“How much does marketing cost?”
It’s the million-dollar question every business owner asks. The problem is, most answers are vague, unhelpful, and leave you feeling more confused than when you started. You’re told to spend “around 10% of revenue,” but what does that even mean for your business? For a Sydenham cafe versus a law firm in the CBD?
The truth is, asking “how much does it cost?” is framing the problem backwards.
The right question is: “What is the strategic investment required to achieve my specific growth goals?”
This guide throws out the old rulebook. We’re not talking about arbitrary percentages. We’re providing a blueprint for investing in your growth, detailing the real costs for digital and traditional channels in New Zealand, and revealing where you should focus your budget for maximum return on investment (ROI) in 2025 and beyond.
For years, the standard advice has been to allocate 5-10% of your revenue to marketing. If you’re a New Zealand business owner, you’ve heard this a dozen times. While it’s a simple formula, it’s also a deeply flawed one.
Relying on a percentage of revenue is like driving while only looking in the rearview mirror. It tethers your future growth to past performance and completely ignores critical factors: your profit margins, the competitiveness of your industry, and—most importantly—your specific goals.
A Christchurch retail store spending 10% of its revenue on scattered marketing efforts saw minimal returns. Meanwhile, a local plumbing company invested just 4% but focused it like a laser on generating qualified leads, seeing a steady stream of new business. The difference wasn’t how much they spent, but how they spent it.
Instead of starting with a budget, start with a goal.
This is objective-based budgeting. It’s a simple shift in perspective that changes everything. To roll out proper objective-based budgeting, you need to have a good understanding of your business data, your customers, and have access to reliable industry benchmarks.
This method forces you to think like an investor, not a spender. It links every dollar to a tangible outcome, making your marketing accountable, measurable, and more effective.
Once you have a goal-driven budget, you can allocate it to the channels that will deliver. For nearly every New Zealand business, the digital landscape is where you’ll find your customers.
A website is a non-negotiable in business today. Your website isn’t just an online brochure; it’s your digital storefront and the engine for all your marketing. Driving traffic to a slow, confusing, or outdated site is like throwing money in a firepit.
For most local New Zealand businesses with smaller marketing budgets, your highest return on ad spend (ROI) will come from the killer local combination of Local SEO and Google Ads.
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of earning visibility in Google’s non-paid search results. It’s an investment in a digital asset that appreciates over time.
Think of it as owning your traffic, not renting it.
When someone’s pipe bursts, they don’t browse Facebook. They search “emergency plumber Christchurch.” Google Ads puts you at the top of the results at that exact moment of need.
Google Ads delivers immediate leads and priceless data on what keywords convert. You then use that data to inform your long-term Local SEO strategy, de-risking the investment and creating a powerful growth flywheel.
The world of search is changing faster than ever before. Google’s new “AI Overviews” are moving from a list of links to a direct, conversational answer.
This is the dawn of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).
Your new goal isn’t just to rank #1. It’s to be so authoritative and helpful that Google’s AI cites your content as the source of its answer.
E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google and other AI search engines prioritise content demonstrating these qualities because it provides users with reliable, valuable, and genuinely helpful information.
What is E-E-A-T?
How to Optimise Your Content for E-E-A-T:
SEO Benefits of E-E-A-T:
GEO Benefits of E-E-A-T:
The data is in, and it’s staggering: video content is 3.1 times more likely to be cited in an AI Overview than text.
Why? Because for many queries, video is simply a better way to answer the question. A video showing a customer how to do something is far more powerful than text describing it.
Your video strategy doesn’t need a Hollywood budget. Focus on being helpful:
Crucially, you must optimise your video for AI. This means providing a full transcript, detailed descriptions, and using chapters/timestamps to break the video into logical sections. This allows AI to find and surface the exact 30-second clip that answers a user’s specific question.
The cost of marketing is the price of being found. For a Christchurch business, the path forward is clear:
Investing wisely, measuring relentlessly, and committing to genuine expertise is how you’ll win—not just today, but for years to come.
