MBA1962 When & How to Hire for Marketing + Free Ride Friday

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The past 180 days ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. No fluff, just the good stuff every single day with our 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and and today's episode is Free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Friday, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. All you gotta do is leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday, like today to see if you won. It's that simple. In today's episode you will learn when and how to hire for marketing. In my experience, marketing is one of those things that most entrepreneurs, especially new ones, do not spend nearly enough on. Most highly successful small and large businesses are able to grow and scale because they double down on their marketing. But you might be thinking, Omar, I'm not sure when I can afford it. How do I make my first hire? Where do I invest my dollars when it comes to marketing? How much should I be spending? We're going to get into all those details today. I'm going to share with you some of the first hires we made when it came to the marketing team and as our company grew where we continue to invest and spend money on Listen. You can have a fantastic product, a great service, but if nobody knows about it, no one will buy. And without buyers, you don't have a business. So let's jumpstart Your marketing in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation Fees. I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxt and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days.

We'Re going to split today's episode into two parts. The when and the how. Many people ask me. Omar, I know marketing is important. I know I should be spending on marketing, but I have a very tight budget. I don't know when I should start hiring for marketing. Getting some marketing help. This is very, very common, especially if you're a solopreneur and it's a tough one because it's one of those what came first, the chicken or the egg? You need marketing so you can get customers so you can get revenue. But you need revenue to spend on marketing, right? First, I want to start with the premise of what type of hire is a marketing hire? There are different types of hires in your team. Some hires will free up your time, some hires will improve your product, some hires will improve your customer retention or service. And some hires will directly impact your revenue. And marketing is one of them. Marketing and sales are the two departments where you really can't overspend. This is why large corporations spend millions upon millions of dollars on marketing like super bowl ads. Why would a company do that? Well, because most effective marketing initiatives or efforts will pay off, will get them a customer at least and pay for itself and of course ideally make more than just its cost. So you need to start thinking about hiring for marketing as an investment. This is actually a very short term investment, meaning that the efforts that your hire is going to make should result in increase in revenue. You should really actually tie their responsibilities to that metric. And when you think about that, it's kind of like you can't afford not hiring a marketer or somebody that can help you with your marketing. So in my personal opinion, when it comes to your business, if you have a working product or service, the first dollar that you make in profit should go to marketing. Because if you have an Existing product or service that's working, that is fulfilling on its promise. The next step is getting people to buy it, is getting people to be aware of it, to get customers. And that should be your main focus. So if you have a business up and running and it's profitable, you're already kind of too late. But you should definitely by now start hiring for marketing. We'll talk about what are these hires, what do they look like, where to find them. Now, if you have the budget, even if you're not profitable yet, even if you're just even pre launch, if you have the budget for it, you can't go wrong with hiring somebody to help you market because they're going to help you with that launch, help you with that awareness, help you get established in your marketplace. Now a lot of people think they need to spend, you know, thousands upon thousands of dollars a month for marketing or marketing hire. You don't need to start there, you could start with a few hundred dollars a month. Freelancers, consultants, and they're everywhere on upwork, on fiverr, people that can do tasks for you, projects for you. For example. One of the first hires that we made in our company and I think is one of the first things you should focus on, is somebody that's going to help you with your marketing on your own website where your business is taking place. Why? Because there is no use in running ads to your website if your website doesn't convert, if your website is not optimized, if it's not marketing your product or service properly. So if you don't come from a marketing background or you're not into marketing as the founder, then you should definitely find somebody that's going to help you refine your copy, a copywriter, refine your messaging, refine your branding so that when somebody does get to your website, it's an easy conversion. People feel welcome, people know what you're about, people understand what you offer, they know how to get started, all that kind of stuff. So even just hiring a freelance copywriter that's specialized in sales copy to do an audit on your website and give you some suggestions on like a word doc, and then you can just make the edits that this is a huge investment, you can easily do this for $500, even less in some cases if you don't have that many pages in your website. If you're just maybe pre launched and you have a landing page, one page, a homepage, this might cost you a couple hundred bucks. Again, using sites like Upwork, like Freelancer.com like Fiverr, this is a fantastic investment because now that your site's in order and that your copy is, is optimized, you can now rest assure that any marketing efforts with social media, with ads, with affiliate marketing, with podcasting, with whatever will be optimized will be not a waste of money. Like you're not throwing money down the drain. So that would be my first hire is to get your copy, your marketing copy all sorted out. Now you can even extrapolate this beyond your website, like your social profiles, like your email marketing, your autoresponders, getting somebody to audit that and rewrite it for you. And guess what? If one freelancer doesn't work, try another. And this is actually a good exercise because you're working on small little projects that don't cost you an arm and a leg. But in the process, you're finding somebody you enjoy working with that actually understands your brand, understands your voice and can deliver on the job. And eventually what you can do is cultivate that relationship and then at some point offer them a full time job or a part time job and work for you for an extended period of time to work for you on larger projects, things like that. If you're looking, let's say, to grow your email list, well, you're going to need some sort of lead magnet, right? So maybe getting somebody to write you an ebook, or getting somebody to write you a PDF checklist or some sort of infographic. There are plenty of designers that can help you out with that. This again is a small project you can hire for. And remember I said you should see marketing as an investment. Well, you should do the same thing with this hire. So you're saying, okay, I'm going to hire somebody who's going to edit all my onboarding emails for any new leads. In these emails, I tell people what I do, I suggest what their next steps are. I even make an offer to one of my products or services. Maybe right now you are converting at 1%, meaning for every hundred people that read your email, 1% becomes a customer. If you can get somebody to increase that conversion rate to take it to 2 or 3%, how much money would that make you on a regular basis every year? How much money are you investing to just get that fixed and get that rewritten? What percentage of profit is that? So see this as a business transaction and as a solid investment, project by project and basically a full time salary is that, but just kind of extended. You're paying somebody every single month to produce certain amount of work, every single month. How much value are they adding to the company and generating how much revenue for you and your business after you have worked on or improved your website, your email, your messages, your social media, where people find you, where people actually interact with you, you've optimized your copy, you've optimized your images or your opt ins or your lead magnets like we mentioned, the next step I would say is invest in getting somebody to help you bring in new customers. Now this could take different forms. This could be somebody who can help you with getting affiliates to promote your website. You can get somebody to create content to bring in customers. Like they can create videos for you and create a YouTube channel for your company. And through those videos they're bringing in new leads. This could be somebody who's running your paid advertising campaigns, somebody who's an expert at Facebook or Google Ads. Again, you don't need to invest a lot of money. Just see this as a project. Say hey, I need somebody to do xyz. So for example, let's say you want to start running some Facebook ads and you want to invest in that, but you need somebody to be able to be an expert to run these ads for you and optimize them as you go along. Now there are large marketing firms that charge quite a lot of money every single month. And they will charge you even more the more you spend on marketing. Meaning that you know, a lot of these rates are based on your marketing spend. So if you spend $10,000 on ads, they'll charge you more than if you spent 5,000 dol on ads. So it can get quite expensive. But it doesn't have to be that way. There's a lot of different services that will help you get started with paid advertising, especially if you have a smaller budget. Let's say you're spending $1,000 on paid ads every single month. If this is the case, I recommend going to adespresso. Adespresso is actually an app that helps you optimize your ads if you want to run yourself. But they also have a service which they will take care of it for you. And some of their services are between 200 to $500. Now you might be saying, oh, I want to spend $500 to spend $1,000 on ads. That seems like a lot of money. Yes, but they're going to make sure that thousand dollar in spend actually gets you customers versus you wasting all your money. That thousand dollars. Right, because you don't know what you're doing because you're not an expert at ads. It's like flushing $1,000 down the toilet versus getting maybe a 200% ROI again. See, as a project I'm going to run ads for a month or for six weeks. I'm going to spend this much money for the service. How many new customers will that equal? How much revenue would that mean for you?

Gas, snacks, tolls? This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxed data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number 31st month and 25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days.

To wrap up today's lesson, I highly recommend that you see each marketing activity as a project and hire for that project, set a budget for that project. Go to websites like I mentioned, like Upwork, Freelancer, Fiverr. These sites are specialized in project work and gig work. Put up a job post, describe exactly what you want to get done and then when you see candidates applying, take a look at their work. Take a look at their experiences, some of their things that are in their portfolio. Have they done or accomplished similar tasks, similar projects in the past? If they haven't, reach out and ask them, hey, saw you applied for the job. Can you show me some examples that are similar to the project I want to get done? And in project work you can go on a 5050 basis, meaning you pay 50% up front so they can start the project and then 50% upon completion. So there's two milestones. This shows that you have enough trust in them based on their experience to hire them and pay them. But at the same time they don't get the rest of the agreed amount until after they deliver the final product or the final result of the project. Now after you've done a few projects, you might consider hiring them full time, make them an offer. Or maybe you'll hire them part time but work directly with you. And when it comes to hiring professionals in marketing, in sales, in writing, in pretty much anything, you get what you pay for. I actually highly recommend you choose people with a higher hourly rate or project rate. Why? Because they're actually going to get it done better and faster. People that know their stuff that are worth a higher rate, they know it and they're going to be able to pull off what you want with less headaches, with less back and forth, with more efficiency and better results. So don't go cheap, okay? Don't try to find the diamond in the rough or the cheapest person that can do it. Find somebody who's experienced that maybe is charging a little bit more. But trust me, you're going to get a better roi. Thanks so much for listening to the hundred dollar MBA show. But today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's get see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Zach Bellhat. Zach says simple, rich and laser focused. Five stars. Thank you very much for your efforts. Omar and his team are number one on my top five podcasts. I listen to three to five lessons a day whenever I'm driving and I absolutely learn a lot. 10 minutes. Quick, simple and very targeted lessons. Thanks again guys. Keep up the great work. Well, thank you Zach. Really appreciate the review. You are a free AT Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so we can hook you up with the free ride to the Automated Webinar challenge, our full 30 day course on how to build your own automated webinar system to automate your leads and sales so that you can grow your business. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday just like today to see if you won. It's that simple. Thank you so much for listening. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Every time I looked at how much I was spending on marketing and re evaluated, I realized I need to spend more. I need to spend more. I need to spend more. Why? Because the more I smartly spend on marketing and invest in marketing, the more my business grows, the more people know about my company, the more people know about my products and services, the more I'm able to grow and hire more people and improve my product. It's one of the best investments you can make in your business if you're hiring and working with professionals. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check in on Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got 1 line of 5G for just 25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile just.

Bring your number 31st month and 25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days.