Growth
2026-10-29 · 7 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
A common rule of thumb used globally, and reasonably applicable in Nepal, is to budget somewhere between 5% and 12% of revenue on marketing, with newer or growth-focused businesses leaning toward the higher end of that range and established businesses with steady demand leaning lower. A business doing NPR 50,00,000 a year in revenue and aiming to grow might reasonably budget NPR 2,50,000 to 6,00,000 a year, roughly NPR 20,000-50,000 a month, across website, management fees, and ad spend combined.
A brand-new business with no existing customer base often needs to spend proportionally more in its first year simply to become known at all, even if that percentage looks high relative to current, low revenue - the budget in this case is really an investment in building the base that future, more conservative percentages will apply to.
It is worth running this calculation even if you have never formally budgeted for marketing before - many small Nepal businesses are already spending close to this range without realizing it, just unevenly and without tracking, which means a formal budget often changes less about the total spend and more about how deliberately it is used.
“A marketing budget is not a wishlist - it is a spreadsheet that has to survive contact with your bank balance.”
The first bucket is foundation - your website and any core digital assets, which is mostly a one-time cost of NPR 30,000-1,20,000 for a basic site, more for dynamic or e-commerce, plus a small ongoing maintenance line of NPR 5,000-20,000 a year. The second bucket is management fees - what you pay an agency or freelancer to run SEO, social media, or ad campaigns, typically NPR 15,000-60,000 a month per channel, or NPR 30,000-80,000-plus for multiple channels managed together.
The third bucket is ad spend itself - money paid directly to Google or Meta, entirely separate from management fees, and the most flexible of the three since it can be scaled up or down month to month based on what the business can afford and what is actually working. Keeping these three buckets separate in your own records, rather than one lump marketing line, makes it much easier to see where money is actually going and which bucket is underfunded.
Keeping these three buckets visible also makes conversations with any agency or freelancer clearer, since you can ask specifically which bucket a proposal is quoting - a vague monthly number that bundles management fee and ad spend together makes it much harder to tell whether you are being quoted fairly.
Consider a small retail or service business with NPR 15,00,000-25,00,000 in annual revenue, aiming to grow steadily. A realistic monthly marketing budget might look like SEO management around NPR 30,000, social media management around NPR 20,000, and Google Ads management plus roughly NPR 20,000 in actual ad spend - totaling around NPR 70,000-80,000 a month, alongside a one-time website cost already paid off and NPR 10,000-15,000 a year set aside for maintenance.
A smaller business or one just starting out might scale this down to a single channel - say, just social media management at NPR 15,000-20,000 a month, or SEO alone from around NPR 30,000 a month - and add additional channels only once the first is showing clear results and the budget allows.
These numbers are a starting illustration, not a formula to copy exactly - a business with higher margins per sale, or one in a more competitive category, may reasonably justify spending more in any of these buckets, while a lower-margin business needs to watch the ad spend bucket especially closely since it is the easiest one to overspend.
If the budget needs to shrink, the ad spend bucket is the easiest and safest place to scale back first, since it can be adjusted monthly without breaking a longer-term commitment. What is harder and riskier to cut is analytics and tracking - removing the ability to measure what is working is how a tight budget turns into a wasted one, since every future decision becomes a guess.
Website basics - load speed, mobile usability, a working contact form - are also a poor place to cut corners, since a broken foundation reduces the return on every other rupee spent on top of it, including whatever reduced ad spend remains.
A useful gut check before cutting anything: ask whether the cut saves money this month at the cost of a worse decision next month. Cutting tracking saves nothing if it means months of ad spend happen with no way to tell what is actually working.
Review the budget against actual results, not assumptions, at least quarterly. If a channel has been running for three months with reasonable spend and tracking in place but is not producing measurable inquiries or sales, that is a signal to adjust, not necessarily abandon it outright, since some channels, SEO especially, take longer to show results than others.
As revenue grows, the absolute marketing budget should typically grow with it, even if the percentage of revenue stays roughly the same or gradually decreases - a business that never revisits its budget as it grows tends to either underinvest in marketing relative to its new scale, or keep overspending on channels chosen when the business was much smaller.
Keeping a simple record of spend by bucket over time, even in a basic spreadsheet, makes this quarterly review far easier than trying to reconstruct it from memory or scattered invoices when the review date arrives.
The goal of a first marketing budget is not precision - it is a reasonable, honest starting point you can actually afford and sustain for at least a few months, with enough tracking in place to know whether to adjust it. A smaller, sustained budget consistently applied beats a larger one that gets cut after six weeks because it was never realistic to begin with.
Arcetis scopes engagements for Nepal businesses starting from around NPR 20,000 a month, built around what a specific budget can realistically achieve rather than a fixed package, which is generally the more honest way to start a conversation about marketing spend.
Whatever starting number you land on, write down the specific outcome you expect from it over the following three months, so your quarterly review has something concrete to compare against rather than a general impression.
A workable starting point for a small business is often NPR 20,000-50,000 a month, focused on one or two channels rather than spread thin. This should scale with revenue over time - roughly 5-12% of annual revenue is a reasonable range to budget toward, with newer businesses leaning higher.
It depends on team bandwidth and expertise more than budget alone. In-house can work well if someone on the team has real time and some marketing skill to dedicate to it consistently; an agency makes more sense when the business needs specialized skills such as ad platform management or SEO that would otherwise take significant time to learn, or when the team simply does not have spare capacity to manage it well.
Review actual results against the budget at least quarterly, and revisit the budget amount itself whenever revenue changes meaningfully or a channel has had enough time, generally three months minimum, to show whether it is working. Avoid changing the budget every few weeks based on short-term fluctuations, since most channels need a reasonable run to produce reliable data.