Budget season: how to make the case for comms spend in your 2027 planning

For a lot of SMEs, September and October are when next year’s budget starts taking shape. Marketing and comms are often the first lines to get questioned, not because they don’t work, but because the value can be harder to put a number on than sales or operations.

If you’re heading into budget conversations soon, here’s how to make a stronger case for comms spend in 2027.

How much should you actually be spending?
Before you can defend a number, you need one to defend. The benchmarks vary but they cluster in a useful range. Forrester’s B2B Marketing Budget Benchmarks put the average firm’s marketing investment at around 8% of annual revenue, with most companies landing somewhere between 7.1% and 10%. Gartner’s CMO Spend and Strategy Survey has tracked a similar figure, with average marketing budgets sitting at around 9% of total revenue in recent years. On the smaller end, older SBA-cited research put average spend closer to 7-8%, rising if you’re an earlier-stage or B2C business still building brand awareness, and falling once you have an established customer base to rely on.

The honest answer is that there’s no single right number. What matters more than hitting a benchmark exactly is being able to show whoever holds the purse strings that your ask is grounded in something other than ‘this is what we spent last year’. If you’re well below industry norms, that’s a legitimate argument for investment. If you’re broadly in line, that’s a legitimate argument for holding steady rather than cutting.

Connect activity to outcomes, not output
“We sent 12 press releases” isn’t a business case. “We secured coverage that put us in front of three target accounts who later became customers” is. Wherever you can, tie past comms activity to something the business cared about: leads, hires, tender wins or reputation with a specific audience.

Social media is a tactic, not a strategy
It’s easy to let ‘post more on social media’ stand in for a marketing strategy, especially when budgets get tight and social feels like the cheapest option on the table. But it isn’t a strategy -it’s one channel among many and treating it as the whole plan is a common reason comms budgets underperform.

Authentic, well-made social content takes real time: working out what to say and why, writing it, sourcing or shooting imagery, editing, scheduling and then actually engaging with the people who respond. Done properly, that’s a meaningful chunk of a working week, not a five-minute add-on. If social is the only line in your 2027 plan, it’s worth asking what it’s meant to be achieving and whether it’s being resourced properly to do that job, or whether it’s quietly eating time that should be going towards other activity.

One area worth prioritising alongside it: content built for GEO (generative engine optimisation), meaning blogs and articles written so AI search tools and assistants can find, understand and cite them. As more people research and buy through AI-powered search rather than traditional Google results, having authoritative, well-structured content on your own site is becoming as important as it ever was for SEO. This is a good moment to start building that in, rather than treating it as next year’s problem.

If a full content programme feels like a lot to take on, don’t try to do everything at once. Look back at what you’ve already published, identify your top 5 to 10 performing posts by traffic, engagement or leads generated, and start there. Refresh them, expand them and make sure they’re structured clearly for both readers and AI tools to pull from. It’s a smaller, more achievable ask for a budget conversation than ‘we need a content strategy from scratch’, and it shows you’re building on evidence rather than starting a wish list.

Be honest about what didn’t work
A budget case that only lists wins tends to get treated with suspicion. Include what you tried that didn’t land and what you’d do differently. It builds trust with whoever is signing off the spend and shows the plan is grounded in evidence rather than optimism. And don’t forget to price in the boring but essential work. Crisis planning, media training and internal comms rarely feel urgent until the moment they’re needed. If your business is growing, now is the time to budget for these properly rather than treating them as an afterthought.

Show the cost of doing nothing
Competitors are telling their stories whether you tell yours or not. For SMEs in crowded markets, silence has a cost even if it doesn’t show up on a spreadsheet. It’s worth spelling this out plainly for anyone holding the purse strings. But keep the ask realistic. A budget request that’s clearly been thought through in proportion to the size of the business lands better than an ambitious wish list. Better to ask for what you can genuinely deliver against and build from there.

Let’s talk before you finalise your 2027 budget
Building a comms budget case in isolation is hard, especially when you’re trying to weigh up PR, social, content and the less glamorous but essential work like crisis planning, all at once. That’s exactly the kind of holistic view a full-service agency is built to give you.

Padua Communications works across the full mix, not just one channel, so we can look at your activity as a whole and tell you honestly where your budget will work hardest for 2027. Our MD is a Chartered Marketer, so you’re getting that assessment against a recognised professional standard, not just an agency opinion.

If you’d like a second pair of eyes on your budget case before it goes to whoever’s signing it off, get in touch with Padua Communications. It’s a conversation we have with clients every autumn, and it’s far easier to have it now than to defend a budget you’re not confident in come January.