What to Prioritize in Your 2026 Marketing Budget
From reliable SEO to new technology, here's what you should think about for next year.
It’s never too early to start preparing for the coming year. And now’s a great time to start planning out your 2026 marketing budget.
When it comes to formulating next year’s marketing strategy and figuring out what to prioritize within your budget, it’s important to look at what worked for you in 2025. Some things you might want to consider to increase brand awareness and lease-ups at your properties include online reputation management, social media and ad spend.
Planning out the year in advance allows you to start off on a good note. Refer to old data to see what was working, what generated the most leads and which social media platforms got the most engagement. Also, take note of what wasn’t working for you. Maybe carving a piece of the marketing budget for social media wasn’t as successful as you originally thought it would be, or you had multiple services to handle certain SEO strategies to build your leads when one service would have been more efficient.
I counsel all my clients that I would pour every dollar and cent that (I) have into Google, before recommending social media.
—Kyle Jones, Agency Manager, REACH by RentCafe
Casting a wide SEO and PPC net
Though social media and ILS might seem like good areas to budget for, they don’t always yield results. Instead, one of the most effective areas to consider is SEO. Kyle Jones, agency manager for REACH by RentCafe, suggested budgeting for pay-per-click Google ads and prioritizing SEO first.
Effective SEO strategies result in more leases and tend to cost less than social media. According to Kyle Jones, SEO is the top-performing source for his clients. “It drives the highest returns and the most net rental income at the lowest cost. If you’re doing SEO, it’s going to maximize your efforts and returns on PPC as well.”
When thinking about SEO and utilizing it for marketing strategies, it’s important to keep your demographic in mind. Making a section of your budget fit into creating an effective SEO strategy ensures that the listing will have a lower cost but will get to your prospective renters. Optimizing your search results for higher rankings ensures that more people will interact with the ad and that it will target the relevant audience. This includes location, age range and what people are looking for from a property.
According to Wordstream’s 2025 marketing trends survey, the average click-through rate for real estate ads is 8.4 percent, which is higher than the overall average of 6.7 percent. This number is slightly down from 9.2 percent in 2024, but it’s still a high-performing strategy to implement. “Both SEO and PPC are going to drive higher quality leads that convert into leases almost always at a lower cost than internet listing services,” noted Kyle Jones.
Budgeting for a CRM vendor is a great way to collect PPC data and plan for the following year. It’s also a tool to help improve SEO, so the team can see what’s performing well, generating the most clicks and getting the most leads. Windell Mollenido, director of marketing at The REMM Group, recommends securing a CRM with lead attribution. You should source these vendors earlier rather than later to lock in the best price.
“I always recommend that if you know you’re going to use a program for the following year because it’s been successful for the last three, four or five years that you’ve been using it, you should have those discussions ahead of time,” said Mollenido. “Get the best deals you can.”
Optimizing services
When planning a marketing budget, another area to consider is outsourcing different types of training and technology services for on-site teams and operations. Matthew Mehon, director of marketing at Marquette Cos., said the optimization of these services is a crucial aspect to consider in 2026.
For this coming year, Marquette is finding software and vendors that offer all those services as a package. This will help the firm optimize its spending and limit the amount of outsourcing it does, reducing its technology vendors from four to one.
Outsourcing is a great way to improve on-site processes, but using multiple vendors can eat away at your budget. Marquette manages 50 properties across its portfolio throughout 10 different markets in the Midwest, Florida and Texas. Mehon noted that streamlining the company’s vendors has proven to be effective, saving hundreds of dollars a month.
“Optimize your advertising budget to double down on what’s working and get rid of what’s not working,” advised Mehon. “At a certain point, you need to kick the tires, implement it across a couple of properties, understand how it operates and then determine whether it’s something that can be scaled or dropped.”
AI looks for you. So whether you’re on page 1 or page 100, AI will tell you that this is the property—on page 82—that meets your criteria.
—Windell Mollenido, Director of Marketing, The REMM Group
Machine-learning technologies
When it comes to next year’s budget, don’t just look back—look forward as well. AI is now considered essential in marketing, so it’s important to budget for it in 2026. According to Kyle Jones, there are many different services you can research, including Elise AI and Performance Max. These programs learn what’s working and what isn’t so that they can improve over time. They can run an ad campaign over a broad network to gather more data and adapt accordingly or reach out to leads, reducing the need for call centers.
“This is why you want to have some sort of AI tool in your tech deck to maximize the value of all the leads that you’re getting and handle the follow-ups and email responses,” reported Mollenido.
Nicole Jones, senior vice president of marketing and communications at Veris Residential is budgeting for AI, especially as services such as ChatGPT, Copilot and other technologies’ responses are showing up at the top of Google search pages.
“Our website has evolved to be as future-proof as possible, with embedded AI across every touch point, offering 24/7 assistance to investors, prospects, residents and potential employees,” said Nicole Jones. “People now ask ChatGPT and Claude to find homes, so we’ve ensured our properties appear in those results through LLM optimization. As Google loses market share for the first time to these AI tools, this has become more important than ever.”
Flexibility, flexibility, flexibility
The average leasing season varies year over year. Because of this, Kyle Jones suggested being flexible with your spending on a monthly basis and not planning to spend less in specific months. By understanding that there are times when search and leads may fall off, this can promote a better understanding of how to spread your budget out and where to allocate more resources at a certain time, rather than cutting costs.
“You shouldn’t be dropping your budget during the off-season,” Kyle Jones said. “You should be thinking about maintaining more spend in what would historically be considered off months of the cycle.”
Creating a rigid budget without considering how the market changes is not the best way to get the most out of your money. With built-in flexibility, if there’s a month that has less leasing activity or an unforeseen economic circumstance, you can adjust your budget accordingly.
When it comes to formulating Veris Residential’s marketing budget, Nicole Jones also encourages flexibility when it comes to budgeting. She looks at a budget as a guideline rather than a step-by-step list of criteria to hit each month with no room for error. After all, no budget is ever 100 percent accurate when it’s formulated in advance.
According to Nicole Jones, Veris plans its marketing budget sometimes almost a year out. With circumstances constantly changing, she adjusts the budget based on what the company wants to focus on. This ensures that no matter what the outside circumstances are, the firm can pivot accordingly.
“We work closely with our asset management and on-site teams, reviewing key metrics, performance data and upcoming exposure every month to map out our spending strategy,” she noted. “If market conditions shift or unexpected opportunities arise, we make informed decisions about budget adjustments, including situations where we might need to exceed our original projections for strategic reasons.”
