B2B Benchmarks 2025: Key Marketing Insights & Budget Trends Revealed

Key Findings from the 2025 B2B Benchmarks Report

There is plenty to read and digest, but the key findings that resonated include:

Increased Marketing Budgets: Median marketing budgets have risen from 9% to 10% of revenue, indicating a growing emphasis on marketing’s role in business growth. Notably, companies in the top quartile have increased their budgets from 16% to 20%.

Correlation Between Budget and Growth: Companies experiencing faster growth tend to allocate a higher percentage of their revenue to marketing. This raises the question of causality—does increased marketing drive growth, or do growing companies invest more in marketing?

Product-Led Growth (PLG) Investments: Organisations adopting a product-led growth strategy are allocating larger portions of their budgets to marketing, particularly focusing on program-heavy initiatives.

AI’s Impact on Budget Allocation: The integration of artificial intelligence is prompting discussions about its influence on budget distribution among personnel, programs, and technology.

Evolution of Revenue Attribution: As companies mature, there’s a shift toward multi-touch revenue attribution models, reflecting a more sophisticated approach to understanding marketing effectiveness. Mixed media modelling can help here, but comes with additional overheads (costs, resources)

Inbound Leads and Deal Size: A higher percentage of inbound leads is closely associated with larger deal sizes, emphasising the importance of inbound marketing strategies.

GTM Efficiency Metrics: Metrics such as Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and CAC ratio are not yet central to marketing evaluations, suggesting room for integrating these efficiency measures.

Scaling and Marketing Investment: As companies scale, the marketing investment per dollar of new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) decreases, highlighting improved efficiency in larger organisations.

Additional Insights for B2B Startups and Scaleups

Over and above the key insights, there are particularly useful insights for startups and scaleups to consider as they begin to work through product-market fit.

Budget Allocation by Company Size: Smaller companies (below $5M in revenue) allocate a median of 14% to marketing, whereas larger companies (over $150M) allocate around 4%.

Demand Generation and Events: These areas consume over 50% of marketing budgets. As companies grow beyond $5M, the allocation to demand generation increases to 34-38%, but decreases to 29-30% once revenues surpass $100M, with a corresponding increase in budgets for events, communications, channel marketing, and operations.

Marketing’s Share of Sales and Marketing Budget: Marketing accounts for about one-third of the total sales and marketing budget, with a smaller share in companies handling higher average contract values. In the report launch webinar, Jon Miller makes the point that a consolidated understanding (as well as nuanced view) of the sales + marketing budgets can drive solid data-driven decisions that deliver against the RevOps goals of sales and marketing alignment.

For a comprehensive understanding and to tailor these benchmarks to your organisation’s profile, you can access the full report and interactive benchmarks on Benchmarkit’s website.
And a great way to go deeper is to watch the B2B Marketing Benchmarks Webinar where the research team speak through the findings, revealing their surprise (and delight) at the data.