: 15–20%+ of revenue

Remember, these numbers are just guidelines. Use them to start, then adjust based on your goals and what you learn as you track your spending.

What to include in your marketing budget

Once you've set an overall budget number, the next step is deciding how to break it down. Organizing your marketing budget into categories makes it easier to track spend, spot trends, and identify areas where you might need to shift resources.

Here are the most common categories to include in your marketing budget template:

• Paid advertising: This covers search ads, social media ads, display campaigns, and any other paid media placements.

• Content marketing: Budget for blog posts, ebooks, video production, graphic design, and other content creation.

• Social media: Include costs for organic social media management, scheduling tools, and influencer partnerships.

• Email marketing: Factor in your email platform, list management tools, and any costs for email design or copywriting.

• Events and sponsorships: Include costs for hosting or attending marketing events, trade shows, and webinars.

• Marketing technology: Account for software subscriptions like analytics tools, CRM platforms, marketing automation, and project management tools.

• Public relations: Include agency fees, press releases, and media outreach costs.

• Freelancer and agency fees: Budget for any external support your team relies on for specialized work.

Dividing your budget into clear categories helps your team see where the money goes. It also makes it easier to compare your planned and actual costs during the quarter.

Who should be involved in marketing budget planning

Building a marketing budget shouldn't be a solo effort - cross-functional collaboration helps teams avoid surprises down the line and benefit from broader input on priorities and resource needs.

Here are the key people who should be part of the budgeting process:

• Marketing leadership: Directors or VPs of marketing set the strategic direction and determine how the budget aligns with team goals.

• Finance: Your finance team can help validate budget assumptions, provide revenue forecasts, and ensure your marketing spend fits within the organization's financial plan.

• Campaign or channel owners: The people who manage specific channels, such as paid media, content, or events, have the most accurate view of what those efforts actually cost.

• Executive stakeholders: Senior leaders who approve budgets should be looped in early to align marketing spend with company-wide priorities.

When you plan the budget together, your team can spot gaps, set realistic spending goals, and make sure everyone is accountable from the start.

How to use a marketing budget template

1. Build out your template with essential budget information. Your marketing budget template serves as a tool for tracking your monthly, quarterly, or yearly marketing budget. Start by breaking up your template into sections, such as quarters. Then use custom fields to track important budget information for each section, such as the total amount budgeted for the initiative, the actual spend, the remaining spend, and whether the initiative's spend is on or off track.

2. Connect your marketing budget to your goals. Use custom fields to connect your budget to team or organizational goals, so your team has a better understanding of how much funding is available for specific resources.

3. Regularly document your expenses. Define a process for your team so that when someone needs to log an expense, they know exactly how to do it and where it goes. Make it clear who is responsible for recording this information in the budget.

Integrations and apps for your marketing budget template

Use Asana’s built-in features and connected business apps to create one system for tracking and make budget collaboration easier.

Integrated features

1. List View. List View is a grid-style view that lets you see all your project's information at a glance. Like a to-do list or a spreadsheet, List View displays all your tasks at once so you can not only see task titles and due dates, but also view any relevant custom fields, such as Priority, Status, and more. Unlock effortless collaboration by giving your entire team visibility into who's doing what by when.

2. Reporting. Reporting in Asana translates project data into visual charts and digestible graphs. By reporting on work where work lives, you can reduce duplicative work and cut down on unnecessary app switching. And, because all of your team's work is already in Asana, you can pull data from any project or team to get an accurate picture of what's happening in one place.

3. Custom fields. Custom fields are the best way to tag, sort, and filter work. Create custom fields for any information you need to track, from priority and status to email addresses and phone numbers. Use custom fields to sort and schedule your to-dos so you know what to work on first. Plus, share custom fields across tasks and projects to ensure consistency across your organization.

4. Dashboards. Dashboards are project-level tabs containing graphs and visualizations that let you zoom out from the day-to-day to quickly understand your project's progress. Customize Dashboard charts so you can instantly identify potential blockers in your team's work and subsequently move the project forward. Use the Dashboard tab as a reference point to find data to get a quick pulse on how the project is progressing.

Recommended apps

1. Dropbox. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana using the Dropbox file chooser, built into the Asana task pane.

2. Google Workplace. Attach files directly to tasks in Asana using the Google Workspace file picker, built into the Asana task pane. Easily attach any My Drive file with just a few clicks.

3. Gmail. With the Asana for Gmail integration, you can create Asana tasks directly from your Gmail inbox. Any tasks you create from Gmail will automatically include the context from your email, so you never miss a beat. Need to refer to an Asana task while composing an email? Instead of opening Asana, use the Asana for Gmail add-on to simply search for that task directly from your Gmail inbox.

4. Slack. Turn ideas, work requests, and action items from Slack into Asana tasks and comments that are trackable. Go from quick questions and action items to tasks with assignees and due dates. Easily capture work so requests and to-dos don't get lost in Slack.

Build better marketing budgets with Asana

A well-managed marketing budget is key to effective marketing. Asana’s marketing budget template puts your budget in the same place where your team already plans and tracks work, so you can:

• Track spending in real time instead of managing costs in a static spreadsheet.

• Collaborate in one place with built-in sharing, comments, and status updates.

• Connect spend to goals so every dollar is aligned with the work that matters most.

Get started and see how much easier it is to plan, track, and manage your marketing budget in one place.

FAQs about marketing budget templates