How Much Should a UK Engineering or Manufacturing SME Actually Spend on Marketing?

Ask a UK engineering or manufacturing SME what percentage of revenue goes on marketing and most owners genuinely don't know, not because the figure is embarrassing, but because nobody ever set one. Spend happens when there's cash left over after payroll, materials and the next capital purchase, which is a defensible way to run a factory floor and a poor way to plan anything with a lead time longer than a quarter.

There is at least a benchmark now, even if it comes from a very different kind of company. Gartner's newest CMO Spend Survey, fielded among 401 marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe between January and March 2026, put average marketing spend at 7.8% of company revenue this year, up slightly from 7.7% in 2025. Gartner is upfront that most respondents run businesses turning over more than a billion dollars, so this is not SME data and shouldn't be treated as one. It's still worth knowing, if only because trade bodies serving smaller engineering and manufacturing firms rarely publish anything comparable at all.

What makes the 7.8% figure worth sitting with is what it apparently still isn't buying. Among those same large, well-resourced organisations, 56% of CMOs told Gartner their budget falls short of what their marketing plan actually needs, and 70% said internal processes aren't yet mature enough to use what they do have well. A bigger number attached to the same underlying muddle doesn't fix much. The more transferable lesson isn't the percentage itself, it's the discipline behind it: work out what growth this year genuinely requires, then size a budget against that requirement, rather than spending whatever happens to be left once everything else is paid for.

For UK manufacturers specifically, what growth requires in 2026 has a fairly clear shape. Make UK's Executive Survey 2026 with PwC UK found 42% of manufacturers naming new export markets as a major opportunity for the year ahead, with 39% planning to actively increase exports to other countries as a direct response to US tariff changes, and 44% aiming to cut reliance on the US market specifically to spread that risk elsewhere.

Entering an export market a business has never sold into is, underneath the logistics and the paperwork, a marketing problem before it's anything else. There are no local case studies to point to. Buyers have never heard the company's name. Standards and certifications that are second nature at home need explaining in terms a first-time buyer somewhere else actually recognises. None of that runs on whatever happens to be sitting in the account once the quarter's other costs have cleared.

The same Make UK survey found 60% of manufacturers planning to invest in digital technologies, AI or automation over the next year, and 69% expecting to actually deploy new tools rather than just discuss them at board level. That creates a smaller version of the same problem. A technical buyer being asked to trust an unfamiliar capability, whether that's a new automated process or a new market entirely, needs to be told plainly why it matters and shown it working. Somebody has to do that telling, and it's marketing's job whether or not anyone at the business has ever called it that.

None of this is an argument for a UK engineering SME to aim at Gartner's 7.8% as a target figure; a five-person consultancy's cost base doesn't scale down neatly from a billion-dollar one, and chasing someone else's ratio is its own kind of guessing. It's an argument for doing the exercise Gartner's survey demonstrates rather than skipping it: name what the coming year specifically requires, whether that's a new export market, a digital investment that needs explaining to a sceptical buyer, or a case-study library that doesn't exist yet, and size a marketing budget against that named requirement.

We've made a related point before about why marketing spend that only switches on around a trade show or a website refresh misses most of the buyers who aren't ready to act yet; the same logic applies to the budget itself. A fixed, planned line survives the quarters when nothing visible seems to be happening. Whatever's left over after everything else rarely does. This is roughly where Nebula starts with clients working out a 2026 budget: not by copying an enterprise ratio, but by pricing the specific growth the business has actually committed to, then holding that figure with the same discipline as any other line item, rather than treating it as the first thing to cut when a quarter gets tight.