In the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs research for 2024, published in October 2023, 48% of B2B respondents said content marketing gets less than 10% of their total marketing budget, excluding salaries. Another 29% said 10% to 24%, and 24% said 25% or more. That spread is the clearest of the public content marketing budget benchmarks, and it answers how much do companies spend on content marketing with a range, not a single number.
Before you compare yourself to anyone, it helps to know what the public data can and can't tell you. Most free studies report content spend as a share of the marketing budget, or as dollars per month or per year. The industry and company size breakdowns you will find usually cover all marketing spend as a share of revenue, not content alone. This piece keeps those measures apart, because mixing them is how a benchmark turns into a wrong number.
Which measure are you looking at?
Three questions get blended together in most articles on content marketing budget benchmarks, and they have different answers.
| Question | Denominator | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| What share of the marketing budget goes to content? | Total marketing budget | How a team prioritizes content against other channels |
| How many dollars go to content? | None (an absolute amount, monthly or annual) | Scale of the spend |
| What share of revenue goes to content? | Company revenue | Content as a cost of the business |
A figure from one row can't stand in for a figure from another. A source that says 24% of marketers put at least a quarter of their budget into content is not saying the average content allocation is 24%. A source that says marketing is 8% of revenue is not saying content is 8% of revenue. Keep the denominator in mind every time you read a number, including the ones below.
What share of the marketing budget goes to content?
The cleanest content-specific number comes from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs. Their Outlook for 2024 survey was fielded in July 2023 and received 1,080 responses globally, across industries, functional areas and company sizes. The B2B budget question asked what share of total marketing budget, excluding salaries, goes to content marketing.
| Content share of total marketing budget (excluding salaries) | Share of B2B respondents |
|---|---|
| Less than 10% | 48% |
| 10% to 24% | 29% |
| 25% or more | 24% |
The published figures add up to 101% because of rounding, and we've kept them as reported. Two things to keep in mind. The top band is open-ended, so you can't work out a true average from it. And the 1,080 figure is the whole survey, not the number of people who answered this one question.
Semrush gives a finer split in its State of Content Marketing 2023 Global Report. It surveyed more than 1,700 marketers and business owners in 34 countries, across more than 20 sectors, with B2B at 41% of responses and B2C at 25%. Companies with one to 10 employees were the largest size group, at 22.6%.
| Content share of marketing budget | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Less than 5% | 15% |
| 5% to 9% | 17% |
| 10% to 29% | 36% |
| 30% to 50% | 21% |
| 50% to 70% | 8% |
| Over 70% | 4% |
The biggest single band is 10% to 29%, picked by 36%. Semrush is the vendor behind the study, and the report's bands meet at 50%, so treat the edges loosely. The percentages also add up to 101%.
Why the two studies don't match
The CMI figures describe B2B marketers and a budget that leaves out salaries. The Semrush sample mixes B2B and B2C, many countries, and many company sizes, and its treatment of salaries wasn't established in the material we reviewed. The band edges differ too. These are two different pictures, not a before and after, so please don't average them or read the gap as spending going up or down. What they do agree on is that there is no single normal level, and a team putting 5% into content and a team putting 30% into it can both be in a very large group.
How much do companies spend on content marketing in dollars?
Semrush also asked about average monthly content marketing budgets. The annual column below is simple arithmetic on the monthly bands, assuming the amount stays the same all year. It isn't a separate survey result.
| Average monthly content budget | Share of respondents | If sustained for 12 months |
|---|---|---|
| Less than $1,000 | 27% | Less than $12,000 |
| $1,000 to $3,000 | 19% | $12,000 to $36,000 |
| $3,000 to $5,000 | 20% | $36,000 to $60,000 |
| $5,000 to $10,000 | 17% | $60,000 to $120,000 |
| $10,000 to $20,000 | 10% | $120,000 to $240,000 |
| Over $20,000 | 6% | Over $240,000 |
The most common single answer was under $1,000 a month, at 27%. That is not most respondents. The sample spans company sizes, so you can't read these bands as a small business table, and you can't assign them to employee brackets either. The shares add up to 99% as published.
For a view at the other end, 10Fold and Sapio Research surveyed 400 senior marketing executives with budget authority at B2B technology companies in North America and Europe, and 10Fold released the results in August 2025. They reported an average annual content spend of $1.2 million, with 20% of respondents spending $250,000 to $499,000 a year. That is a mean, not a median, and it comes from a survey commissioned by an agency. It also doesn't line up with the Semrush bands as if they described one group, because the populations are different.
If you want one takeaway from the dollar figures, it is that the spread is very wide. Under $12,000 a year and over $1 million a year both show up in credible sources.
What can we say about content marketing spend by industry?
This is where honesty matters most. We could not find a public, current study that reports content marketing spend by industry as a share of revenue. What exists falls into two groups.
The first is direct content evidence for one industry. The 10Fold survey above is B2B technology, and its $1.2 million average is the only content-specific industry figure in the research we reviewed. There is no matching figure for manufacturing, healthcare or banking collected the same way, so you can't fairly say technology companies spend more than those industries do.
The second is total marketing spend by industry, which is useful context but is not content spend. The CMO Survey's 2026 Firm and Industry Breakout Report asked U.S. marketing leaders what share of company revenue marketing expenses represent. It was fielded January 7 to 29, 2026, with 308 responses from 2,111 leaders contacted (a 14.6% response rate), and 154 answered this question.
| Industry | Mean total marketing as a share of revenue | Responses |
|---|---|---|
| Banking, finance, insurance | 7.43% | 21 |
| Communications, media | 18.00% | 6 |
| Consumer packaged goods | 11.53% | 15 |
| Consumer services | 11.00% | 3 |
| Education | 18.40% | 5 |
| Energy | 7.13% | 4 |
| Healthcare | 5.88% | 17 |
| Pharma, biotech | 6.80% | 5 |
| Manufacturing | 5.64% | 13 |
This is a selected set of rows, not a full ranking, and every row is total marketing, not content. Several of these means rest on three to six responses, so these means are fragile. A manufacturing mean of 5.64% does not mean manufacturers put 5.64% of revenue into content marketing. It means all of their marketing, content included, averaged that share among 13 respondents.
The same survey breaks results out by business model, and those rows are not industries, so please don't treat "B2B product" as a stand-in for manufacturing.
| Business model | Mean total marketing as a share of revenue | Responses |
|---|---|---|
| All respondents | 8.96% | 154 |
| B2B product | 7.02% | 61 |
| B2B services | 10.07% | 41 |
| B2C product | 11.99% | 34 |
| B2C services | 7.24% | 18 |
How does the budget change with company size?
The size comparisons we have are, again, for total marketing as a share of revenue. We've kept the survey's own brackets instead of relabeling them as small, mid-market and enterprise.
| Annual company revenue | Mean total marketing as a share of revenue | Responses |
|---|---|---|
| Less than $10 million | 13.34% | 20 |
| $10 million to $25 million | 17.40% | 15 |
| $26 million to $99 million | 11.14% | 18 |
| $100 million to $499 million | 5.86% | 34 |
| $500 million to $999 million | 6.86% | 17 |
| $1 billion to $9.9 billion | 5.70% | 33 |
| $10 billion or more | 9.45% | 15 |
| Employees | Mean total marketing as a share of revenue | Responses |
|---|---|---|
| Fewer than 50 | 16.26% | 23 |
| 50 to 99 | 13.31% | 19 |
| 100 to 499 | 8.80% | 30 |
| 500 to 999 | 5.48% | 18 |
| 1,000 to 2,499 | 3.97% | 21 |
| 2,500 to 4,999 | 11.53% | 15 |
| 5,000 to 9,999 | 7.63% | 4 |
| 10,000 or more | 4.28% | 24 |
Smaller companies in this sample report a higher share of revenue going to marketing. The numbers are not a smooth slope, though. The 2,500 to 4,999 employee group sits well above the groups on either side, and the 5,000 to 9,999 group has only four responses. So the safe reading is that smaller firms tended to spend a larger share, not that the share falls steadily as a company grows.
What these tables can't give you is content spend for a business that matches both an industry and a size. Knowing a survey covered both groups doesn't mean it published the intersection, and separate industry and size averages don't describe it.
Two overall averages for 2026
Two 2026 sources give different overall marketing averages. The CMO Survey reports a mean of 8.96% of revenue. Gartner's CMO Spend Survey, fielded January through March 2026 with 401 marketing leaders in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe, reports 7.8%, described as roughly flat against 7.7% in 2025. Gartner's respondents were mostly at companies above $1 billion in revenue, so the samples differ in country and scale. Neither one is wrong, and neither one is a content benchmark.
What is the content marketing budget percentage of revenue?
Here is the direct answer to the question most people arrive with. The public studies we reviewed don't establish one reliable content marketing budget percentage of revenue for any industry or size. They measure content as a share of marketing budgets or in dollars, and revenue ratios generally cover all marketing.
It is tempting to estimate content marketing spend by industry by multiplying a marketing-to-revenue average by a content-to-marketing share. For the same company and period, that identity is correct: content share of revenue equals marketing share of revenue times content share of the marketing budget. It stops being valid when the two inputs come from different surveys, because the result is a model, not something anyone measured.
You can use it on your own numbers. Here is a made-up example with invented inputs, not a surveyed company or a recommendation. A business with $10 million in revenue and a marketing budget equal to 8% of revenue spends $800,000 on marketing. If 20% of that goes to content, the content budget is $160,000, which is 1.6% of revenue.
How should you read these benchmarks for your own budget?
A few habits keep a comparison honest.
- Match the denominator. Compare your content share of marketing budget with other shares of marketing budget, and your share of revenue only with revenue figures.
- Match the accounting boundary. CMI's question excludes salaries. If your internal number includes payroll, it is not directly comparable, and for the other studies the treatment wasn't established.
- Match the period. The CMI data was gathered in July 2023, the Semrush distributions are from its 2023 report, 10Fold released its numbers in August 2025, and The CMO Survey and Gartner figures come from early 2026. They aren't all 2026 spending.
- Match the population. A B2B technology executive panel, a global marketer survey and a U.S. panel of mostly large companies are different peer groups.
- Treat a distribution as a distribution. A band says where respondents fall, and a mean summarizes their answers. Neither one says what is the right level for you, or that spending more produces better results.
Newer CMI reports don't replace the older distribution either. The 2025 edition was fielded June 25 to August 16, 2024 with 1,186 global responses and reported on 980 B2B respondents, and the 2026 edition was fielded June 24 to August 14, 2025 with 1,229 global responses and 1,015 B2B marketers. Those articles cover other budget questions, such as expectations, and a plan to spend more is not the same thing as observed spend. A newer publication date doesn't mean a newer measurement of this variable.
If you want a practical next step, write down your annual content spend, your total marketing spend and your revenue for the same year, using the same rules for what counts. Then work out content as a share of marketing and as a share of revenue. You can place the first against the CMI and Semrush bands right away, and you'll be able to see where your own budget sits without borrowing a number that doesn't match yours. If you'd like help getting more finished articles out of whatever budget you land on, you can start a 7-day free trial of DeepSmith at any time.
