Marketing Team Size In 2024

You Can’t Spell MARKETING Without TEAM

Ah, that age old question, “how big should my marketing team be?” As with most things involving marketing, the answers are varied and vague. Unlike other teams, the direct output of one member is difficult to measure and scale.

For example, let’s say data shows that your company must make 400 cold calls to make one sale. Each sales representative can make 100 calls a day. Four sales reps should then equal one sale per day. Of course it’s never that simple but that’s the thinking that informs team scaling decisions.

To find this magic equation for marketing teams we studied articles, listened to experts, and dredged Reddit boards to find clues that would lead us to the missing link. However, before we can find the perfect marketing team size we need to find the perfect marketing budget.

Current thinking in marketing circles warns against using percentage of total revenue as a basis for budget but let’s lean on that for a moment. HubSpot reports that the average amount of overall company revenue allocated to marketing was 9.1% in 2023. When it comes to individual industries the numbers vary.

The rule of thumb is that B2B companies should spend between 2-5% on marketing while B2C should spend between 5-10% but based on the CMO Survey retail brands are spending around 14% and CPG brands spend around 25%. Startup advisors recommend spending between 11-30%.

We know that a marketing budget is not solely devoted to headcount. How do we optimize the split? The team at Convertiv worked on a marketing budget calculator that allows the user to play with various inputs to determine the appropriate spending to meet their growth goals. The average split comes out to around 50% allocated for promotions, 40% to headcount, and 10% to the tech stack.

HubSpot reports the average marketing team is 5% of total headcount. Other sources say it should be 10%. Jigsaw Metric recommends 3 marketing members for a team of 12, making up 25%. Other sources recommend that the number of marketing programs you deploy should be your indicator, keeping to at least a 1:1 ratio of people to programs starting out.

The real question is not what companies should be doing but what are they doing? We asked Reddit what their marketing team size was based on the company ARR or total headcount. Here’s some of what we found.

A variety of different industries so a wide variety of answers but some of these numbers seem shockingly low, don’t they? We asked how they can keep headcount at bare minimum while seeing this level of growth? The answer: outsourcing. Most of these small, sometimes single person, teams said they outsource 80%+ of the work to external agencies. Frequently more than one.

When it comes to marketing teams it’s like everything in business: if you can do a lot with a little then that’s what you do. It would appear that agency partnerships are currently the cost-effective choice when it comes to modern marketing budgets.