"How much should I be spending?" is the wrong first question. The right one is "spending on what, in what order, and how will I know if it's working" — get that right and the number sorts itself out.
Most independent home, garden and lifestyle brands land on a marketing budget one of two ways. Either they pick a round number that feels safe — a few hundred pounds a month on ads because that's what the last person suggested — or they spend nothing until things go quiet, then panic-spend on whatever agency emailed them that week. Neither is a budget. Both are guesses.
A real budget isn't a fixed figure pulled from nowhere — it's a percentage of revenue, sized to what you're trying to do, and spent in a sequence that gives you evidence before you commit the next pound.
As a rough starting range, established businesses looking to grow steadily tend to sit somewhere around 5-10% of revenue on marketing; businesses actively pushing for growth, or newer businesses building awareness from a low base, often need to run closer to 10-20%. These aren't rules, they're a sanity check — if you're spending 1% and wondering why nothing's moving, or 30% and wondering where the margin went, the number itself is telling you something before any campaign does.
The point of anchoring to revenue rather than a flat figure is that the budget scales with the business instead of staying fixed while everything else changes around it.
The cheapest, fastest return almost always sits in the list, the database and the past customers a business already has. That work costs the price of the campaign and a bit of setup time, not an ongoing spend, and it should be the first thing funded, not an afterthought once the ad budget's been decided.
Only after that's live does it make sense to put real money behind paid channels — because by then you have actual signal on what messaging and offers convert, instead of guessing with ad spend.
Google Ads captures demand that already exists — someone is actively searching, so budget here tends to convert faster and can be judged sooner. Meta and Instagram ads create demand from people who weren't necessarily looking, which is powerful but needs a longer runway before the numbers settle — both platforms run a learning phase, typically several weeks, before cost per result reflects reality rather than an inflated early number. Judging a Meta campaign on its first two weeks and judging a Google Search campaign on its first two weeks should not use the same yardstick.
Content doesn't need a large spend, but it does need consistent time, and time is a cost even when no invoice shows up for it. A business that budgets zero hours a month for content and organic search is quietly budgeting to stay dependent on paid channels forever, because organic visibility compounds and paid visibility switches off the moment spend stops. Even a modest, consistent content budget — an hour a week, or a fixed monthly fee to have it done — pays back over a longer horizon than any single ad campaign will.
A budget locked in for twelve months and never revisited is really just a guess made once and defended forever. Review what's converting monthly, and be willing to move spend toward the channel that's proving itself and away from the one that isn't — the goal isn't to spread money evenly across every channel, it's to fund the ones with evidence behind them and starve the ones without it.