Every agency gets asked this and most give the same unhelpful answer, which is that it depends. That is true and useless. What follows is the method we actually use, which produces a number rather than a shrug.

Why the percentage rules do not help you

You will find advice suggesting you spend somewhere between five and fifteen percent of revenue on marketing. For a company doing fifty million dollars that is a reasonable planning heuristic. For a Montreal business doing eight hundred thousand it tells you to spend between forty and one hundred and twenty thousand a year, which is a range so wide it is not a recommendation.

The deeper problem is that the percentage approach starts from what you can afford rather than from what a customer is worth. Those are different questions and only one of them tells you whether the spending will work.

Start from the unit economics instead

Three numbers. Most businesses can produce them in twenty minutes and many have never written them down.

What is a customer worth in total? Not the first invoice. The whole relationship, including repeat work and referrals. A client paying two thousand dollars who stays three years is a six thousand dollar customer, and budgeting against the two thousand will lead you to underspend badly.

What is your gross margin on that? Revenue is not what you have to spend from. If you keep forty percent of a six thousand dollar relationship, you have two thousand four hundred dollars of margin to work with.

What can you afford to pay to acquire one? A common starting point is a third of gross margin, which on the example above is around eight hundred dollars per customer. That leaves room for delivery costs and profit while still being aggressive enough to actually win clients.

Now the budget calculates itself. If you want ten new clients this quarter and you can afford eight hundred each, your quarterly acquisition budget is eight thousand dollars, or roughly two thousand seven hundred a month. That number came from your business rather than from a benchmark, which is why it is defensible.

The payback period question

One complication worth understanding, because it is what makes marketing budgets feel risky.

If a customer is worth six thousand dollars over three years but you paid eight hundred to acquire them today, you are out of pocket now and profitable later. How long you can carry that gap depends on your cash position, not on your marketing.

A business with comfortable cash can spend against lifetime value and wait. A business that is tight has to spend against first purchase value instead, which means a smaller budget and slower growth, and that is a legitimate choice rather than a failure. Just make it deliberately. Running a lifetime value budget on first purchase cash flow is how businesses get into trouble with marketing spend.

Three buckets, not one number

Marketing budgets are usually discussed as a single monthly figure, which hides the fact that the money is doing three different jobs.

Foundation, spent once. Website, brand identity, core photography and video, analytics setup. This is capital expenditure. It does not repeat and it makes everything else work better. Spending on ads while pointing them at a website that does not convert is the most common and most expensive sequencing error in small business marketing.

Always on, spent monthly. SEO, content production, social, retainers, ad spend. This is where the ongoing budget lives and where consistency matters more than size. Six months at a modest level beats two months at triple the spend, because most of these channels compound.

Experimental, a slice of the monthly. Ten to twenty percent for testing a channel you have not used. Without it you never learn anything new. With more than that you are gambling rather than testing.

Realistic Montreal ranges

With the method above understood, here is roughly where businesses in this market tend to land. Treat it as orientation.

A business establishing itself, needing foundation work first, typically spends between five and fifteen thousand once on website, brand, and initial content, then something in the range of one to three thousand monthly to keep it moving.

A business with foundations in place and pushing for growth generally runs three to eight thousand monthly across channels, with the mix depending heavily on whether demand for their service already exists in search.

A business at the point of running multiple channels seriously, with paid media at real volume plus ongoing production, is usually above eight thousand monthly, and at that stage the allocation question matters more than the total.

Our own service ranges sit inside those bands. Social media management runs $1,000 to $1,500 monthly for management alone and $2,500 to $4,000 with original production included. Video production is project based rather than monthly.

Where to put it, by situation

Rather than a fixed split, work from what is currently broken.

If nobody knows you exist and people do search for your service, weight toward SEO and paid search. Search intent is the most efficient demand there is.

If people find you and do not convert, stop buying traffic and fix the site and the proof. More visitors to a page that does not convert multiplies the problem rather than solving it.

If nobody searches for what you sell because they do not know it exists, you are in demand creation, which means content, social, and paid social rather than search.

If you are credible but look smaller than you are, that is foundation spend. Photography, brand, and website, not ads.

The mistake that costs the most

Spreading a small budget across five channels.

Two thousand dollars a month split five ways gives every channel too little to work. SEO needs months of consistency, paid needs enough spend to gather data, content needs volume. Four hundred dollars a month achieves none of those things anywhere.

The same two thousand concentrated on one or two channels can produce a real result. It is genuinely better to do one channel properly and add the second when the first is working than to be visibly present and ineffective in five places.

What to cut first when things tighten

In order: experimental spend, then anything you cannot attribute at all, then paid media, which stops producing the day you stop paying but also stops costing.

What to protect: SEO and content, because they compound and restarting after a gap costs more than maintaining. And anything already producing measurable leads, which sounds obvious and is routinely cut anyway because the reporting on it was unclear.

The bilingual line item

Operating in both languages in Quebec does add cost, though less than most businesses assume. Adaptation of persuasive copy, second language ad creative, and bilingual community management are the real additions, and they typically add somewhere in the region of fifteen to thirty percent depending on how much of your content is persuasive rather than functional.

Worth setting against what it returns. It roughly doubles your addressable market in this province and the French side is frequently far less competitive, which often makes it the cheapest growth available rather than an overhead.

How we scope it

Every engagement starts with the three numbers at the top of this article, because without them any recommendation we make is decoration. Across our digital marketing work we would rather size a budget that survives twelve months than propose one that looks impressive and gets cut in month four.

We will also tell you when foundation work should come before advertising, which is not the answer that maximises a monthly retainer but is usually the correct sequence. Our piece on choosing an agency covers what else to ask before committing.

The takeaway

Work out what a customer is worth, what margin you keep, and what you can afford to pay to acquire one. Multiply by how many you want. That is your budget, and it came from your business rather than a benchmark.

Separate one time foundation from ongoing spend, concentrate rather than spread, and be honest about whether your cash position supports spending against lifetime value or only against the first sale. Most marketing budget failures are sequencing and concentration problems rather than size problems.