B2B Marketing Budget 2027: How Much Mid-Market Firms Should Spend (and Where)

Most mid-market B2B firms should plan a 2027 marketing budget of 6% to 8% of revenue, and professional services firms with aggressive growth goals may need closer to 10%. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, which skews toward large companies, puts the average at 7.8%. Fund a few channels properly, and give AI visibility its own line.

Here's how a lot of 2027 B2B marketing budgets will get built. Someone opens last year's spreadsheet, adds 5%, and spreads it across every channel that has a line item already. LinkedIn ads, a trade show, a newsletter, a podcast nobody listens to, a little SEO, a little paid search. Everything gets a slice, and none of the slices are big enough to work.

We get why it happens. It's fast, it's defensible in a board meeting, and nobody gets yelled at. It also makes it likely that 2027 looks a lot like 2026.

If you're a CEO or VP of Marketing at a $5M to $100M professional services firm, you probably have about six weeks before your 2027 number gets locked. This post covers how much to spend, where to put it, what to cut, and whether AI visibility deserves its own line. (If you're still deciding who does the work, start with our post on in-house, agency, or fractional marketing for professional services firms. This one is about how much and where.)

How much should a B2B company spend on marketing?

Plan on 6% to 8% of revenue as your marketing budget percentage of revenue, and go higher if your growth target is aggressive.

The anchor number comes from Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, released May 11, 2026. Marketing budgets rose "only slightly to 7.8% of company revenue in 2026 from 7.7% in 2025." That's basically flat. Budgets are keeping pace with revenue and not much more.

The same survey found 56% of CMOs say they lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy. CMOs at AI-mature companies spend 8.9% of revenue on marketing, more than a full point above average.

One caveat before you copy 7.8% into your plan. Gartner surveyed 401 CMOs and other marketing leaders in North America, the UK and Europe between January and March 2026, and "the vast majority" reported annual revenue of more than $1 billion. Big companies usually start with more brand recognition than a $20M consulting firm, so smaller firms often have to spend more to get noticed.

Professional services firms also tend to spend a bigger share of revenue. Spring 2026 CMO Survey benchmarks, as reported by CMO.Works, put B2B services marketing spend at 10.1% of revenue, compared with 7.0% for B2B product companies. That gap makes sense to us. If what you sell is your people's expertise, buyers need to see that expertise long before they talk to sales.

Our take: 6% is the floor for holding position. 8% is where most growth-minded mid-market firms should land. 10% is for firms with an aggressive growth target, a new practice area, or a market they're entering cold.

B2B marketing budget allocation: three sample 2027 budgets

A mid-market professional services firm should plan to spend 6% to 8% of revenue on marketing in 2027, with about half going to people and partners and the rest concentrated in a handful of channels.

$10M revenue (6% = $600K)

• In-house marketing team: 40%, $240K

• Agency and freelance partners: 10%, $60K

• Paid media: 20%, $120K

• Content, thought leadership and events: 12%, $72K

• Website and SEO: 5%, $30K

• AI visibility (GEO): 3%, $18K

• Martech and data: 6%, $36K

• Test budget: 4%, $24K

$30M revenue (7% = $2.1M)

• In-house marketing team: 45%, $945K

• Agency and freelance partners: 12%, $252K

• Paid media: 18%, $378K

• Content, thought leadership and events: 10%, $210K

• Website and SEO: 4%, $84K

• AI visibility (GEO): 3%, $63K

• Martech and data: 5%, $105K

• Test budget: 3%, $63K

$75M revenue (8% = $6.0M)

• In-house marketing team: 48%, $2.88M

• Agency and freelance partners: 10%, $600K

• Paid media: 18%, $1.08M

• Content, thought leadership and events: 10%, $600K

• Website and SEO: 4%, $240K

• AI visibility (GEO): 2%, $120K

• Martech and data: 5%, $300K

• Test budget: 3%, $180K

At $10M, the $60K partner line covers a $3K/month agency relationship ($36K a year) plus $24K for project work like a website refresh or a video shoot. These are TRA's sample models, not industry benchmarks, so adjust them to your market, salaries and goals. At this size, there's room for one or two in-house people and outside specialists. Squeeze it much further and it often ends up as one overworked marketing manager doing everything.

People take the biggest share at every size. For comparison, Gartner's June 2026 release from the same survey, which found labor's share of marketing budgets rose from 21.9% in 2025 to 24.5% in 2026. Our sample budgets put a lot more toward people than that. Mid-market totals are smaller, and a good marketer doesn't cost much less just because the company does.

The test budget is often the first thing to go when the CFO asks for a trim. Please fight for it. It's the one line where you get to try something new without having to defend it in the next quarterly review.

What to cut from your 2027 marketing budget

If your plan funds eight channels at $15K each, you don't have eight channels. You have eight experiments too small to read. Pick the three or four that can actually produce pipeline and fund those properly. These are the usual suspects for the chopping block:

1. Any channel you can't tie to a lead, a meeting or a closed deal after 12 months. "It's good for awareness" is a fair answer in year one. By year two, you should be able to point to something.

2. The trade show you go to because you've always gone. Count the meetings booked last year. If you can count them on one hand, ask whether that booth was an expensive coffee.

3. Social accounts on platforms your buyers don't use. A $40M accounting firm probably doesn't need a TikTok strategy. It needs a great LinkedIn presence and a partner group that actually posts.

4. Martech seats nobody logs into. Pull the usage report before renewal season. There's a good chance you'll find a tool you're paying for out of habit.

5. Content produced to hit a quota. In our experience, two sharp, opinionated pieces a month do more than eight forgettable ones.

Whatever you free up, assign it to a specific line right away. Money that isn't assigned tends to disappear into next year's plus 5%.

Should AI visibility get its own line item?

We think so, even if the line is small.

More buyers are using ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers to figure out which firms to look at, sometimes before they visit a single website. If your firm doesn't show up in those answers, you may not make the shortlist.

Across 75 mid-market professional services firms we scanned with Lighthouse in 2026, 60% didn't appear in unbranded AI answers for their own core service.

A separate line gives someone ownership. When AI visibility sits inside "SEO" or "content," it's easy for nobody to own it or measure it. A dedicated 2% to 3% (that's $18K at $10M in revenue) can cover a baseline audit, regular tracking across the major AI platforms, and some of the content and citation work that improves it.

Gartner found CMOs allocate an average of 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI initiatives, but only 30% report mature or fully developed AI readiness capabilities.

If you want the how-to side, start with our guide on improving your brand's visibility in AI search engines.

What does all this cost to staff with an agency? Carly breaks down agency pricing models in her November 9 post.

B2B marketing budget FAQ

What percentage of revenue should a B2B company spend on marketing?

We recommend most mid-market B2B companies plan for 6% to 8% of revenue. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey, mostly of companies over $1 billion in revenue, puts the average at 7.8%, and Spring 2026 CMO Survey benchmarks put B2B services firms at 10.1%.

How much should a $10M professional services firm spend on marketing?

About $600K a year at 6% of revenue. That covers one or two in-house marketers, a $3K/month agency relationship, paid media and a small test budget.

Does the marketing budget include salaries?

It should. Planning programs separately from people hides the real cost of marketing and makes in-house vs. agency comparisons hard to do. Gartner reports labor at 24.5% of marketing budgets in 2026.

How many marketing channels should a mid-market firm fund?

For most mid-market firms, three or four. Spreading the same budget across eight channels leaves each one too small to produce results you can measure.

Should AI visibility be a separate marketing budget line?

We recommend it. A dedicated 2% to 3% of the marketing budget gives someone responsibility for tracking whether AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity recommend your firm.

About the author

Lauren Patterson is Co-Founder and CEO of That RANDOM Agency and co-founder of Lighthouse, an AI visibility platform that tracks how brands show up across 20+ AI platforms. Before starting TRA in 2020, she worked at GTB, Campbell Ewald and Lambert. She writes about AI and social media as a Forbes contributor and is a media contributor for Fox 2 Detroit.

That RANDOM Agency is a women-owned boutique marketing agency in metro Detroit.

Sources

• Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey press release, May 11, 2026

• Gartner media spend and labor share press release, June 8, 2026

• CMO.Works: Marketing budget benchmarks by business type and stage (citing The CMO Survey, Spring 2026), updated Oct 14, 2026