Marketing leaders are heading into 2026 with a complex mandate: drive growth amidst economic unpredictability while navigating the most significant technological shift in a generation.
There’s a mix of cautious optimism and intense pressure to deliver measurable results according to the CMO Survey. Fortunately, confidence is high, with 83% of B2B marketing decision-makers expecting their budgets to increase in the coming year (source: Forrester).
This optimism is supported by strong spending forecasts. Worldwide B2B digital ad spend is projected to hit $48.15 billion by 2026, a figure that nearly triples pre-pandemic levels according to eMarketer).
This article explores the latest budget benchmarks, strategic investment priorities, and key trends to help you build a resilient and effective marketing budget for 2026.
Before you allocate a single dollar, it's crucial to ground your budget in your company's primary business goals. Your budget is a strategic plan to meet top-level objectives. And in 2026, leadership expectations are crystal clear.
According to the Spring 2025 CMO Survey, marketers believe their leadership's top priorities are maximizing company profitability and innovating to grow the company. This highlights the pressure from the C-suite, felt by over 6 in 10 marketers. Their directive? To demonstrate the financial impact of their activities.
Actionable Advice: Work backward from your 2026 revenue goals to define the necessary lead, traffic, and conversion KPIs your marketing budget must support.
Knowing what to spend is one thing; knowing where to spend it is the key to success. We like Forrester’s "Invest, Divest, Experiment" model to guide your allocation.
AI became a real point of leverage in 2025, and will continue in 2026. Companies report using AI in marketing 17.2% of the time currently, but they project this will surge to 44.2% within the next three years according to The CMO Survey.
This investment is justified by tangible ROI, as marketers already report that AI has improved sales productivity by 8.56% and reduced marketing overhead costs by 10.75% (source: The CMO Survey). Your budget must account for both AI tools and the critical upskilling of your team.
There’s also a counterpoint. The recent State of AI in Business 2025 study by MIT found that 95% of organizations are getting zero return on their AI pilots.
GenAI is still early in the adoption curve, and certain industries are seeing more gains than others, with Media & Telecom and Professional Services industries reporting the most disruption. Sales and marketing are where GenAI pilots have been most adopted, especially in sales applications.
Global ad spend is projected to grow by 7% in 2026 according to MarketingProfs. With organic reach dwindling due to AI overviews and ChatGPT usage for search, a paid strategy is essential. Plan to allocate 15-20% of your budget to social media, with at least half dedicated to paid distribution. This aligns with forecasts showing social media's share of global ad spend growing to 23.6% by 2026 according to MarketingProfs.
Be aware that just three companies – Meta, Amazon, and Google – are expected to attract over 46% of all ad spend by 2026, making it a competitive space.
For years now, our strategy with clients is to write both new content and refresh old articles. The advice to update and improve existing content is more important than ever.
However, the strategy must evolve. With Google's AI Overviews changing the way people search, Forrester recommends reallocating at least 15% of your content or digital spend to improve AI search visibility through modular content, schema markup, and expert profile optimization.
Marketers are planning to increase spending on Customer Relationship Management (+6.12%) and Customer Experience (+3.46%), and your website is the engine for both (source: The CMO Survey).
At Whittington Consulting, we noticed a considerable uptick of B2B companies wanting to update their websites in 2025. We expect this trend to accelerate in 2026, especially if broader economic uncertainties begin to cool.
This investment is driven by the need for a modern, intuitive design that improves user experience, aligns with new SEO realities, and converts more visitors into qualified leads, which directly addresses the profitability and growth objectives that leadership demands.
Marketers are planning a 6.59% increase in brand-building spending according to The CMO Survey, and for good reason. In the age of AI Overviews, search has become an "AI citation race." To be included in AI-generated summaries, your brand needs to be seen as an authority. This means investing in activities that generate brand mentions across the web.
Budget for digital PR to land expert quotes, podcast guest appearances for your subject matter experts, and the creation of original research that others will cite. The more your brand is mentioned, the more authoritative it becomes to AI models, directly impacting your visibility.
A small portion of your budget should be set aside to test ideas that aren’t currently part of your marketing mix but have the potential to accelerate growth if they work.
Think of it as your innovation lab.
The key is to be strategic:
By giving yourself permission to experiment, you create a safe way to test emerging tactics without derailing your core strategy. Over time, the “experiment” bucket ensures your marketing program doesn’t get stale.
It’s good to have a plan, but you need a team executing it. Marketing hires are expected to increase by 4.97% in the next year according to The CMO Survey. The #1 people challenge for marketing leaders is hiring the best people. The top reasons this is so difficult are compensation being too low, difficulty finding specific expertise, and a general scarcity of talent.
Actionable Advice: Ensure your 2026 budget accounts for competitive salaries and robust professional development, especially AI training, to attract and retain the top-tier talent needed to achieve your goals.
If you need some help determining what your priorities should be, or if you might want to consider a digital marketing agency to help with your marketing in 2026 we offer a complimentary marketing opportunity review.
Note: This article was originally published in 2018 and last updated on September 29, 2025.