It is a question that I get asked frequently; what should I spend my marketing money on?
I have worked for some large companies and several small companies that were awash with investor cash. The marketing teams in these companies had great fun metaphorically throwing wads of money against a wall of prospects to see what stuck. I often got involved in creating glossy advertisements for aeroplane magazines, bus shelters, radio, and TV. But the metrics to track the effectiveness of these type of adverts was subjective at best. As a salesperson, I was often asked to mark a sale against the marketing manager’s favourite advertising campaigns when the customer had clearly never seen one of the adverts.
That is all very well for large companies. But solopreneurs like us don’t have the luxury of throwing away wads of advertising money, metaphorical or otherwise. We certainly can’t be ‘wasting half our advertising money’ like John states above. Fortunately, we live in very different times to when John and I worked for large companies; though to be fair, I started working about 134 years after John. The world we live in now gives us the ability to test and track every single one of our advertising dollars.
This ability to track and test our marketing spend for a product or service allows us to know exactly how much it costs to get a new client or sale. It allows us to quickly drop those marketing strategies that don’t work. And it allows us to concentrate on those marketing strategies that do work. And you should be concentrating on those winning marketing strategies. If you are serious about your small business, if this is not just a side hustle, then you should be looking to do some form of paid advertising.
There has never been a better time to start advertising, where we can be sure we won’t be wasting huge amounts of money on untested and untrackable advertising strategies. And when you find something that works, then as we would say when I was growing up, ‘give it horns!’. It means, put your energy and focus into that successful advertising strategy.
If we know how much a sale costs, and we want more sales, then we know how much we need to spend to get those sales. Then it is just a matter of finding the money, but at least we know we will get it back. And when times are tough, like now, we should be putting more money into our most effective marketing strategies, not less.
If you need help putting together a tailored marketing strategy that works, then feel free to get in touch via Facebook or my contact page.