Breaking down the top marketing budget items for manufacturers.
We wrote recently about how businesses in the manufacturing and manufacturing tech industries often miscalculate the value of an agency vs. an inside hire. This is understandable. Allocating a marketing budget can be a challenge, especially when buckets overlap, you’re not sure what you’ll be getting for your investment, and strategies and tactics vary.
Let us then break this calculation down by looking at each of the main budget categories in turn.
1. Internal Staffing
Let’s begin with your most important resource: People. Depending on your size, you may have a whole team working on your marketing, or it may be just you. We’ve worked with both, and found success with both—but we find the work runs smoothest when there is a person with dedicated marketing responsibilities at the helm.
Staffing is the largest line item for any marketing budget. Even a junior marketer can cost over 100K a year to employ, once factors such as benefits, payroll tax, and employment are taken into consideration. This isn’t a reason not to hire, but the baked in overhead is a reason to prefer a qualified, experienced person in the role, to maximize bang for your buck.
The worst outcome is to hire at the entry level thinking you’ll just delegate your “busy work.” An inexperienced hire won’t be effective in the role, you’ll still get pulled in for decisions, and all that hiring overhead will go to waste. It would be far better in this position to work with an agency.
Budget: At least $100K per full-time experienced marketer.
2. Trade Shows
Trade shows power the manufacturing industry—and for good reason. In-person events remain one of the best ways to discover new technologies, create business connections, and scope out the competition. But they aren’t cheap: In 2026, even the smallest entry-level booths at IMTS will cost $7K for a 10×10 booth and $13K for a 10×20 booth. Costs rise from there as you pay extra for everything from electrical hookups, to IT support, to (not joking) having a waste basket. You will of course pay more for a larger space with booths getting as large as 20×20 or even 40×40, but you’ll also pay for each foot of height beyond (typically) eight feet.
And none of this includes travel, the employee time costs of attendance, or any of the marketing materials that go into the booth including the booth design, visual graphics for booth displays, and print materials.
If you can show up with a simple 10×10 or 10×20 pop-up booth and assemble it yourself, you may keep your costs down to $15K-$20K. Even a modest 20×20 booth can run you $60-$80K+ depending on the show and depending on your placement on the show floor. (If it’s your first year attending they’ll probably stick you against a wall and not on a main isle.) The larger your booth is, the less likely you’ll be able to set it up yourself, in which case you’ll have to pay for labor to setup and takedown. If you don’t want to ship your booth and store it yourself throughout the year, you might also pay an event you attend regularly to store it, or you may opt for a style that allows you to hang your graphics on a generic build that the event will rent you and reuse. The biggest players in the industry have full-time staff whose whole job is to manage these events, and they might drop over $1M on a big show like IMTS.
And this is for just one show.
That said, a successful trade show will pay for itself many times over. Many customers find it fuels their business for a good portion of the year. This speaks to two things: 1) the potential value of attending more shows, and 2) the importance of making sure the marketing around the shows you do attend is up to scratch.
Trade shows are also where your internal staff will shine brightest. There’s a real value to having your people on the floor, making face-to-face connections, and getting immersed in the industry. It’s also the one part of your marketing you can’t outsource, so if you are bringing on new team members, hire with the intent of bringing them to events.
Budget: (Highly variable but…) $15K-20K for small booths and shows, $60K-$80K for medium booths at larger shows, and no upper limit on the biggest displays and events (per show, including booth costs, travel, booth design costs, and print collateral. Many companies in the manufacturing space do 2-4 events per year, and some never stop, with events every month.)
3. Website
Your website is the public face of your company. You may have an impressive display at your trade shows, but after you’ve made that first impression most of your contacts will take a quick look at your website before giving you a call. If your website doesn’t reflect the company they met in person, their interest in reaching out will drop.
But when your website reinforces that impression, it warms up your subsequent outreach. Instead of chasing down a lead, they reach out to you first. They make time for your call. They’re better informed when you talk. Just a few minutes on a good website can take a prospect from needing to be reminded who you are again? to asking sales-ready questions about your business.
And that doesn’t just happen after that first call. It happens after the call, when they’re thinking about what you told them and they idly turn back to that browser tab they left open to glance through your capabilities page again. It happens when they go to their CFO to pitch a budget plan that includes your product.
You won’t be in the room when that happens, but your website will be, quietly making the case for your business to a hesitant audience.
Your website should look the part. And to be clear: you won’t get there with a cheap page builder site loaded up with janky plugins. You should plan on an up-front investment of at least 40K-60K+, with more budget set aside for professional photography and copywriting needs. If you have custom functionality requirements, that cost can easily double.
That said, a well-built website should last you for years, and scale with you as you grow. Some of our websites are over a decade old and still running well—but every website requires ongoing maintenance. This includes hosting costs and keeping plugins up to date at the very least. As you begin to use your website more seriously, you will also find new places to expand it, such as landing pages, or custom content.
Budget: $40K-60K+ for a basic initial build, + $100/mo. for hosting and maintenance.
4. Marketing Agency
As you build up your marketing efforts, you will inevitably run into the question of when to hire more internal talent vs. when to hire outside help. We’ve covered this question in depth, but the shorthand is this: Hiring internally makes sense if you have enough full-time, specialized work to keep someone consistently busy year-round.
However, you have to be pretty big, as a company, for this to be the case. In reality, what you need is fractional expertise: a bit of content writing here, a bit of photography there, video one month, web development the next, a few hours of consistent work a month to manage SEO and ad campaigns, and a trusted liaison to make sure it all keeps running. Hiring each of these roles individually would be prohibitively expensive, while finding one special hire who can do all these things at once is an impossible ask. Thus: an agency.
While expecting one person to do it all is a big ask, you should have higher standards for your agency. You can, of course, find agencies that specialize in one area of support—web development, or SEO, or paid media, or social media. But hiring each of these agencies individually still leaves you with the task of managing all those relationships. Instead, find an agency that can handle all those needs while partnering with you on strategy and execution.
Budget: $60K–120K + per year for content creation, event support, and other digital marketing services.
5. Tech Stack
What do we mean by your tech stack? Broadly speaking, your tech stack can include everything from the content platform you use to manage your website (a.k.a. a CMS like WordPress), a keyword tracking and discovery tool for SEO like SEMrush, a mail delivery platform like MailChimp, your various social media sites plus tools to manage to those pages which can come with their own features for content scheduling and design, lead attribution software, and a CRM platform like HubSpot or Salesforce that may or may not include some of these functions with varying reliability.
As you can imagine (or as you have probably experienced), it’s easy for the tech stack to get out of control. Many are the tools that promise to do it all, and few are the platforms that deliver. The reality is that some platforms do certain portions of the job very well, others will do things well enough not to justify a more specialized tool, and some tools will be irritatingly niche but also irreplaceable.
The biggest and most important line items in your tech stack, however, are your CMS and your CRM. The good news is that your CMS should already be rolled in to the cost of your website. It’s your CRM and all the related lead tracking and attribution features that will be your biggest expenditure.
You may have already made a decision on this front. If you haven’t, talk to your marketing agency about the platforms they use and what they would recommend. Some agencies specialize in specific platforms and can offer insight into why one will be a better choice for you than others. For our part, we recommend HubSpot, which varies greatly based on options but a reasonable average starting price point is in the ballpark of $1,500/mo. for a professional package including lead attribution tools. We have worked with many clients on Salesforce, and have yet to find anyone happy with that decision. The feedback we have heard the most is “We would switch if we could, but that ship has sailed, it’s not happening.” This is almost invariably followed (regardless of the size of the client) by them saying “I think it’s designed for companies that are larger than us.”
Budget: $2K/mo. for a tech stack that includes an integrated CRM like HubSpot, plus other services such as email marketing, analytics, or SEO tracking.
6. Paid Media
Finally, let’s talk about your ad spend. We’re getting to this last in part because so many businesses put it first: You want to feel like you’re doing something, so you set up a quick campaign on Google Ads, trust that the numbers its giving you are correct, and wait to see leads come in. At this point, many manufacturers either forget about their campaign, or they realize it isn’t performing and turn it off, concluding that the ad spend just doesn’t work for them.
And: in many cases this is true. Many online advertising platforms encourage you to spend money, and when you’re not getting enough real leads to justify the expense, their recommendations are to spend more money, and also widen your ad parameters so they can serve it to a larger audience pool and make those leads cheaper. Unfortunately, a larger audience usually means a less qualified audience, so the only thing that really goes up is unqualified form submissions.
This doesn’t mean paid media can’t work for manufacturers, but to make it work, a lot of other factors have to be nailed down first—including your website (so that you can build professional landing pages and forms) and other elements of your tech stack like your CRM and lead attribution (sometimes the same thing). Having worked closely with our customers to pin down lead attribution from digital campaigns, we would not recommend anyone spend any amount of money on digital ads without attribution software in place to track where leads are coming from. Without good attribution tools, many platforms will over report successful conversions because they lack the ability to discern a spam submission from a real lead. As far as they can tell, every spam submission is a win worth celebrating! (There are conversion feedback mechanisms in place for these platforms, but they were designed with the ecommerce industry in mind where feedback on a real sale is immediately measurable. These features are rendered worthless in an arena where six months is considered a short sales cycle.)
Your other marketing efforts will stay with you delivering value to your brand for the long term. Your ad spend is just money down the drain: if it isn’t yielding a return, you don’t get anything else, and you need to turn the faucet off.
Budget: $1–5K/mo. + for initial campaigns, with budget increases subject to performance.
How should manufacturing marketers prioritize competing budget priorities?
Every one of the budget items we discussed above is valid. Depending on your specific business model and growth strategy, you may not need all of them equally, but you should at least have considered them. So how do you balance them against each other? Assuming you don’t have unlimited budget, what should you prioritize?
Well, in writing this article, we already covered them in order because… well, priorities. But let us take one more minute to demonstrate why that order matters.
I. Establish internal leadership. This may not be a budget item, per say, if you already have someone on your team who can take charge of your marketing. If that is you, the business owner, then get right with yourself that this will be a priority that deserves a portion of your time on a weekly to monthly basis. If you’re adding a new duty to one of your other team members, make sure their workload is clear enough to handle the work. And as we said earlier, if you’re hiring a new team member to take this work on, hire with the intent of giving that person real decision making power.
II. Attend trade shows. Trade show attendance is such a big part of marketing for so many of our clients that it’s often the step they need to get working in order to fund their marketing budget. In an ideal world, of course, we’d like to get everything perfectly polished and presentable first… but the world ain’t perfect, and you need to start somewhere. That said, if you’re already going to some trade shows, then we would recommend investing in your website before expanding your event list.
III. Invest in your website. Every marketing dollar you spend will go farther with a website to support it. Your website is the hub of all your outreach. When you give someone a business card, it will go back to your website. If you mention the name of your company to someone at a conference, searching for you will lead them back to your website. If you run an ad, it will lead back to your website. Beyond this, it’s simply hard to execute a marketing strategy without a good website. The sooner you prioritize your website, the longer it will serve you.
Just a few minutes on a good website can take a prospect from needing to be reminded who you are again? to asking sales-ready questions about your business.
IV. Bring in a marketing agency. This goes somewhat hand-in-hand with investing in your website, because you’re going to want to hire an agency to build the website in the first place. Some agencies specialize in both web development and marketing (hello!), so you may already have a relationship established.
We strongly recommend that you consider an agency relationship at the same time you’re looking for someone to handle your web development, as your marketing agency can inform decisions about your website, particularly when it comes to your tech stack. But we also recommend not to do a lot of digital marketing with an agency before your website is in order. Any traction you try to build will be handicapped by a dysfunctional site. A good agency will also take time to onboard anyway, so if you use the development time to bring them up to speed, then they’ll be ready to hit the ground running by the time you launch.
V. Scale up your tech stack. Many marketing tools are relatively inexpensive, and you can get a long way with a hundred or two a month toward various management platforms. But to really level up your game, invest in a CRM with lead attribution. This will help you track the ROI of your campaigns so that you can do more of the marketing that works.
VI. Experiment with ad spend. Before you start putting money into paid media, every other duck needs to be in a row. With groundwork laid, paid media can be the final element that helps your marketing work scale. But remember our caution from before: Especially in the manufacturing industry, running a profitable paid media campaign can be a challenge. You need to have attribution in place to be sure you aren’t throwing good money after bad.
Marketing in manufacturing does tip the scales, but it’s a different beast from B2C sales.
A lot of marketing advice—and marketing budget advice—is targeted toward businesses selling products to consumers. These strategies don’t account for months-long sales processes involving annual budget approvals and high-level sign-offs. It’s important to keep your expectations on target, and not expect overnight success.
On the other hand, the value of a sale in manufacturing usually dwarfs a typical manufacturer’s annual marketing budget. It may take a while to see results, but the bar for achieving ROI on marketing dollars spent is much lower in manufacturing and manufacturing technology than in other industries. At every event I attend, I ask the sales team how the show is going for them, and I never get through a show without someone saying “It only takes one!”
We work with clients where adding a single new client a year more than recoups their marketing expenses. So take a look at your current resources. If you think a better website or marketing collateral could help carry a single client over the edge in 2026, then it’s time to start making more space for marketing in your budgeting priorities.