Notes for owners · Business growth
How to set an advertising budget
A budget is not one number. It is twelve monthly numbers, four kinds of cost, and a decision about which part of it you are allowed to move in March. Here is how to build that page and run it.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 8 min read
Setting an advertising budget is two jobs, and most owners only do the first. The first is arriving at the annual figure, which is arithmetic from the orders you need and what an enquiry has cost you before. How much should I spend on advertising works through that calculation. The second job is turning that figure into a document. Twelve months, four kinds of cost, and a written rule about which part may move and who is allowed to move it. This page is about the second job.
Four kinds of money, kept apart
An advertising budget that is one line called "marketing" cannot be managed, because every one of these moves for a different reason.
| Line | What it buys | How it behaves |
|---|---|---|
| Media | The space or the time: the hoarding cycle, the column centimetres, the cinema weeks, the ad spend | Rises with season and competition |
| Production | Artwork, photography, the film, printing and mounting, language versions | Lumpy. A large charge in month one, small ones after |
| People and fees | Your own team's time, an agency retainer, a freelancer | Flat, and therefore easy to forget |
| Response capacity | The phone line, the number tracking, the person answering, the CRM | Small, and the first thing an unplanned budget starves |
Printing and mounting is the line that catches first-time buyers. A hoarding carries a media rate, and then a separate charge to print the flex and put it up. That charge is per site. Buy eleven sites and you pay it eleven times.
Phase it against your year
Twelve equal monthly figures describe no Indian business. Write the months down the left of a page and mark the ones that matter to your trade before you put any money against them.
A jewellery showroom is planning for Akshaya Tritiya, Dasara, Deepavali and the wedding weeks, and spending very little in Ashada. A school is spending from December to March and going quiet for the rest of the year. A machine tool supplier finds his buyers releasing capital expenditure before March closes and going silent in April. A resort is advertising against long weekends. An interiors firm is advertising where a project was handed over last month, whenever that happens to be.
Then look at where the money has to be committed rather than spent. Festive hoarding sites and newspaper positions go early. If Deepavali is your month, the booking decision is in the monsoon.
Committed, flexible, and the bit you hold back
Split every rupee in the plan into three buckets and mark them on the page.
Committed is money you cannot take back once the order is placed: a three-month hoarding cycle, six weeks of cinema, a newspaper booking, a retainer with notice. It buys certainty and it removes your freedom.
Flexible is money you can stop on a Wednesday: search, social, retargeting. This is where you learn, because it answers quickly.
Held back is a month or so of media you deliberately do not allocate. Something always turns up. A competing showroom opens two streets from yours. A festival lands a fortnight earlier than last year. A site you have wanted for two years falls vacant in week three. Without a reserve you fund those by cancelling something that was working.
For a small advertiser the useful shape is most of the money flexible in the first quarter, while you are still learning what produces enquiries. It moves towards committed offline once you know which catchment responds.
The page itself
One table, printed, on the wall. Month, channel, committed or flexible, media, production, what this money is for in one line, and the single number it is judged on. If a row cannot be given a number it is judged on, you have not decided what it is for.
Take the row away and ask what you would lose. Rows that survive that question stay. The tool subscription nobody has logged into since March does not. Advertising budget planning is the service page if you would rather this page was built with you than by you.
Running it: the monthly reforecast
A budget set in April and opened again in March is a wish. Once a month, sit with three columns: planned, spent, and what came of it. Then make one decision.
Money moves towards evidence, not towards enthusiasm. If the Kannada newspaper insert in one set of pincodes produced walk-ins and the citywide English display did not, next month's money goes to the insert. That is a decision with a reason, which is what the budget is for.
Two rules keep this honest. Do not move money out of a brand channel halfway through its flight, because you will have paid for the setup and none of the effect. And write down who approves a move above a level you decide, otherwise the budget quietly becomes whatever people spent.
The lines that arrive after the budget is signed
Every one of these has surprised an owner who thought the quotation was the cost.
Taxes, written out rather than assumed. Artwork adapted to each size, because a hoarding, a lift panel and a newspaper strip are three different files and the designer charges for all three. Language versions, which in Karnataka usually means a Kannada cut as well as an English one. Certification of an advertisement film before a cinema or a television channel will carry it. The commission or mark-up an agency takes on media, which should be visible rather than buried in the rate. And the small recurring costs of being reachable: the tracking number, the WhatsApp account, the person who picks up.
Add a line for each of these before you commit, even if the figure is a guess. A guessed line gets revised. A missing line becomes an argument in month four.
When you should not set one yet
If enquiries already arrive and nobody calls them back within the hour, the budget is not the problem and more media will make the loss larger.
If you cannot say what your last hundred customers came from, even roughly, then any allocation you write is a guess dressed as a plan. Spend a week on the enquiry register first.
What to do next
Open a blank sheet and write the twelve months down the side, then mark your three heaviest selling months and your two dead ones. That skeleton takes ten minutes and it changes the conversation from "what should we spend" to "what are we buying in September". If you want the plan built against your own enquiry history rather than against a rule of thumb, book the free audit and bring last year's figures.