Marketing Budget Template

I've seen dozens of marketing budget templates. Most of them show you a column for the budget amount followed by a column for the actuals.

Row by row they show how much you estimated to spend vs. how much you actually spent on different marketing campaigns and initiatives. I find these templates are best suited for finance professionals, not marketing leaders.  

I want to see how the marketing dollars we spend actually lead to performance for the business.

For our venture-backed, B2B SaaS company, we create marketing budgets that include headcount costs, tools and paid campaign budgets. We also include a detailed marketing funnel that calculates how those dollars produce marketing qualified leads that are either converted in a self-serve motion or fed to our sales team to close.

This Marketing Budget Template in Google Sheets is designed for you to budget your monthly marketing costs and project marketing results from your investment of marketing dollars.

Click "Add to Cart" on the right. Then checkout to use this Marketing Budget Template. You will immediately receive a link to the Google Sheet, which you can also convert into an  excel file.

The template includes the following tabs:

• Instructions: instructions on how to use this template most effectively.
• ‍Growth Scenario Planner: a way to project high level growth rates and determine top of the funnel inputs required to achieve your goals.
• ‍Marketing Budget Summary: a summary view of your total marketing budget, which includes headcount, tools and paid campaigns.
• ‍Marketing Campaign Spend & Lead Funnel: a template for how you will invest marketing dollars to generate leads.
• ‍BONUS Go-to-Market Checklist: a step by step list of activities to complete when going to market with a new product.

Here's how I recommend you use this marketing budget template:

1. First, review the contents of this template. Review each tab to familiarize yourself with the information.
2. Play around with the Growth Scenario Planner to get a sense of the resources required to achieve your high level growth goals.
3. This will then inform how you prepare your budget. Next, move onto the Marketing Campaign Spend & Lead Funnel tab.
4. Input last 12 month historicals.
5. Add additional rows for net new marketing channels.
6. Forecast your budget and MQLs for each channel for the next 12 months.
7. Update the Marketing Budget Summary tab with the campaign spend, headcount costs and tools required to support your marketing plan.    

A bottoms up approach like this always helped us more accurately forecast from quarter to quarter. It also helped us hold our marketing team accountable for projected outcomes. You have to give your marketing team a commit of some sort (MQLs, SQLs, trials, pipeline).

Whatever it is, just get them to commit to it. Then measure their performance toward these goals.

Click “Add to Cart” on the right and then checkout. You will immediately receive a link to the Google Sheet.

If you run a go-to-market team at a B2B SaaS company, check out these templates as well:

• Marketing Campaign Template
• Marketing Calendar Template
• Brand Guidelines Template
• View Template Bundles