Every guide answers this with a percentage of revenue. Eight percent, twelve percent, two to five for B2B.
That is useless advice for most IT and SaaS companies, because the companies asking the question are the ones whose revenue is the thing marketing is supposed to fix.
Size the budget from the output instead.
Start from the meetings you need
Work backwards from one number: how many qualified sales conversations does the business need each month to hit its plan.
Say the answer is ten. Your close rate from a qualified conversation is one in five, and your average contract is worth 30,000 euros a year. Ten conversations a month is two deals, and 60,000 euros of new annual contract value per month.
Now you have something to price against. A marketing budget that produces those ten conversations is cheap at almost any number below the value of one deal. A budget that produces three is expensive at any price.
If you cannot fill in those three numbers, that is the first problem to fix. It is also usually a sign that nobody is defining qualified the same way twice.
What the work actually costs
There are two separate costs and most budgets confuse them.
The first is getting found. Technical search foundations, content, AI answer visibility, paid channels and the tracking to tell them apart. This is ongoing monthly work. On our own published pricing it runs from 300 euros a month at the entry level, 900 a month once the audit findings are being implemented and content is running, and 1,400 a month for continuous work across search, AI answers and paid channels.
The second is looking ready to buy from. The website that converts, the pitch deck, the one pager, the demo script, the proposal templates. These are one time projects, not monthly work, and they cost from 1,900 euros for the basics up to 6,900 for a full set built for several markets.
The order matters. Traffic sent to a page that does not convert is the most expensive mistake in this list, and it is the most common one.
What the budget does not cover
Advertising spend is not the same as the fee to manage advertising. If someone quotes you a marketing budget with ad spend folded in, ask for the split before you compare it to anything.
Software licences sit outside as well. Analytics, CRM, enrichment, sending tools. For a small B2B team this is realistically a few hundred euros a month and it is not optional.
Nor is the cost of your own time. Marketing that never gets a subject matter expert on a call produces content that nobody in your market recognises as informed.
A reasonable first year
For an early stage IT or SaaS company in Europe, a defensible first year looks roughly like this.
One one time project to make the company look ready, in the first quarter. Then monthly work at the entry level while you find out which channel actually produces conversations. Then a decision at month six: put more into the channel that worked, or change the offer.
The sales side is a separate line. Our own sales plans start at 1,750 euros a month with a committed minimum of qualified meetings, which is the number to weigh marketing against. If marketing cannot produce a conversation for less than the sales side charges to book one, the marketing spend is not earning its place yet.
The full breakdown of both sides is public, on the marketing pricing page and the sales pricing page.
The one rule worth keeping
Judge every line by cost per qualified conversation, and review it every quarter.
Not impressions, not traffic, not leads. A budget reviewed against that one number gets cut in the right places and grown in the right places, which is more than most marketing budgets ever manage.