It is late October, which means somewhere in your business there is a spreadsheet with a cell labeled “marketing” and nothing in it.
You will fill that cell one of two ways. You will either copy last year’s number, or you will guess. Both are extremely common and both are how businesses end up spending twelve months funding something nobody can evaluate.
Here is the third way. It takes about twenty minutes.
Start with the only number that matters
Not a percentage. Not an industry benchmark. This:
What is one new customer worth to you?
Average job value, multiplied by how many times they come back. A lawn service might land at $900. A roofer might land at $11,000. A personal injury firm might land somewhere that makes both of those look like rounding errors.
Once you have that number, budgeting stops being philosophy and becomes arithmetic. If a customer is worth $900 and you want forty more of them next year, you are asking what it costs to generate forty customers. That is a question with an answer.
If you cannot answer it, stop reading and go work it out. That calculation is worth more than the rest of this article, and most business owners have genuinely never done it.
The percentage rule, and why it is only a starting point
The common guidance is 5 to 10 percent of revenue to hold your position, 10 to 15 percent if you are trying to grow.
It is a reasonable sanity check and a terrible strategy. A percentage tells you what you can afford. It tells you nothing about what you need, and those are different questions. A business doing $800,000 in a low-competition category in Georgetown and a business doing $800,000 in personal injury in Charleston should not spend the same, and no percentage will tell you that.
Use the percentage to find your ceiling. Use the customer-value math to find your target. Spend somewhere between.
What a local SC business actually spends
Real ranges, not a sales pitch. These are what the market charges, and they vary by market.
Myrtle Beach, Charleston and Greenville are the competitive markets. A single-channel engagement generally starts around $1,500 a month. Two or three channels running together land in the $3,000 to $4,500 range. Full coverage across search, paid and content runs $5,000 and up.
Columbia, Florence and Georgetown run lower. Single channel from around $1,000. Growth-level in the $2,200 to $3,500 range. Full coverage from about $4,000.
Project work sits outside all of that. A professional website is generally $3,000 to $15,000 depending on size and complexity. Brand identity runs $3,000 to $8,000.
Ad spend is always separate. If anyone quotes you one blended number covering both management and the money that actually goes to Google, ask them to split it. The fact that they did not is information.
Category value overrides market every time. A personal injury firm in Florence can carry Charleston pricing because one closed case pays for the year. A boutique in Charleston may not. Price the case value, not the zip code.
Where the money should go, in order
This order is not negotiable and it is where most budgets go wrong.
1. The website. Everything else drives traffic to it. If it is slow, dated or impossible to contact you from, you are funding a leak. Fix the bucket before you buy more water.
2. Local SEO and your Google Business Profile. Highest return available to a local business, and it compounds. The work you do in January is still paying in November. Unglamorous, essential.
3. Reviews and reputation. Cheap, fast, and it makes every other dollar work harder. A strong review profile lowers the cost of every ad and every landing page you will ever run.
4. Paid ads. The accelerator, not the engine. Run them before the three above are solid and you are paying to send people to something that does not convert.
5. Content and email. The long game. Small ongoing spend, large cumulative payoff.
Most businesses do this list backwards, start at four, and conclude that marketing does not work.
What to cut
Anything you cannot measure. If it cannot be tied to calls or customers, it is a donation.
The Boost button. It is advertising with the targeting and the objective removed, which is most of what makes advertising work.
The cheapest option that needs redoing. Buying twice costs more than buying right.
Software you use once a month. Audit the subscriptions. There are more of them than you think.
The mistake almost everybody makes
They budget for activity instead of outcomes. We should post more. We should run ads. We should do SEO.
Toward what? A budget without a target is spending with extra steps.
Start with the number of customers you want. Work backward to what it costs to produce them. Fund that. Everything else is optional, and treating it as optional is how you find out what was actually working.
Before you commit a number
You cannot budget intelligently without knowing where you currently stand. Which channels are producing, what is leaking, and where the fastest wins are sitting.
Get a free Visibility Scorecard. We will check your website, your search visibility and your local competition, then send a plain-English read within 24 hours. No call required, no packages presented.
Then fill in that cell with a number you can defend.
Keep it flyt. 🚀