Are you spending too much or too little on marketing?
According to Gartner, businesses are spending significantly less this year compared to last and are experiencing a two-year decline. Today, the B2B sector is allocating a notable portion of their revenue to marketing.
In Hinge’s 2025 High Growth Study, we observed a similar trend. Across all professional services, marketing spend as a portion of revenue remained stable. However, when we focused on the High Growth firms—those that achieved substantial annual growth for three consecutive years—marketing budgets stayed consistent at a higher level.
So what does one do with this information? One suggestion is to use these numbers as benchmarks. How does your firm stack up against all professional services? And how does it compare to the best-performers? Even better, you can look up the numbers for your industry, since these trends vary—sometimes significantly—from one industry to another.
A Different Perspective
Benchmarking your budget against others is valuable. It allows you to determine if you are over or underinvesting in a macro sense.
But understanding exactly what drives spending up or down is an inexact science. Are budgets shrinking because firm leaders are uncertain about the future? Is AI and automation raising productivity? Is M&A activity and industry consolidation creating cost efficiencies? Or is it something else? The data doesn’t always offer clear answers.
That’s why we like to think about marketing spending another way. It’s not how much you spend, it’s how wisely you spend it.
Let us share a real-life example.
We worked with a mobile app development company that was devoting 100% of their marketing dollars each month on one thing: Google ads. The result? Crickets. (Or maybe the gentle sound of a flushing toilet.)
They hired Hinge to find a solution. We started by studying the learning, buying, and decision making behavior of their target audience.
We found that despite all the money this firm was pouring into Google ads, they were getting almost no engagement from their audience. They weren’t investing in promoting the thing their customers valued most: their expertise.
Because they had put all their eggs in the digital ads basket, they had nothing else to sustain interest in their services. Even when people clicked on the ads, there was little to entice them to take the next step.
In our research, we found that their audience was hungry for information on software development expertise like theirs. So we dismantled their Google ads campaign and built a new content-based strategy that would help people discover their expertise. In the end, we chopped their marketing budget by two thirds.
The result?
Leads. Really good ones. And after consuming their content, visitors went to their website where they encountered strong differentiated messaging. The results were pretty dramatic.
In this case, smarter marketing meant spending less. And the path to smarter marketing was research.
How Research Leads to Smarter Marketing
We’ve written recently about why every firm needs to conduct research, but it’s worth reviewing a few key benefits of target audience research in the context of marketing and business development:
- Research can identify what your audience is interested in. You can then use that intel to feed them exactly what they crave.
- It can determine where your audience learns and gets their information. This equips you to be where your buyers are—and provide the insights they want.
- It can uncover what criteria your buyers use to find, evaluate and select firms like yours. Information like this is pure gold, as it allows you to calibrate your pitches and messaging to your prospective clients’ expectations.
High Growth firms are more likely to do this kind of research. And of those that do it, they conduct research more often than their Average Growth peers. Here’s the data:
How much do you spend on marketing? It’s an important question, and as a starting place we recommend comparing your level to the benchmarks in this email. But even more important is to spend those dollars wisely. And research is the key that unlocks a wealth of marketing wisdom.
