How to Set a Marketing Budget in Egypt.

Ask ten business owners in Egypt how they set their marketing budget and most will say some version of "whatever we can afford this month." The rest will quote a percentage of revenue they read somewhere. Both produce a number disconnected from what the business actually needs, which is why the budget feels like a cost instead of a purchase.

Work backwards from the customer

Four numbers produce the budget. Three of them you already know:

1. What a customer is worth to you — the margin on an average sale, multiplied by how many times they buy. Not revenue.
2. What you can afford to pay for one — a fraction of that value. A third is a common, conservative starting point.
3. How many customers you need this quarter, as an actual number.
4. What a result costs — the only one you may need to discover, by running a campaign for two weeks.

Multiply (2) by (3) and you have the budget. If the result is a number the business cannot survive, the problem is not the budget — it is either the margin, the price, or the expectation of how many customers are realistic.

A worked example

Say an average sale leaves 600 EGP of margin and a typical customer buys twice: the customer is worth 1,200 EGP. A third of that is 400 EGP as the maximum acceptable cost per customer. You need 50 new customers this quarter, so the ceiling is 20,000 EGP over three months.

Now bring in the cost per result. If a conversation costs 2 EGP and one in ten conversations becomes a customer, a customer costs about 20 EGP in media — far below the 400 ceiling, which means the constraint is not budget but capacity: how many conversations the team can actually handle.

That is the most common real finding. The arithmetic usually reveals that the limit is answering, not spending.

The floor you cannot go below

There is a minimum below which spending behaves badly. A campaign needs roughly 50 results a week to leave the learning phase and settle into a predictable cost. Multiply your expected cost per result by 50 and divide by seven:

Below the floor, money buys learning rather than customers, and the cost per result never stabilises. If the floor is out of reach, run one campaign properly rather than three badly — splitting a small budget is the fastest way to make all of it underperform.

Dividing what you have

Once there is a number, it splits three ways. Media is the largest share. Production — the photography, video and design that feed the media — is the one most often forgotten, and the shortage shows up a month later as rising costs from tired creative. Testing is the smallest and the one that protects the other two.

Management sits outside all three: in our published pricing, ads management is 10,000–18,000 EGP a month, a mobile reels day is 6,000 EGP, and camera production runs 12,000–30,000 EGP per day. Any proposal that merges media and fees into one figure is hiding one of them.

When to scale, and when not to

Increase spend when two conditions hold together: the cost per customer has been stable for several weeks and sits comfortably below what a customer is worth, and you have new creative ready to deploy. Scaling budget behind one ad that is already fatiguing pushes cost up, not results.

In the ICAR account the cost per conversion held at 4.87 EGP across 2,235 conversions as budget rose, and the reason was a weekly flow of fresh creative. That is what makes scaling safe. Published costs by industry are on the benchmarks page.

The spend nobody budgets for

Two costs sit outside the media line and quietly decide whether the media works. The first is answering: if conversations arrive faster than anyone can reply, more budget simply buys more ignored messages. The second is production: creative fatigues, and a budget with no line for new photography and video ends the quarter paying more per result than it started.

Before raising media spend, confirm both are covered. It is common for the right decision to be keeping media flat and spending the increase on a shoot day and a second person answering.

Review it quarterly, not monthly

Monthly reviews encourage reacting to noise; a bad fortnight triggers a budget cut that resets the learning and makes the next month worse. Review the plan quarterly against cost per customer and capacity, and leave the campaigns alone in between unless something is genuinely broken.

If you want the number worked out against your own margin instead of a package, send us what you sell and what it leaves you — the calculation above takes one conversation, and sometimes the honest answer is to spend less and fix the follow-up first.