How Much Do Companies Spend on Marketing? (Part 1: The Data & Why It’s Misleading)

“How much do companies spend on marketing?”

It’s a common question, and at first, it sounds like the answer would be useful. As if knowing the number will help you decide what you should spend on marketing.

Our research shows companies put roughly $2,000 per month on average into marketing. But that number by itself is almost meaningless.

It doesn’t tell you whether the spending is effective, why some companies see results while others don’t, or what the money is actually being used for.

To understand marketing spend in a meaningful way, you have to look beyond the dollar amount and break it down into its components.

But first …

The Research

When we looked at how much companies actually spend on marketing, the average came out to around $2,000 per month.

But that figure alone tells you almost nothing about marketing effectiveness. A company spending $2,000 could be growing steadily, while another spending the same amount sees no movement at all.

Larger companies naturally spend more and smaller ones spend less. A median or average doesn’t tell you anything useful about “what companies spend on marketing” instead it mostly reflects the distribution of company sizes.

The number doesn’t reveal what’s working and what’s not. It doesn’t explain why. And it doesn’t help you understand what the money is being put towards.

But because everyone keeps asking the question “How much do companies spend on marketing?”, we’re answering it directly, and then breaking down why the answer isn’t as helpful as people assume.

The real question becomes: “What exactly are companies spending that money on? And how do we categorize it in a way that actually helps us understand results?”

The Two Major Categories of Marketing Spend

To make sense of marketing spend, we need a simple framework.

All marketing activity (no matter the industry or budget) falls into two categories: Brand Building and Methods of Outreach. Understanding the difference between these is what gives the numbers meaning.

Brand Building

Brand building is the foundation of all effective marketing. It’s the work a company does to shape how it’s perceived, which involves establishing its positioning, clarifying what makes it different, and building the trust needed for customers to pay attention.

When a brand is clear, people know what you stand for and why they should care.

Brand building isn’t one activity but a set of deliberate practices. It includes formal marketing (such as STDP and developing market understanding), marketing strategy (deciding what you communicate and why), and ongoing communication efforts, including writing articles and email newsletters, answering customer questions, refining your message, and sharing it consistently.

So, why should companies invest in brand building? Because it makes a company recognizable and memorable. It creates interest before outreach happens. A strong brand makes customers more receptive, more engaged, and more likely to convert.

In short: brand building is the preparation that makes all other marketing efforts work better.

Methods of Outreach

Methods of outreach are the activities companies use to reach out to customers and amplify their message. If brand building shapes who you are and what you stand for, outreach is how you push that message into the world so people actually see it.

These methods cover a wide range of tactics: PPC campaigns, paid ads, SEO, buying backlinks, and other visibility-driven tools. Each one is designed to put your message in front of more people, more often, and in more places.

Outreach isn’t optional. Every company needs a way to distribute its message. But these tools only work as intended when a brand already has clarity and differentiation behind it.

To put it simply, outreach doesn’t build a brand, but it can amplify one. It’s how strong brands increase reach, awareness, and traffic. Without brand building, outreach becomes guesswork, but with a brand in place, it becomes a multiplier.

The Problem of Measurement

Once companies start using outreach tactics, a new challenge appears: measuring what actually worked.

Most teams try to track the return on their individual outreach tactics (be it ads, SEO efforts, PPC campaigns, or backlinks), but quickly discover that the numbers don’t add up the way they expect.

This is because all of these outreach methods rely heavily on third-party data.

Facebook Ads Manager, Google Ads, SEO tools, and backlink trackers all use their own systems to report conversions, clicks, impressions, and attribution. None of it is first-party data, and none of it is fully trustworthy, complete, or accurate. Everything is measured by proxy.

Instead of seeing the true outcome, you see the platform’s interpretation of the outcome. As a result, companies find it almost impossible to calculate a real cost per action, cost per campaign, or cost per outcome. What’s worse is that the numbers shift based on the tool, the attribution window, or the model being used.

Here’s the key takeaway: without brand building, measurement becomes even more ambiguous.

If you haven’t clarified your message, your positioning, or your audience, the data from outreach campaigns becomes harder to interpret. You can’t tell whether an ad underperformed because the tactic failed or because the brand behind it wasn’t clear to begin with.

Brand Building Makes Marketing More Measurable

Brand building strengthens a company’s identity and makes marketing easier to measure. When a brand is actively developed, it naturally generates first-party data, i.e. the most reliable kind of information a company can use.

You start seeing the real questions customers ask. You create blog posts, emails, landing pages, and social content that clarify your message. You refine your positioning and differentiation in ways that show up clearly in customer responses. You grow an audience (subscribers, clients, users, buyers) whose behavior gives you direct insight into what’s working.

All of this becomes first-party data that you control, rather than arbitrary numbers filtered through an ad platform’s attribution model.

And once this foundation exists, outreach methods become far more effective. PPC, SEO, ads, and backlinking act as multipliers, amplifying a message that’s already clear and grounded in real customer understanding.

What various outreach methods cannot do is replace brand building. Outreach tactics don’t create clarity, trust, or differentiation. They don’t build a brand, and they rarely work well without one. They’re expensive experiments with unpredictable results.

On the flip side, a strong brand gives your outreach something meaningful to amplify.

What We Cover in Part 2

Part 1 showed that while you can roughly average out the dollar amount companies spend on marketing, they don’t get the same results because the number itself doesn’t matter. What matters is what the money is spent on and whether it goes toward brand building or outreach.

In Part 2, we’ll dig deeper into this difference. We’ll look at two companies with identical marketing budgets and break down why one sees strong growth while the other struggles. You’ll see how the composition of the marketing spend (not the total amount) determines the outcome, and why brand building consistently produces better, clearer, and more measurable results.