D2C Brand Playbook - Part 9 - Your guide to estimate Marketing Budget.

How do you arrive at marketing budget for your D2C brand?

Most brands still set marketing budgets using folklore:
Spend 5–15% of revenue.
Match what the competitor spends.

But there’s much more nuance to arriving at your marketing budget.

It’s dependent on your category, your own business and your objective for the year -


✅ Your Category

What’s your Share of Voice relative to your Market Share?

SOV = your media spend share in the category.
SOM = your market share in the category.

eSOV (Excess SOV) = SOV – SOM.
eSOV thumb rule: every +10% eSOV typically delivers ~0.5% SOM gain per year.

What’s the Purchase Cycle & ATV dynamic for your category?

In high-ticket, low-frequency categories (real estate, automobiles), even 1% of revenue can be overkill.

What’s the # of visible brands in your category?
More brands = higher spend needed to stay salient. In a duopoly, your budget works harder.


✅ Your Company

Are you in the 0–1 stage, 1–10 scaling phase, or 10–100 growth phase?
Is your CAC sustainable relative to LTV?
Is your CAC ≤ 30% of LTV?

✅ Your Objective

Are you launching, gaining share, or sustaining this year?

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There’s a lot more to defining a marketing budget than % of revenue or CAC × target customers. More on this in the next post.

How do you arrive at your marketing budget? Drop a comment.

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I write regularly on D2C brand building, growth, and marketing insights.
hashtag#runningmarketer

D2C Brand Playbook - Part 8 - How to set up your Brand Health Track without spending 15 lacs/mth?

 

No budget for a traditional brand tracker?

👇 Here’s a D2C guide to measure brand health:

What do you measure in a brand health tracker done ny likes of Neilsen or Kantar?

-You track mind map funnel of target consumer:

From Awareness to Consideration to Preference to Recommendation.

-You track brand perception on a set of functional and emotional statements

-You track trigger/barriers on the category and the brand

Here is your answer without spending 10-15 lacs/month:

A. Your funnel:

🔍 1. Awareness → Share of Search (Google Trends)

-Tracks relative search interest vs competition.

- If people aren’t Googling you, they aren’t thinking of you.

🛒 2. Consideration → Branded Search Clicks + Marketplace Search Share

- Searches like “xyz brand + category” or “xyz review” signal mid-funnel intent.

- Marketplace search rank + click share gives you category-level visibility.

❤️ 3. Preference → Repeat Rate + Social Listening

-Low CAC but high repeat = chosen brand.

-Mine reviews on Google Business Pages, Reddit, YouTube comments to hear why they’re coming back (or not).

📣 4. Recommendation → NPS + Organic Referral Share

-Run your own NPS via post-purchase email or app like surveymonkey.

-Track what % of your sales come via referrals (“Friend told me”)

B. Your Perception:

💬 Image statements → Review Sentiment clusters for perception

-Scrape 100+ reviews from own website, Amazon, Quora, Google Pages

-Use AI to tag recurring themes: “trustworthy”, “value for money”, “premium vibe”.

C. Your Trigger/Barriers for category:

-Run a survey on leads that are in your funnel (pro considering brand sample)

-Run another on category research portals like say bikedekho (for 2W) for overall category considerers.

So, there you go. Your Brand Tracker without a pricey tag!

Not exact traditional Brand Tracking replacements, but will get you good enough sense on trends.

Have your own hacks to measure brand health? What would you add?

#BrandTrack #Brandstrategy

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I write regularly on #D2C #brand building/ scaling #growth insights.

#RunningMarketer