What does Meta advertising cost for a Belgian SME? (how to calculate your budget)

Stop asking what you can get for €1,000 a month

Almost every conversation about advertising budget starts at the wrong end. A business owner says: I have €1,000 a month, what can I get for that? It is a fair question and it is unanswerable, because the amount was picked before anyone looked at what the company actually needs to sell.

Turn it around. Start with the revenue you want to add, work back through your own conversion rates, and the budget appears on its own. What you get is not an opinion about advertising. It is arithmetic about your own business, and it either fits your ambition or it does not.

The useful side effect: the moment you do the sum, you stop arguing about the ad budget and start arguing about the two things that matter far more. How much a customer is worth to you, and how good you are at closing the enquiries you already get.

• →Your average order value. What does one customer bring in?
• →Your appointment-to-customer rate. Out of ten quotes or sales conversations, how many buy?
• →Your enquiry-to-appointment rate. Out of ten enquiries, how many turn into a real conversation?
• →Your cost per enquiry. The only number you cannot know before you start spending.

The formula, worked through

Budget = (revenue goal / average order value) / appointment-to-customer rate / enquiry-to-appointment rate x cost per enquiry. Written out it looks heavy, so here it is with numbers. These figures are a hypothesis to demonstrate the method, not a benchmark from anyone's account.

Say you want €50,000 in extra revenue in a month. Your average project is €8,000. Of the people you sit down with, roughly a third become customers. Of the enquiries that come in, about six in ten make it to an appointment. And say the campaign settles at €35 per enquiry.

Now run the same sum with a close rate five points higher and watch what happens. Improving what you do after the enquiry is almost always cheaper than buying more enquiries, because a better close rate lowers the budget without touching a single ad. That is also why the arithmetic sometimes says no: if your average order is €300 and you close one in ten, paid social cannot carry that model until the offer or the order value changes.

1. Customers needed€50,000 / €8,000 = 7 customers
2. Appointments needed7 / 0.33 = 22 appointments
3. Enquiries needed22 / 0.60 = 37 enquiries
4. Budget at €35 per enquiry37 x €35 = €1,295 in ad spend

⚠️ The numbers above are illustrative. Replace all four with your own; the answer changes completely, and that is the point.

The floor: below a certain budget the algorithm is guessing

Meta's own guidance has been consistent for years: an ad set needs roughly fifty conversion events per week to leave the learning phase and optimise reliably. That is not a marketing myth, it is how the delivery system is built. Below that volume, the algorithm is working from noise and your results swing wildly week to week for reasons nobody can explain.

Do the arithmetic in the other direction and the floor becomes concrete for your case. If an enquiry costs you €40, fifty a week means €2,000 a week, which very few small companies want to hear. That is why sensible campaigns often optimise for a cheaper event higher in the funnel, or run one consolidated ad set instead of five clever ones, so the data lands in one place.

The practical rule: fewer ad sets, fewer audiences, fewer clever splits. Every extra ad set divides the same conversion data into smaller piles. A small budget spread across six audiences learns nothing six times over.

The ceiling: at some point you are buying frequency, not reach

There is a limit in the other direction too, and in Belgium you hit it sooner than you would in a large market. Once a campaign has shown your ad to everyone in the audience who is likely to respond, the extra euros do not find new people. They show the same video to the same people more often. Frequency climbs, results fall, and the report looks like the platform broke.

It did not break. The creative ran out. The fix is almost never a bigger budget or a new audience; it is a new set of videos, or at minimum a new set of openings on the material you already have. Budget scales with creative volume. If you want to spend more, you need more to say.

This is where a lot of companies conclude that advertising stopped working for them. What actually happened is that they treated one video as a permanent asset instead of a consumable one.

Cost per enquiry: the one number you have to buy

You can estimate order value and close rates from your own books. Cost per enquiry you cannot know in advance, because it is set by an auction you are not yet in. It depends on how visual your product is, how urgent the need feels to the buyer, how considered the purchase is, and how many competitors are bidding for the same attention at the same moment.

A leaking roof and a new kitchen behave completely differently in that auction. One is urgent and gets answered from the sofa at ten at night; the other is a six-month conversation involving a partner, a bank and three quotes. Same platform, same budget, entirely different cost per enquiry.

So you measure it, and you can do that inside three to four weeks. Week one is delivery and technical validation: is the conversion tracked, does the form work on mobile, are the enquiries real. Weeks two and three give you the first honest read on cost per enquiry. Week four tells you whether it holds when you push spend. From that point on you are no longer estimating, and the formula above becomes a planning tool instead of a thought experiment.

How long before I can judge the campaign?

Three to four weeks for a first read on cost per enquiry, and a full sales cycle before you judge revenue. If your average deal takes two months to close, judging results after three weeks tells you about lead cost, not about return.

What if my cost per enquiry is higher than the calculation assumed?

Then you have three levers, and adding budget is the worst of them. Improve the offer, improve the creative, or improve the conversion from enquiry to customer. The first two change the auction; the third changes how much you can afford to pay in it.

Belgium is a small market split down the middle

This is where imported advice stops being useful. Belgium has roughly eleven million inhabitants, and your addressable audience is usually only a slice of that: the right region, the right language, the right age, the right role. A campaign for homeowners in a couple of Flemish provinces can easily come down to a few hundred thousand people, not the multi-million pools that American case studies assume.

Two consequences follow directly. First, creative fatigues fast. In a small audience your frequency builds within weeks, not months, so you need a pipeline of new material rather than one hero film. Second, a single campaign can only absorb so much budget before it starts bidding against itself, which caps how quickly you can scale a winning setup.

Then there is language. Dutch and French are not two versions of the same campaign; they are two markets with different creative, different landing pages and different follow-up. Running Flanders and Wallonia in one ad set to save effort usually means one language subsidises the other and you cannot see which. Brussels adds a third layer, where English often works for international and expat audiences. Plan the split from the start, budget for it, and read the results separately.

⚠️ All budget figures on this page are illustrative arithmetic. Your own numbers are the only ones that matter.

Frequently asked questions

What is a realistic minimum monthly Meta budget for a Belgian SME?

There is no universal minimum, but there is a mechanical one: enough spend for the campaign to generate meaningful weekly conversion data, plus enough left over to test more than one video. Work it out from your own cost per enquiry once you have measured it. If the arithmetic says you cannot reach a useful volume of conversions, the honest conclusion is to raise the order value or the close rate first.

Should I run Dutch and French campaigns separately?

Yes. They are different markets with different creative and different landing pages, and combining them hides which one is actually working. It does mean each side gets a smaller share of budget, so if you have to start with one, start where your delivery capacity is.

Is Meta better than Google or LinkedIn for a Belgian SME?

They answer different questions. Google captures people already searching for a solution; Meta creates demand among people who were not looking yet, which is why video does the heavy lifting there. For most small and mid-sized companies with a visual product and a clear offer, Meta reaches more of the right people per euro, and YouTube can extend the same video work where longer form makes sense.

How much of the budget goes to advertising versus production?

It depends entirely on the objective, but the two are not separable: a strong video with no media behind it reaches nobody, and media behind a weak video buys expensive proof that the video is weak. We have delivered projects from €7,000 to €30,000, depending on the objective, the number of videos and the size of the advertising budget.

Is the ad spend deductible and how does VAT work?

Ad spend is a business cost like any other, and Meta invoices Belgian companies with a valid VAT number under the reverse-charge rules, so you handle the VAT in your own return. Check the exact treatment with your accountant, since it depends on your VAT status and how your account is registered.