Rethinking the Marketing Budget

A strategic approach for built environment brands.

Most built environment brands take a reactive, legacy-based approach to marketing budgets—allocating just 2.2% of revenue on average, compared to 7% across other B2B sectors—highlighting a missed opportunity to adopt a more strategic mindset by reassessing fixed costs, aligning efforts to a true marketing funnel, and linking budget decisions to long-term business goals to drive meaningful growth.

It’s budgeting season…again. For many in the commercial interiors space, this time of year brings familiar patterns. Line items are rolled over, percentage-of-revenue calculations are dusted off, and tradeshows are tentatively penciled in. Most companies will complete the process with a sense that they have done what was necessary. However, as the role of marketing continues to evolve across the industry, it’s worth asking: Is the standard budgeting process helping marketing leaders be proactive?

For organizations serious about long-term growth, marketing can’t simply be reactive or limited to executing against a tweaked version of last year’s plan. It must be a strategic lever that is aligned with the broader business, designed to support measurable goals, and structured in a way that allows for adaptation as market dynamics change. The good news is that getting more from a marketing budget doesn’t always require more budget, but it does require a shift in thinking.

How your budgeting likely works today

Our Foundations research highlights a common budgeting pattern across the industry:

Budgets are built “bottom-up” based on ad hoc needs.
Allocations are based on prior-year spending or anticipated revenue for the current year.
Results are generally seen as acceptable.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach, it tends to reflect an outdated view of marketing as a necessary support function rather than a strategic engine for growth. In a more static market, this model was sufficient. However, the market is no longer static.

Marketing’s evolving role

Traditionally, marketing has served as sales support, preparing sales decks, producing literature, managing trade shows, and keeping the price guide updated. These tasks are still important, but they no longer reflect the full scope of what’s required to reach and engage today’s specifiers and decision-makers.

Several macro-level trends are pushing the function toward a more strategic role:

Hybrid work has changed how and where designers work, reducing reliance on physical libraries and increasing the importance of digital engagement.
Digital tools are more capable and accessible than ever.
The generational gap between sales reps and designers is often 30 years or more. Behavioral expectations are misaligned.

All of this puts more pressure on marketing teams to identify, warm, and nurture prospective leads, which is something the Foundations research suggests the broader B2B market has figured out, but where commercial interiors still lags.

According to our research, the commercial interiors sector allocates just 2.2% of its revenue to marketing, compared to an average of 7% across other B2B categories (Deloitte). That delta reflects a missed opportunity.

Budgeting with purpose

Regardless of how the full budget is established, it’s helpful to rethink how it is allocated. At Peopledesign, we encourage clients to evaluate their budgets through three complementary lenses:

Wants and Needs
Marketing Funnel Stages
Building the Big Picture

Go beyond the line items and look for an integrated, holistic picture to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

1. Wants and Needs: Auditing the Essentials

In many organizations, most of the marketing budget is already committed before any strategic conversations begin. The usual suspects, including print collateral, trade show expenses, website hosting, and Revit or CET file maintenance, consume the majority of the funds. These are often non-negotiables, but that doesn’t mean they’re beyond scrutiny.

Traditional/Print Media: Are printed materials still delivering value? Are quantities right-sized? Are we using the correct printing methods for the tool? Are we printing too many things? Could digital alternatives serve the same purpose more efficiently?
Tradeshows: Are we attending shows that align with our target customers and segments? What’s the return on investment?
Website Maintenance: How much are we spending monthly, and what does that include? Can the internal team update content without relying on developers?
CET/REVIT: Are your BIM resources up to date and appropriately distributed?

By asking hard questions and reassessing legacy costs, many organizations can uncover budget capacity. That capacity can then be reallocated toward more impactful, forward-looking initiatives.

2. The Marketing Funnel: Understanding the Role of Each Activity

Many built environment brands don’t have a formal marketing funnel. What they have is a sales funnel that marketing supports. But while the sales funnel focuses on conversion, a marketing funnel is about building awareness, shaping perception, and nurturing relationships over time. We typically define the marketing funnel in four stages:

Awareness – Building brand visibility and recognition
Consideration – Educating and inspiring the audience
Engagement – Encouraging interaction with the brand
Retention & Advocacy – Sustaining loyalty and amplifying positive experiences

We should be able to slot our different marketing activities into one of these stages. Some initiatives, such as websites, span multiple stages; in this case, we aim to align different website pages with a specific stage in the funnel. For instance, a gallery might live on the awareness stage, whereas a product page might be in the consideration stage.

Once aligned, each stage should have measurable KPIs, allowing us to identify where the drop-off occurs. Are we investing in building awareness, only to lose leads before they engage? Without this structure, it’s easy to spend reactively, supporting whatever initiative is loudest or most urgent.

3. Big Picture Building: Linking Budget to Strategy

Take a step back and ask, where do we want to be in 3 years? 5 years? What would we need to change to get there?

Budgets need to be developed on a yearly cycle, but often fail to consider the big picture. It’s treated more like a container; we stuff it with the usual things, then try to squeeze in a couple of bigger initiatives. Whatever doesn’t fit gets punted to next year.

Rather than thinking of each initiative as a rigid thing, we can deconstruct it into its different building blocks. Doing so allows us to generate tactics that create market momentum today and can also be utilized in the future for the larger initiative. For instance, if we view a website as a single, rigid entity, we overlook its need for high-quality imagery. If, instead, we view the site as a culmination of imagery, your product portfolio, market strategy, and so on, we can ensure that we invest in assets that are utilized in a variety of different settings.

Marketing as a Strategic Discipline

Marketing budgets are challenging, especially in an industry where marketing has historically been viewed as a cost center rather than a driver of value. But as customer behaviors shift and traditional tactics yield diminishing returns, organizations that treat marketing as a strategic function will be better positioned to adapt and grow.

By reassessing legacy line items, mapping efforts to the marketing funnel, and aligning spending with long-term business strategy, marketing teams can gain greater clarity, make better decisions, and ultimately generate more impact without necessarily increasing budget.

The discipline is evolving. The market is evolving. How we build budgets should, too.