Marketing Budget Calculator
Work backwards from a revenue goal to the budget you need.
Your numbers
Monthly budget needed
₹62,500
Customers needed
20
Leads needed
250
Budget per customer
₹3,125
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Definition
A marketing budget is the total you commit across channels for a period. The two sane ways to set it are as a percentage of revenue, or by working backwards from a growth target and what it costs you to acquire a customer. Picking a comfortable-sounding number is neither.
The formula
Budget = New customers needed × CAC or Revenue × Marketing %
Use both and see whether they agree. If your growth target demands far more than the percentage method allows, either the target or the acquisition cost has to change — and knowing that before the quarter starts is the entire point.
A worked example
Sanity-checking a growth plan
- 1Current annual revenue: ₹4 crore. Target growth: 30%, so ₹1.2 crore of new revenue.
- 2Average customer is worth ₹2,00,000 in revenue, so 60 new customers are needed.
- 3CAC is ₹18,000, so the goal-based budget is ₹10,80,000 for the year.
- 4The percentage method at 8% of current revenue would allow ₹32,00,000.
The growth target is comfortably affordable — the constraint is not budget but whether the funnel and the team can absorb 60 new customers. That is a very different conversation from the one the business was having.
How to move the number
Budget from the goal, then check against the percentage
The goal-based number tells you what the plan costs. The percentage tells you what the business can bear. Where they disagree you have found the real constraint before you have spent anything.
Hold back a test budget
Reserve 10-20% for channels and creative you have not proven. Without it every rupee sits in what already works, and the day it stops working there is nothing ready to replace it.
Fund capture before creation
Demand that already exists — search, branded, remarketing — converts fastest and funds everything else. Build the capture layer first, then spend on creating demand.
Reforecast quarterly
An annual budget set once and never revisited is a plan, not a system. CAC moves, seasonality moves, competitors move; the budget should follow the evidence.
Where people get this wrong
- Setting the budget as a round number that feels safe, with no link to a lead target or an acquisition cost.
- Spreading a modest budget across six channels so that none reaches the volume needed to learn.
- Cutting marketing first in a slow quarter, which reliably deepens the following one.
- Ignoring the cost of the people and tools needed to convert the demand the budget creates.
Marketing Budget Calculator — questions we get
What percentage of revenue should go to marketing in India?
Commonly 5-10% for established businesses and 12-20% when growing aggressively. Treat it as a sanity check rather than a method — two businesses with the same revenue and different margins can afford very different budgets.
How should I split budget across channels?
Start by funding demand capture — search and remarketing — until it stops returning, then move incremental budget into demand creation on social. The right split is discovered by measurement, not decided in advance.
Should the agency fee come out of the marketing budget?
Yes, it is a marketing cost. Just keep it visible as a separate line so you can see media efficiency and total channel cost independently.
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