Marketing Budgets: How to Build and 22 Free Templates

ByThiago Sgobero

Creating Marketing Budgets is a Critical Task, No Matter the Type of Service You Offer

This last part is important. “Marketing Budgets” can refer to two types of work: a budget for a client or an internal budget, which we often call a “budget.”

An agency, for instance, creates Marketing Budgets by pricing its services and negotiating with clients.

For companies in other sectors, the process is a bit different: they create Marketing Budgets (known as Annual Budgets) to allocate resources for the marketing department in the upcoming year.

Oh, and a quick note: an agency also needs to make its marketing “budget” clear, okay?

In this article, we’ll discuss both types of budgets, how to create them, and how to price your products and activities.

To make it easier to follow along, we’ll differentiate between them by calling them Marketing Budgets and Budgets.

And at the end, there’s a bonus! I’ve put together a comprehensive list of the best Marketing Budget templates for you to use as you wish.

Shall we begin?

What is a Marketing Budget?

For agencies, a budget can also mean two different things:

  • The description of the products and services being contracted, with pricing;
  • And the process of determining the resources to be spent on marketing in the upcoming year – our Budget.

In companies with in-house marketing – when marketing activities are internal and not outsourced – the budget aligns with the latter: the allocation of resources for the marketing team.

It’s important to discuss the Budget because many people believe it’s solely about money.

But that’s not entirely true. While the Budget is primarily about the capital to be invested, it also addresses other considerations.

This Budget will include items like equipment that needs to be purchased, the amount spent on Paid Media, recruitment needs, and so forth.

Because of this, creating a Budget in isolation is impossible. It needs to be informed by other factors that may even extend beyond the marketing department.

For example, to determine how much to invest in Google Ads, you must know the marketing goals for the year: how many MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) should be generated, how many SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) should be converted into sales, etc.

All of this ultimately results in numbers. It’s not only about how much will be invested but also where the investment will go and how it will be used.

An important point that applies to both cases is understanding how to price your services.

Pricing will have a direct impact on your budget, which needs to be scaled to ensure you achieve a good ROI (Return on Investment).

We’ll dive deeper into this in the next topic. Join me:

How to Price Your Services?

This aspect is crucial in Marketing Budgets because the pricing of your services strongly influences how much you can spend promoting them.

This is an important topic for both types of Marketing Budgets: those created by agencies to sell their products and those developed by marketing departments to manage expenses throughout the year.

And here’s the thing: the latter is often created at the end of the year, a time when pricing needs to be reviewed.

Your team may have expanded, you may have purchased more equipment, the market may be charging higher prices in your segment—there are many reasons why someone might need to reassess their pricing, including inflation.

In this section, we’ll talk more about this, and afterward, we’ll move on to practical applications. Let’s dive in:

Hourly Billing

For companies that work with hourly pricing, keeping pricing up to date is absolutely essential.

This method is more complex than others because tracking variations in hours is challenging.

The ideal approach is to work with averages. To align pricing with your budget, calculate a comprehensive average of your recurring revenue throughout the year.

Some KPIs can help you determine this average, including:

  • MRR: Your Monthly Recurring Revenue. MRR serves as a base for calculating the annual average.
  • YRR: A yearly average derived from all your MRRs over the year.
  • CPA: The cost of acquiring a customer.
  • LTV: For long-term contracts, how much, on average, does a client bring to your company over the course of their contract?

Using these KPIs, you’ll gain a clearer understanding of your financial health, resulting in better pricing and a more accurate annual Marketing Budget.

Project-Based Billing

If you work with project-based pricing, your Marketing Budgets are a bit simpler to manage.

You need to identify the primary requirements of your projects. What do you need to execute them?

This includes personnel, equipment, time, expertise, and even market rates.

These factors will help you determine the cost of each project and how much you should charge to ensure profitability.

However, incorporating this into the annual budget is slightly more complex, especially if project values vary significantly.

The key is to understand your annual revenue average. Compare previous years and map out a trajectory: Are you growing or shrinking?

By analyzing your annual revenue variation, you can set goals to guide your budget planning for the upcoming year.

Service Quantity-Based Billing

In many cases, agencies choose to charge a fixed monthly fee based on a predetermined number of services.

This approach is quite similar to project-based billing. You must evaluate the investment required for each deliverable to arrive at a price that yields a profit.

For annual budgets, it’s essential to consider the volume of materials you typically produce throughout the year and whether it will increase or decrease.

For example, suppose your company has always invested in Google Ads but plans to expand into Social Ads next year.

This expansion will require a larger budget since dividing the Google Ads allocation between two platforms could hinder performance and lead to lost sales.

Increased production will also bring additional costs that must be factored into your annual budget. You may need to hire more staff, purchase additional equipment, or pay for overtime.

Plan-Based Billing

Many companies operating in the SaaS (Software as a Service) model offer different plans.

In this case, Marketing Budgets for agencies are straightforward. Everything we’ve discussed earlier will be used to determine the pricing for each plan.

For annual budgets, working with plans simplifies things significantly. Service packages are sold as products, making the process much easier.

Here, you only need to focus on your sales goals and team sizing.

For example, last year, you sold 500 packages: 200 of the simplest ones and 300 of the more complex ones.

What do you plan to do with these numbers next year? Expand them? If so, you’ll need to increase your Marketing Budget.

How to Create a Marketing Budget for Agencies?

It’s important to distinguish between these two types of Marketing Budgets, as each has unique characteristics.

A Marketing Budget for agencies is more immediate. Typically tailored to a specific client, it must facilitate sales and negotiation.

In agencies, the budget is viewed as the final opportunity to impress. It needs to be solid, competitively priced, aligned with the service provided, and visually appealing with a clear purpose.

In this section, we’ll delve deeper into Marketing Budgets developed by agencies for their clients.

Let’s go:

Determining the Pricing Model

How will you calculate your price?

This might seem like a simple question since there’s a standard method for pricing based on service-related expenses.

However, for agencies, this is just one of the ways to price services.

For instance, after calculating all the hours spent by your writers, designers, customer success professionals, and managers, you determine the cost is R$5,000 per month.

However, during your competitor research, you notice that the same service costs three times more in the market.

Which model would you prefer? Following the market trend or pricing based on your actual company costs?

Ultimately, both approaches align with basic pricing formulas. In the example, you’re simply increasing your profit margin with positive market signals.

Calculating the Price per Client

This might sound a bit odd, but the reality is that there are different types of clients. This must be accounted for in an agency’s marketing budget.

For example, you might sell the same service to Mr. João’s Butcher Shop and Porto Seguro. The butcher shop won’t accept a high price, and Porto Seguro won’t even consider you if you offer a low price.

Imagine yourself in Porto Seguro’s marketing department. You request a quote from five agencies. Four of them provide prices ranging from R$10,000 to R$20,000, but one quotes R$3,000.

The one quoting R$3,000 likely won’t even be considered. A price that low is inappropriate because if all the others are charging higher prices, the cheaper agency might seem inferior.

This is the “cheapest” in its negative sense. Not everything discounted is well-perceived, depending on your target audience.

Aligning with the Company’s Objectives

The price should also reflect the company’s specific objectives during the contract period.

For instance, if you aim to enter a company and gradually expand your service portfolio, you might offer discounts and charge less than usual. 

This approach resembles an ABM (Account-Based Marketing) strategy, where the sale itself serves as lead qualification.

🔎 Check this out: 50 Lead Qualification Questions with Explanations

Creating a Branded Pricing Model

This is crucial: as previously mentioned, everything an agency does aims to attract more clients. Absolutely everything.

If you own an agency and aren’t applying this mindset to even the small daily tasks, you should start now.

One such task is the marketing budget. As an agency grows and gains a reputation, budget requests increase and can become routine.

Never let this work become routine. Your budgets must reflect the agency’s branding and, ideally, be crafted individually—a nearly artisanal process.

Of course, you can streamline this work in several ways. Having pre-made templates, for instance, is a great idea.

But all the information in the marketing budget must be personalized for your client. Don’t neglect this, and always strive to impress as much as possible.

Management Approval

This step isn’t mandatory, but it’s a great idea to validate the client’s proposed values with your management team.

If you handle a large volume of budgets, it’s best to agree on prices, discounts, and negotiation margins beforehand, so management doesn’t have to approve every single one.

But if you handle a small volume—say, one budget per week—it’s worth checking with management before sending it out.

This is because management has a clear understanding of the business objectives and how the client-specific value fits into them.

Returning to the earlier example of price differences for contracts with Porto Seguro and Mr. João’s Butcher Shop: the management team decides on these pricing discrepancies.

Client Approval and Negotiation

This final step is critical. Client approval always comes with negotiation.

It’s important to account for this negotiation when preparing your marketing budget.

Leave an extra margin to accommodate the Brazilian culture of discounts. If the client demands more concessions, involve management.

Presenting results to management is helpful for this reason. Lowering the price might not be feasible, but management can offer additional services or products as a counteroffer.

How to Create a Marketing Budget for a Company?

Now that we’ve extensively covered marketing budgets crafted by agencies for clients, let’s discuss the other side: marketing budgets for internal marketing departments.

“Client-side” is the standard term for such departments: a multidisciplinary marketing team that doesn’t serve external companies but works within its own company.

In the past, these marketing departments were small, as the norm was for companies to hire agencies to handle communications.

However, with the growth of digital marketing, companies realized it was possible to create a “mini-agency” and maintain full control over production.

Today, it’s quite common to find companies with their own marketing departments—and just as common to see them struggle with budget creation.

Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to help you understand the main points of this task. Specific details, however, are up to you.

Shall we?

Expenses from the Previous Period

The first point to analyze is how much was spent in the previous period and whether the return was proportional to the amount spent.

This part is important but doesn’t determine everything, okay? You’ll still need to consider several other factors, including your goals, the purchase of new equipment, etc.

The key is to primarily understand your return and how well the budget aligns with the department’s scale.

The return indicates whether the amount spent was well-utilized, while the department’s scale shows whether the investment was sufficient to meet the team’s demands.

These two pieces of information are your main guides when analyzing the previous budget. You may have spent a lot but achieved little return, and still failed to adequately support your team.

Alternatively, you might have achieved excellent returns with a reduced budget, while your team is too small and on the verge of burnout.

Need for New Hires

Can your current team achieve the year’s goals?

Notice how issues involving other departments directly impact the budget.

If the new goals are ambitious and your current team barely met this year’s targets by late December, you’ll likely need to hire more staff.

This calculation must be included in your marketing budget. Unfortunately, it’s common for companies to overlook this, leading to reallocation of funds from other areas.

Company Objective with Marketing

Does your company rely on marketing to sustain its sales volume?

Many businesses find themselves in this situation, which is entirely normal nowadays.

Digital marketing expands the company’s reach and allows it to access markets that were previously unattainable.

For example, consider a craft store that used to sell only locally but now sells nationwide.

Without advertising platforms like Google Ads, it wouldn’t have achieved this market penetration.

If this is your case, you’ll need to understand your company’s objective with marketing.

If the goal is to achieve increasingly higher sales, you’ll need to keep investing and increase that investment year after year.

However, there are instances where companies simply aim to maintain their current sales levels — in fact, increasing marketing efforts could generate demand they’re not equipped to handle.

Speaking of which:

Sales History and Projections

Marketing is directly tied to the number of sales your company generates.

So, you need to analyze your sales history and compare it with your projections for the upcoming year.

This is why an Annual Marketing Budget isn’t just a marketing department concern. Quite the opposite: it’s everyone’s business.

22 Marketing Budget Templates for Free Download

Now that we’ve discussed almost everything you need to know to create these two types of Marketing Budgets, I’ll wrap up the article with some recommendations I found online.

By reviewing these templates, you’ll see practical examples of how these budgets are typically structured.

All of them are free. Ready for a quick list?

Most ready-made templates cater to corporate Marketing Budgets. Rarely — very rarely, in fact — will you find one designed specifically for agencies.

This is because agencies are expected to create their own budgets to present to clients.

Due to low search volume, few resources are produced on this topic, as related keywords are not frequently searched.

But that’s a subject for another article! 😅 Stick with me until the end because I still have a message for you.

Here’s the Deal: Creating Marketing Budgets Requires Several Considerations

One of these considerations is your lead generation.

If your current marketing efforts are generating plenty of leads, it’s essential to increase your investment to generate more MQLs for your sales team.

This is a critical point. Many companies postpone this process, thinking, “If we have leads, we’re good.” That’s not the case. The more leads you generate, the more assurance you have that your efforts are paying off.

And if you’re not generating leads, now’s the time to fix that.

With Leadster, you can install a sales and marketing chatbot on your website to proactively generate and qualify leads, engaging visitors with personalized and effective strategies.

You can try it today by clicking the banner below. I’ll be waiting for you. Thank you for reading, and see you in the next article!

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