Looking for a reliable marketing budget allocation that doesn’t involve an overheating Excel spreadsheet? We’ve designed a free simulator to help you quickly and effectively decide how to distribute your spending across SEO, SEA, SMA, and programmatic budgets. In just a few minutes, you’ll receive a media mix recommendation that aligns with your growth objectives, margin, and operational reality.
Why Budget Allocation Determines Growth
The marketing budget allocation is a silent lever: no one sees it, but everyone feels its effects. Too small a share for brand building, and acquisition costs climb. Too much short-term focus, and the pipeline dries up in six months.
Conversely, a balanced mix fuels demand while anchoring your brand preference: your campaigns convert better, your CAC stabilizes, and the elasticity of results increases when you expand into new European countries.
At Donutz Digital, we start with the fundamentals: quantifiable objectives, return horizon, target markets, seasonality. Then we translate these elements into channel allocations. The simulator replicates this approach: it materializes concrete trade-offs and reveals the compromises that need to be made today, not ‘when we have more data’.
The Donutz Simulator: your Marketing Budget Co-pilot
The simulator doesn’t ‘guess’ your future. It structures your thinking. First, you define your ambition: objectives, geographical footprint, digital maturity. Then, you enter your monthly budget. The tool then proposes a marketing budget allocation between SEO budget, SEA budget, and SMA budget. ****
This result is a good starting point and can be further refined with a free audit from the Donutz team.
SEO, SEA, SMA: Building your Mix
Building a media plan and a marketing budget means accepting that one channel excels at one point in the journey and another takes over. What matters is the incremental contribution of each euro.
SEO: the Patient Capital that Lowers your CAC
The SEO budget is your marketing’s precautionary savings. We invest in technical structure, content that answers real customer questions, and domain authority.
Result: qualified, recurring traffic that reduces the need to buy every visit. For a company building its foundation or expanding multi-nationally, it’s a shock absorber: when SEA bids skyrocket, SEO keeps the shop open. The simulator helps you size this effort and plan for scaling up.
SEA: the Accelerator that Captures Intent
The SEA budget transforms intent into revenue. You test markets, verify offer hypotheses, arbitrate between
Well-managed, SEA feeds the rest: it reveals queries that deserve dedicated SEO content and provides data to inform SMA creations.
SMA: the Creative Power that Opens the Top of the Funnel
The SMA budget (Social Ads) does two things very well: reaching audiences that search engines don’t yet see, and fostering the desire to choose you. Videos, carousels, UGC, catalogs… creative diversity allows for quick iteration on messages and offer angles.
In e-commerce, it fuels retargeting and product discovery; in B2B, it provides social proof and demonstrations.
Three Budget Scenarios to Guide You
Imagine three European companies, three ambitions, three marketing budget allocations.
The Industrial SME (€120k/year, long cycle)
It sells technical solutions, with a high average order value and collegial decisions. It first invests in SEO to establish ‘problem/solution’ content and multilingual sectoral pages, then aligns a carefully filtered non-brand SEA. The more discreet SMA carries demonstration videos and client case studies.
The E-commerce Retailer (€300k/year, average order value €80)
Its challenge is velocity. SEA structures revenue (Search + Shopping + Performance Max), SMA expands reach and generates rapid creative tests, and SEO secures strategic categories and editorial hubs that will lower CAC over 12–18 months.
The SaaS Scale-up (€1M/year, multi-country)
The challenge is not raw demand, but brand preference and controlled expansion. SMA becomes the main stage for communicating the value proposition, demonstrating the product, and leveraging expert UGC. SEA captures competitive intent in multiple languages. SEO builds comparisons, use cases, and playbooks.
Method: Decide Now, Refine Continuously
No need to wait for ‘perfect’. The right
Implement metrics understandable by everyone: CPA and ROAS for the short term, organic contribution and conversion rate for the medium term, LTV and brand share for the long term.
Every quarter, reopen the discussion: what proves its increment, we keep; what stagnates, we test better; what underperforms, we cut.
By the way, a good mix without good tracking is like a donut without frosting: it nourishes, but something is missing. If you need a hand with data architecture, we’re here 😊
FAQ
What Percentage to Allocate to SEO, SEA, and SMA?
The right allocation isn’t a magic number; it’s a balance that serves your objectives. If you’re starting from scratch, imagine a tripod: the SEA budget provides immediate traction, the SEO budget builds a foundation that reduces CAC, and the SMA budget establishes your brand and fosters consideration.
In practice, a B2B company with a long sales cycle will often accept a larger SEO share, while an e-commerce business will prioritize SEA and creative SMA.
My Marketing Budget is Limited: where to Start?
With a tight budget, first secure the most profitable intent with SEA (essential queries, clear brand/non-brand structure). In parallel, dedicate a foundation to
Conclusion
A good marketing budget allocation is neither a definitive formula nor a gamble. It’s a process: establish a solid hypothesis, arm it correctly (content, campaigns, creatives), measure honestly, then reallocate methodically.
Our simulator offers you a shortcut to make the first decision and provides a common language to explain it to your teams and management. You have the ambition, we have the compass. Shall we grab a donut and get started?
