Massive Marketing Mistakes – Number Six: Spending Money on Your Marketing

How often do you think that you’ll just spend a little more on a bigger advert, just to see if it works? Or do you pay out for a networking event in the hope that it might bring you the right sort of clients? And how often do you get to the end of the month and realise that there’s no money left in the bank – and no new clients to show for it?

If you do this, you’re committing Massive Marketing Mistake Number Six – not setting a budget for your marketing and not knowing what you’re spending your hard earn money on.

Massive Marketing Mistake Number Six – Spending Money on Your Marketing

As a small business owner, you probably don’t have a limitless pot of money to invest in promoting your business. You need to be careful about how much you spend and what you pay for. You need to spend some money in order to market your business in a professional manner; and you need to make sure you still have enough to live on too!

Many small businesses that struggle to grow don’t set aside a certain amount of money to spend on their marketing. They try to do everything on the cheap, or do it themselves. “We’ll spend money on marketing once we’ve got some new clients and we can afford to invest,” they say. But if you don’t invest in your marketing in the first place, how are you going to find the new clients you need, to fund your future marketing?

While your funds might be limited, you still need to decide what you can afford to spend. Why? Because if you don’t set a budget, two things will happen. Firstly, you’ll end up spending more money than you can actually afford. You’ll be tempted by that great advertising offer or just one more event. The people selling this to you rely on you not having a budget. Secondly, if you don’t know what you’re spending your money on, you can’t measure your marketing (and then you’ll be committing Massive Marketing Mistake Number Nine, which we’ll cover in another blog.)

How do you avoid Massive Marketing Mistake Number Six?

First, take a look at the list of potential marketing activities you’ve identified, after avoiding Massive Marketing Mistake Number Five, which you know will work for your business. Then go through the list and work out how much it will cost you to carry out each activity. Be realistic and look at what it could cost to have the work done professionally (such as building a website or writing content for your blog). If you’re going to do it yourself (and you really have the skills to do it) think about the cost in terms of your time.

Once you have an idea of what it will cost to do everything on your list, for a whole year, think about what you can really afford to spend. You could set a budget that is, for example, 10% of your turnover. Or you can look at what funds you have available, for example if you’re working part-time while also running your business, or if you have savings. Does either method give you enough to pay for everything that you want to do? Probably not, so be ruthless! Take off your list those activities which would be nice to have, but which are not essential and are too expensive right now.

One of our newer clients at Appletree set a budget for what he knew he could afford to spend on his marketing every month. He asked us what we could provide for him, for that budget. We worked out his goal – to attract more visitors to his website – in order to promote his existing services to new clients. We identified his ideal clients. They are owners of larger business who don’t spend time on Facebook or Twitter, looking for new suppliers. They need reassurance of quality services and expertise. They want to read quality ‘Thought Leadership’ articles that provide them with useful advice. Having done all this planning meant that we could advise our client on the best marketing to do, from the list of potential activities we created. Every month, we write a well-crafted blog for our client, which we post on his website. We also put Thought Leadership articles onto LinkedIn for him. We promote this content through LinkedIn, building up our client’s profile and helping him develop strong relationships with potential clients. The result? More traffic going to his website with more visits from new contacts – exactly what he wanted to achieve!

Do you have a budget for your marketing? How did you set it and what will you be spending it on? Leave a comment here to tell us about it, or get in touch if you need some help setting your budget.

Massive Marketing Mistake Number Seven is trying to do all your marketing yourself. In the next blog in the series we’ll look at why this isn’t a good idea and what you can do to avoid this mistake.