How many times have you wondered how much your competitors are spending on their marketing initiatives compared to you or even compared to the industry as a whole?  Based on our decade long conversation with the legal technology vendor community through Envision Agency, this question has come up a lot but without many answers.

Where other industries routinely benchmark marketing spend as a percentage of overall company revenue, our market has had no standards to measure against … until now. The inaugural InsideLegal Vendor Marketing Survey of the legal technology community reveals that 46% of vendor respondents spend more than 4% of their company's total revenue on marketing, with 25% spending more than 6%. While this might sound like a healthy allocation, it pales in comparison to other overall industry standards.

According to Go-to-Market-Strategies (GTMS), a resource center for sales and marketing professionals and business leaders, 45% of companies spend over 6%, with most of those between 6-10%.  GTMS adds: "The general guideline for using the percentage of revenue approach is 8-10% of revenue should be spent on marketing, with approximately 5% of that going to labor (either for a department, or outsourcing to a marketing firm). What percentage you use is determined by a number of factors, how mature is your market (how much education do you have to do), how well known is your company in your industry (are you a new or established business, how much brand awareness do you have to do), and how fast do you intend to grow …"

We'll be talking more about this in the upcoming months, but it's a good time to think about where you stand in the mix…