Marketing Budgets. How much should you spend?

Building intellectual capital in the form of marketing data which supports marketing strategies is as strategic as building a diversified financial investment portfolio.

Determining your market research budget, planning the year’s research activities or deciding whether to outsource market research is dependent upon internal factors. Major factors which may determine the necessary allocation of resources include—— staffing issues; expertise, time constraints; capacity; flexibility and the product life cycle.

Highlighted and summarized are findings about marketing budgets from various industry publications including Blackfriars, The American Marketing Association’s and the Market Research Association indicate:

About 50 percent of U.S. companies have a market research department.
On average companies spend approximately 1.2 percent of sales annually on market research.
Fifty percent of market research budgets are used to out-sourced to companies such as Market Directions.
Market research outsource spending has increased by 77% over the last ten years.

Breakdown of the Marketing Budget

Generally, marketing budgets are split as following:

Advertising: 31%
Website development: 17%
Events: 15%
Public relations and analyst relations: 10%
Collateral: 6%
Concept testing: 6%

What is your firm’s market research budget — compare that to marcomm—(marketing communications)? Let Market Directions be one of your marketing tools— we can help your marketing department do their jobs better, faster and with a greater degree of efficiency.