Money, money, money
Abba
Must be funny
In the rich man’s world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man’s world
How much money do you plan to pay out to attract new clients, how often do you intend to invest and what results do you aim to measure to make sure that you are spending your “hard-earned” cash wisely?
Well, that’s the job a good marketing budget does for you and your business, whether you’re doing it “in-house” or delegating to your accountant or marketing agency.
Even though many businesses focus principally on saving money to
and look at marketing as a cost that needs to be reduced…
we recommend seeing things differently and looking upon marketing as an investment in and for your business to generate a pipeline of new leads and make your business more sustainable.
What difference does this make?
I’ve been investigating the steps that businesses go through when moving from a startup, where it’s all about the “hustle”, to scaling up and building a more predictable and sustainable business.
The first transformation occurs when business owners
If you create a marketing budget and process that generates measurable results you can put £ X in and get a multiple of £ X out e.g. 0.25 X, 0.5 X, 1 X, 2 X, 4 X, 8 X, 16 X, 32 X out.
I know this looks a bit like algebra, so I’ll use an example to demonstrate…
I ran a marketing campaign recently where I bought leads from a broker.
I invested £126.36 including VAT and received 2 leads, each spent £30, giving a total revenue of £60 and a Return On Investment of £60 divided by £126.36 or .475 X.
Will I be investing in this lead broker again?
No.
Because, unfortunately, not all marketing spend actually generates good enough results to continue.
But, we have lots of other examples where marketing does indeed generate a great Return On Investment and we have plenty of case studies where our marketing generates an ROI of 4 X or more which means a revenue of £4 for every £1 you invest in your marketing.
In fact, when we talk about small business marketing with guaranteed results that’s what we mean – we guarantee a Return On Investment of 4 X in 4 to 6 months, or we continue working at no additional cost to you until you do. (Provided you meet our criteria, of course).
Break-even means anything better than 1 X (where your marketing pays for itself), and is a good start.
Once you know that your marketing has become an investment, with a Return On Investment greater than 1 X (i.e. break-even), rather than a cost, you can start to scale your marketing
But, it’s only by measuring how much you are spending and how much you are getting back that you will know when your marketing becomes an investment.
And as soon as you have the measurements available to see clearly whether you are making a Return On Investment you’ll make better decisions.
And, when you start to see a positive ROI you’ll probably want to invest money in your marketing every month, because it’s no longer a game of roulette…
you’re not gambling any more…
you are backing yourself and your business!
So, creating and allocating a marketing budget is the first step to discovering what ROI you are making on your marketing and figuring out where to invest in your marketing to scale your business.
And if you feel like you need help to create your marketing budget and you want to start generating a positive Return On Investment.
Let’s have a conversation…
