Benchmark for Media Spend

Sarah Wylie

We often get the question: "Can you tell me how much I should budget for media to spend per account?"

As there are so many factors involved – key objectives/goals, your product, industry, go to market motions, and campaign strategy all have a huge impact on your spend. We recommend thinking about how you want to segment your TAM (or 10,000 accounts), as we’d recommend you have a different strategy (with varying spend) based on which accounts are in market, researching specific keywords, visiting certain webpages, fit different firmo/technographic criteria, etc. 

For reference, this article provides an objective view of budget trends and gets updated annually. 

Key takeaways are:

Total marketing budget for B2B is ~7% of revenue (9.7% being the average for tech/software).

Of that, investment in tech is at 29%.

Investment in online digital spend is 42%, however that accounts for all digital channels – Search, Display, Video, Social, etc (with Display being the second largest spend).

6sense also provides reporting on spend per account, but it’s difficult to recommend what we think that should be because it varies so much depending on the types of accounts you’re going after (Enterprise vs MM or SMB) and your overall strategy. Dell is a great example of a customer that increased their spend for enterprise accounts in Decision and Purchase stages, and significantly decreased spend for accounts in Awareness and Consideration.

Lori Mendel

Great topic and resource. Thanks for sharing! Looking forward to reading the article.