What Should Your Marketing Budget Look Like for 2027?

Every fall, somewhere between the first snow on Pikes Peak and Thanksgiving, clients start asking me the same thing: "What should I be spending on marketing next year?"

It's a fair question. The trouble is that most of the answers online were written for companies with a marketing department, or written to sell you something expensive. So I pulled the actual numbers. Here's what they say, and here's how I'd plan a 2027 budget if I were running a small local business on a tight one.

Most small businesses barely budget for marketing at all

If you've never set a marketing budget, you're in good company. This year UENI asked 7,413 people who had just started a business what they planned to spend on marketing:

That's what brand-new owners said they planned to spend, not a tally of what anyone actually spent. Still, it tells you something. Zero is a budget too. It just means your competitors get to decide who shows up first.

How much should you actually spend?

The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends that businesses with less than $5 million in revenue put 7 to 8% of it toward marketing, assuming margins of around 10 to 12% after expenses. Other experts suggest 2 to 3% for a business that's just starting out, and up to 20% in very competitive industries.

Big companies land right around there. The CMO Survey (Duke, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association) found marketing averaged 8.96% of revenue in January 2026, with a median of 5%. But 87% of the companies in that survey bring in $10 million or more, so treat it as a ceiling, not a target.

Here's what that looks like for a local business. Say you run a landscaping company doing $400,000 a year:

• At 7 to 8%, that's $28,000 to $32,000 a year, or roughly $2,300 to $2,700 a month.
• At a startup-friendly 2%, it's $8,000 a year, about $670 a month.

I'm not going to tell you that you have to spend 8%. I am going to tell you the number should be on purpose. Pick a percentage you can live with, write it down, and then spend it in the right order.

Start with the website, because everything else points to it

Think about every way somebody hears about you. A neighbor's referral. Your truck at a stoplight. A BNI meeting. A Facebook post. A yard sign. Almost every one of those ends the same way: somebody pulls out their phone and looks you up.

That's why the website comes first. Clutch's 2025 survey of small business owners found:

Search is where most of that traffic comes from. When BrightEdge studied thousands of websites in 2019, organic search brought in more than three times the traffic of paid search. It's an older study, but the gap is big enough that the point still stands:

Speed matters just as much. Google's 2017 research found that as a page's load time goes from one second to three, the chance a visitor leaves rises 32%, and that 53% of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

That's why I hand-code every Lamplighter site to load in under a second. If your site is slow, outdated or hard to use on a phone, every other dollar you spend leaks out of it. Get the base layer right first. (If you're not sure how yours stacks up, I wrote about how to know if you have a good website.)

Ads are rent. SEO is equity.

Google Ads work, and they work fast. But you pay for every click, and the clicks aren't cheap. WordStream and LocaliQ's 2026 benchmarks, drawn from 13,474 U.S. campaigns, put the averages here:

And here's the catch: the day you stop paying, the leads stop. Ads are rent. Nothing you paid for keeps working once the budget runs out.

A website that ranks is different. It's closer to owning. Once a page earns its spot, the clicks keep coming without a meter running. But where you rank matters a lot:

One honest caveat: that top spot isn't what it used to be. Ahrefs found in 2026 that when Google shows an AI Overview, the top-ranking page gets about 58% fewer clicks. That doesn't make SEO less important. It means the content on your site has to be good enough, and current enough, that Google and the AI tools want to pull from it.

Does a managed website really rank better?

I wanted to give you a clean number here, something like "managed websites get updated X times more often and rank Y% higher." I looked hard. That study doesn't exist. Plenty of agencies quote a figure like that, but I couldn't find where any of them came from, so I'm not going to repeat one.

Here's what has actually been measured:

Put those together and the picture is pretty clear. Rankings get built over years of steady upkeep, not on launch day. Ahrefs' advice is that if a page still isn't in the top 10 after about six months, its chances are low unless you make changes. And Ahrefs and Google both warn against changing the date on a page without making real changes. So "managed" has to mean somebody is actually doing the work.

That's why every Lamplighter plan includes unlimited content edits. You text or email me the change, and I make it. No logins, no "I'll get to it this weekend." (If you're wondering what's worth updating, here's how often you should update your website and what belongs on it.)

There's a security side to upkeep too. Among the hacked websites Sucuri cleaned up in 2021, the core software was out of date on 50% of the WordPress sites, 74% of the Drupal sites and 77% of the Joomla sites. And Patchstack found that 91% of the new WordPress vulnerabilities discovered in 2025 were in plugins. Lamplighter sites are hand-coded, with no WordPress and no plugins, so there's no plugin to forget to update. (More on that in why WordPress was great but is no longer the best choice.)

Don't forget the line items that cost nothing

Some of the best marketing on this list is free. Your Google Business Profile costs nothing, and neither does asking every customer for a review. BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey shows why it's worth the effort:

Three-month-old reviews and replies to every one of them. That's upkeep again. It's the same lesson as the website: steady beats flashy.

What $487 a month actually buys

Let's make this concrete. Here's the same monthly budget spent two ways.

On a tighter budget, the gap is even starker. A Lamplighter website starts at $187 a month. That's less than three leads' worth of Google Ads at the average price, and the site keeps working for you every day of the month.

To be fair to ads: they have a place. If you need the phone ringing next week, ads can do that. I'd just never let them be the whole plan. Build the thing you own first, then rent attention on top of it.

A simple 2027 budget to start from

Here's how I'd split a budget at three different sizes. This is my suggestion, not a rule, so adjust it for your business and your season.

If you want fresh content going up every month as well, our Unlimited plan includes a blog post a month. Pair it with SEO Boost and you've got new content and someone tracking and tuning it. And if social media is part of the plan, Simple Social Media handles the posting for you.

Whatever size you land on, the order stays the same. Website first. Free stuff second, because it's free. Then SEO, then everything else. I wrote more about that order in build your foundation first.

Keep the light on

A good marketing plan works a lot like a lantern. A big bright flash gets attention for a second, and that's an ad. A steady light that stays on is what people actually find their way by.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on your 2027 budget, text or call me at (719) 357-8727. I'll give you a straight answer about where your money will go furthest, even if the answer isn't me.

Sources

• U.S. Small Business Administration, Marketing Plan Tool
• The CMO Survey, Topline Report, Duke University, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, 2026
• UENI, small business marketing budgets, 2026
• Clutch, small business website survey, 2025
• BrightEdge Channel Report, 2019
• Think with Google, mobile page speed benchmarks, 2017
• WordStream / LocaliQ Google Ads Benchmarks, 2026
• Backlinko, Google click-through rate stats, last updated 2025
• Ahrefs, AI Overviews and clicks, 2026
• HubSpot, historical blog optimization
• Ahrefs, How Long Does It Take to Rank, 2025
• Ahrefs, AI assistants prefer fresher content, 2025
• Sucuri Hacked Website Report, 2021 data
• Patchstack, State of WordPress Security, 2025 data
• BrightLocal Local Consumer Review Survey, 2026