MBA1370 Q&A Wednesday: What should I spend my marketing budget on?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $1 RMBA show. Because when your business gets harder, you need to get better. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and a Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar mba.net Today's question is from Jack and Jack asks what do I spend my marketing budget on? Great question Jack. And first of all, it's a good thing you have a marketing budget. Many small businesses neglect marketing as one of the core expenses they should have. Now what to do with that money? What to do with the money you're willing to spend on marketing is another matter. We got to make sure that whatever we spend on we get a return on investment. Something that can help your business not only in the short term but in the long term as well. There's so many ways you can spend those dollars. But in today's episode I'm going to share with you in what steps, in what priority you should be Spending your marketing dollars on. If you're a huge company like Apple worth a trillion dollars, throwing a couple ads during the super bowl is a no brainer. But for a small business, we gotta be Pennywise, we gotta be a little bit more strategic. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Jack asks, what do I spend my marketing budget on? Let's get into it in today's episode. For the sake of today's episode, I'm going to use an example. Let's say you run a business that sells online courses and you have a budget of $5,000 to spend every month on marketing. Again, this is just an example. You may have more to spend on marketing or less. The number doesn't really matter. The priority of where we spend the money is really what we're going to get into. So the first place I would invest any marketing dollars on, and this may come as a surprise to many of you, but I would spend the money on great talent. You as the leader of the business, you might help with marketing, you might be the face of the business, you might even do some of the videos. But you need somebody that is in charge of your marketing, even if that person is part time, even if they're a freelancer. You need somebody to come up with a marketing strategy for your business. Somebody that's going to research your company, understand your customers, understand your competitors, understand the landscape you're in, the market you're in, and what you want to achieve. Now for us at Webinar Ninja, we've had consultants work with us on marketing plans, on strategies on particular hacks and growth engines. But recently we hired a full time marketing sale specialists and kind of cut out the agencies because we found that it's good to have somebody that is responsible for everything marketing in your business. This is what we learned the hard way. Now if you don't want to spend, you know, for example in this example, all 5,000 on a salary, you can always hire somebody again part time, 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week. But they are the go to person. Why do I think you should spend money on this? Well, your strategy is actually more important than the hacks that you do. Throwing a bunch of money on Facebook ads or, or Google Ads or sponsorships with no real game plan or intention or how it feeds towards your goals is really like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. And that's really not a good use of your money. Even if you hired somebody just to give you a marketing plan for your Business does all the research for you that is immensely helpful so you can implement from that marketing plan. So the first thing I would invest in is somebody to help you with your marketing and your overall strategy for your business. So now you have a game plan and you have somebody who's gonna help you implement that game plan. A good investment are some marketing tools, marketing tools like today's sponsor, mailchimp, for example, that can help you automate your email marketing. It's a very low cost, low barrier of entry, type of tool, mailchimp or otherwise. But the time you're gonna save and the returns you're gonna get for that investment are going to be tenfold. These tools can be like email marketing. It could be like chat software on your website, like Intercom. It could be a webinar software, Shameless plug, Webinar ninja, right? It could be a tool to help you run better ads like Ad Espresso. It could be like a sales page creator or a plugin for your website. These are tools that are going to save you time and allow you to implement your action plans in a more efficient way rather than hiring out and getting a custom job. For most, their tools are not going to be too expensive. They'll spend maybe 3 to 4 to $500 a month on their tools in total. Now, I know you're thinking, Omar, what about the actual marketing channels I need to reach people? Okay, I get it. Good talent, good tools. Where would I spend my money to run some ads? And I wish I can give you a straight answer, but I'll give you some general recommendations because it depends on your market, depends on who your audience is. If your audience is 30 and above, then Facebook and Instagram are a great place to advertise. If they're under 30, it might not be, but in my experience, Facebook ads really get you a pretty solid return on investment and also depends on the price of your product. If you sell a $9 product, it's going to be hard for you to get a really good return on investment because the cost per acquisition cost of getting a customer via an ad might be more than $9. But if you have a product that's 30, 40, 50 and above, then you can reasonably get your cost per acquisition at about 50% of the price or the revenue you're going to get from your product. Especially if you have a reoccurring product where once you gain that customer, they're going to be paying month over month. So you're willing to pay for, let's say, the cost of one month to get them to pay month over month. So Facebook ads. And when I say Facebook ads, I also include Instagram ads because, you know, Facebook owns Instagram. And when you run ads via Facebook, you have that option of saying, do you want to run this ad on Instagram as well? This is a very, very popular choice for many people because it's proven to get return on investment for people. Now it is getting more expensive every year because the market's getting saturated. So you got to be a little bit more clever with your actual ads, your actual ad copy and imaging and all that kind of stuff. The other thing is, if you don't know what you're doing, you, you can lose a lot of money. And that's where the talent comes in. You need somebody who has done this over and over again before in the past and can get you a return on investment. Another honorable mention is LinkedIn ads. I've been getting a lot of good feedback from people saying that they're getting a lot of results from LinkedIn. Especially if your product or your service caters to businesses, to professionals, it's going to be higher cost per acquisition, but it's going to be a higher quality customer, somebody who's a buyer. My third tip when it comes to spending your marketing dollars, believe it or not, has nothing to do with marketing at all. It has to do with customer success. Once you have your customer, if they cancel, if they ask for a refund, if they're no longer your customer and never buy from you again after that first transaction, then your marketing dollars are being wasted. What you want to do is invest in getting a customer with your marketing dollars and keep them for as long as possible, for life if possible. And the way to do that is to make sure they're successful. Make sure that you have some sort of customer success plan. How are you going to keep your customers happy? How are you going to make sure that they're onboarded properly? How are you going to make sure they get the most out of your product? That they have their answers to their questions given to them in a timely manner? You want to make sure the sale sticks. Don't just worry about getting in the customers. Make sure you keep them, you retain them. There's a lot of ways you could do this. Whether it's an onboarding phone call, whether it's a personalized email or a personalized video. You can shoot ongoing kind of customer success calls or chats. You can run a group webinar with all your new customers, answering any questions. And demoing the product for them. You want to make sure they feel supported and they get the most out of your product and they use it. You want them to get a win so they can continue to become loyal customers or be loyal customers. I should say so. Number one, hire great talent that can help you with your strategy and implementation. Number two marketing tools that will help you automate things and get a return on investment with your implementation. Number three Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn ads have been shown to get results but you got to see your own market. These are just my own recommendations. And number four Customer success. Making sure that the sale sticks and your customers are successful with your product or service.

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One of the things that took me a while to understand is that marketing is not something that you just do on repeat. It's not something that you just sit there and you spend money on it and you know that's it. I know my system and I just let it go on autopilot. No, marketing is about experimentation. You have to experiment what works, what doesn't. If it does work, double down. It may not work forever. So you have to change and modify and improve upon it. You got to try new channels. You got to try new platforms. What you're trying to do here with your marketing is not be undefeated. You know, like everything you try is going to work. That's not going to happen. What you want to do is you want to try enough so you actually win more than you lose. So it's okay. If you try 10 things and only seven of them are successful, that's more advantageous for your business. That's better for your business than trying two things, and two things are successful. Going 2 and O, for example. It's about experimentation and making sure you're up to speed and up to date with what's going on in your marketplace. Jack, I hope that answers your question here on Q and A Wednesday. If you have a question that you want to ask, email me over@omar00mba.net I would love to help out and answer your question right here on the show. If you love the show, leave us an iTunes rating and review right now. We read every single review. And when you leave us a review, you enter our weekly random draw to win a lifetime membership to one of our courses. It's what we call free ride Friday. Just listen on Friday to see if you won't. It's that simple. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Marketing is not an afterthought. It takes a lot of planning and thinking and experimentation and trial and error and all this stuff. It's a reason why it's a specialty. It's a career in itself. And that's why I stress in the beginning to have that strategy in place so you know what you're doing and how it will improve your business specifically. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.