How to Set Your 2027 Marketing Budget When You Are Not a Marketer

Sometime in the next few weeks you will sit down with your accountant, or with a spreadsheet late in the evening, and set the numbers for next year. Rent, salaries, stock, insurance: those you know. Then there is the marketing line, and you type in a number that feels reasonable. Often it is last year’s number, which was also a guess.

This article is for the owner who wants to set a small business marketing budget for 2027 that is based on something. You do not need to be a marketer to do it. You need one goal, an honest list of the work, and the prices of three or four ways of getting that work done. It takes about an hour, and the result fits on one page.

Why the percentage rule does not help you

Search for how much to spend on marketing and you will find a percentage of revenue. The best-known figures come from Gartner’s annual survey of marketing leaders, which put marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026. That is a real number, but look at who answered: 401 marketing leaders, the large majority at companies with more than a billion dollars of revenue a year.

A company that size has a brand to maintain in a dozen countries and a marketing department to pay. A bakery in Mechelen or an installer in Breda has neither. Copying their percentage gives you a number with no connection to what your business needs. For some small businesses it is far too much; for a new business trying to get known, it can be far too little.

So start from the other end: what do you want marketing to do next year, and what work does that take?

Step 1: pick one goal for 2027

One, not five. A small business with a small budget that tries to do everything ends up doing a little of everything and nothing well. Some examples of a goal you could actually check in December 2027:

• More enquiries from the region you already serve, so the order book is full in the quiet months.
• Fill a new location, a new service or a new product line that nobody knows about yet.
• Hire people. For some businesses, finding staff is a harder problem than finding customers, and your social media is one of the first things a candidate looks at.
• Stop depending on one big customer, or on one platform such as a marketplace.

Write the goal at the top of the page. Every line below it has to serve that goal, or it goes.

Step 2: list the work, week by week

Now write down what has to happen every week to move towards that goal. Be concrete. Not “social media”, but things you could count:

• How many posts a week, on which platforms. For most small businesses, one or two platforms done well beat four done badly.
• Who replies to comments and messages, and how quickly.
• Photos and short videos: who takes them, and how often.
• The website: what needs updating, and who does it.
• Anything seasonal: Black Friday, Sinterklaas, the summer, a trade fair, an open day.
• Paid advertising, if any, and who sets it up and watches it.

This list is the real budget. The money is just the price of doing what is on it.

Step 3: price the work three ways

There are only a few ways to get marketing work done, and each has a price you can look up. Put all of them on the page, even the ones you think you will not choose.

Doing it yourself

This one looks free and is not. Count your own hours honestly. Four hours a week is 208 hours a year, which is more than five full working weeks. Multiply that by what an hour of your time is worth to the business when you spend it on customers, quotes or your team. Then ask whether the work was actually done every week last year, or only in the weeks when you had time.

Hiring someone

An employee in Belgium costs far more than the gross salary: holiday pay, the thirteenth month and employer charges come on top. In our comparison of the options, an in-house social media manager in Belgium came to roughly €54,500 to €79,000 a year all in, depending on experience. That buys one person, with their holidays, their sick days and the risk that they leave.

An agency

Published Belgian agency rate cards for small and mid-sized businesses run from under €500 to several thousand euros a month, with the mid-market at about €1,500 to €3,000 a month. Read carefully what that buys: often a few days of someone’s time per month, not daily work.

An outsourced team

A dedicated team abroad, managed for you, sits between the two. Our own packages are published: €595, €995, €1,495 and €2,295 a month depending on how much work is in them, month-to-month, with 30 days’ notice. If you want to test a steady rhythm first, €1 a day buys one post a day on one platform: €365 for the year.

In-house vs agency vs dedicated team: the real cost breakdown

What social media management actually costs in Belgium

Step 4: keep a small budget to test something

Platforms change every year. In 2026 alone, Meta started selling paid plans for business accounts, LinkedIn changed how it decides who sees what, and TikTok opened its shop in Belgium and the Netherlands. You will not know in October which of next year’s changes matter to you.

So keep a separate, small amount for testing one new thing per quarter: a short run of paid ads, a new platform, a paid Meta plan if it solves a real problem for you. Set the amount before you start and decide in advance what result would make you continue. If you cannot say what would count as success, do not run the test.

Meta One for Business: should a small business pay for Facebook and Instagram?

Step 5: agree when you will look at it again

A budget you look at once a year is a guess with a date on it. Put four dates in your calendar now, one per quarter. At each one, ask three questions: was the work on the list actually done every week, is the goal moving, and is there anything to stop or to add? The first question is the one most small businesses fail, and it is the one a budget can fix.

Your one-page 2027 budget

When you are done, the page should have five lines on it:

1. The one goal for 2027, in a sentence you can check in December.
2. The weekly work that goal needs, written so you could count it.
3. Who does that work, and what it costs per year, with the options you compared.
4. A separate test budget, and the result that would make each test worth continuing.
5. Four review dates in the calendar.

That page is a far better marketing budget than a percentage. It also makes the conversation with your accountant, your partner or your bank much shorter, because every euro on it has a job.

How to build a 30-day marketing calendar that actually works

Sources

Gartner: 2026 CMO Spend Survey (11 May 2026)

If you have filled in the page and the work on it is more than you can do yourself, book a free intro call. We will go through your list with you, tell you which of our packages fits it, or tell you honestly that it is not us you need.

See our packages and the €1 a day offer