The Rising Tide Approach to Marketing Budgets
"A rising tide lifts all boats" is the metaphor Tide Surge is built on, and it usually gets applied to how channels work together. Your content earns trust. Your sales alignment turns that trust into pipeline opportunity. Your demand generation brings in your needed lead volume. And none of it works in isolation, all of it works better together.
But the metaphor can also be applied to how you set your marketing budget as well, and not just the channels it funds. A rising tide does not lift one boat a little and leave the others stuck in the mud. It raises the whole harbor evenly, because the water underneath everything went up. That is what your annual marketing budget should do inside your business: it should be sized to lift the whole growth effort you're aiming for, not just fund whatever campaign got the most attention last quarter.
Most owner-led businesses do not set a budget that way. They set it by looking backward.
The Wrong Starting Point: Last Year, or What's Left Over
We've seen two habits show up constantly when marketing budgets are getting built:
The "last year plus a little" method. Whatever was spent last year becomes this year's floor, with a modest bump if things went well. It is easy, it is defensible in a budget meeting, and it has almost nothing to do with what the business actually needs to grow.
The "whatever is left" method. Marketing gets whatever is left over after payroll, operations, and everything else gets funded. It treats marketing as an expense to minimize instead of an investment that produces a return, and it guarantees the budget will never be big enough to hit an ambitious growth goal number.
Both methods have the same flaw. They start with a dollar figure and work backward into a plan, instead of starting with a growth goal and working forward into a dollar figure.
Start With the Growth Goal, Then Work Backward Into the Number
If a business wants to grow revenue by 20% next year, that is not a marketing question yet. It is a business math question. Before a single dollar gets allocated, the owner and leadership team needs a clear answer to something like this:
- What does 20% growth actually look like in new customers, expanded accounts, or both?
- What does the sales team's current close rate and average deal size suggest about how much pipeline that requires?
- How much of that pipeline can existing relationships, referrals, and repeat business realistically cover?
- What is the resulting gap that marketing has to generate through net-new demand?
That last number, the demand marketing actually has to create, is your true starting point. It is a specific, calculable figure, not a "vibe" or educated guess. Once it exists, the question changes from "how much should we spend on marketing" to "what will it cost to generate that much qualified pipeline given our current conversion rates and market conditions." In our opinion, that's a much more useful question, and is one a business can actually answer with data instead of guesswork.
Then Figure Out Where the Investment Needs to Go
Once the demand target is clear, the next step is mapping out the areas of work required to hit it, not the tactics. Areas of focus first, then tactics, in that order. Our rising tide approach typically means investment needs to be considered across several fronts at once:
- Foundational positioning and messaging. If the market does not understand what makes the business different, everything downstream costs more and converts worse.
- Content that supports the buying journey. Not volume of content for its own sake, but content that addresses the specific assets a buyer needs to move from "being aware of you and your services" to "convinced you're the right partner to work with".
- Paid media. Leverage paid media can help you compress time by buying you visibility and qualified traffic that organic efforts alone would take much longer to build. Paid media should rarely be your whole strategy, but for most B2B businesses it should be in the mix.
- Sales and marketing alignment. This is managing your CRM structure, lead handoff, and creating shared definitions of what counts as a qualified opportunity. Without this in place, everything above it leaks.
- Systems and reporting. The infrastructure that shows what is actually working, so next year's budget conversation starts from evidence instead of opinion.
The point of laying this out before assigning dollar amounts is that it keeps your business honest about what a real growth effort requires. It is much easier to defend a budget request when it is tied to a specific list of work that a specific revenue goal requires, instead of a lump sum that sounds reasonable in the moment.
What the Numbers Say
As a general range, most B2B companies should plan to reinvest somewhere between 5% and 10% of annual revenue back into marketing to fund meaningful growth. That range is not a rule written in stone, and it will not fit every business in every year, but it does hold up as a working starting point for the majority of budget conversations.
It is also consistent with what shows up in outside benchmarking. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that marketing budgets across the companies surveyed have held steady at 7.7% of overall company revenue, right in the middle of that range, with paid media alone accounting for close to a third of that spend. You can read the full release from Gartner here.
It is worth noting that Gartner's survey skews toward larger companies, most reporting well over a billion dollars in annual revenue. An owner-led, small to mid-sized B2B business chasing aggressive growth, especially one trying to build market awareness from a smaller base, may reasonably need to sit toward the top of the range, or above it for a period of time, to get the flywheel turning. A mature, well-established business defending its position may sit toward the bottom. The range is a reference point for the conversation, not a substitute for the growth math described above.
When the Number Comes First Anyway
Reality does not always cooperate with the ideal order. Sometimes a marketer inherits a fixed number from ownership or finance before any of this planning happens, and the job becomes prioritizing tactics within that budget constraint rather than building the budget from scratch.
When the budget is fixed, your prioritization should follow a few principles:
- Protect the foundation first. Positioning and messaging that is unclear will undercut every dollar spent downstream, including paid media. Fix that before adding volume.
- Fund the alignment work even when it feels unglamorous. A CRM that does not reflect reality, or a sales team that does not trust marketing leads, will waste spend faster than any underperforming campaign.
- Choose fewer channels, done well, over many channels, done thin. A fixed budget spread too wide rarely produces results strong enough to prove the investment was worth it.
- Build in a measurement plan from the start. A constrained budget needs to earn its case for growth next year. That case gets built with data and results, not with a good feeling about how things went.
- Be honest about what the number can and cannot achieve. If the fixed marketing budget cannot realistically fund the demand target your business needs, that mismatch should be surfaced early, not discovered in Q4.
The Rising Tide Still Applies
Whether your marketing budget starts with the growth goal or starts with a number handed down from above, the underlying principle does not change. Marketing works best as a coordinated, incremental effort across the whole business, not a single flashy campaign that is supposed to carry everything on its own. A rising tide lifts every boat in the harbor at once. A marketing budget built with the same discipline does the same thing for a business: it raises positioning, content, alignment, and demand together, so the growth that follows is durable instead of lucky.