Business owners waste money on marketing driven by fear instead of data. Set a budget of 3-10% of revenue, track what works, and scale it. A $3,000 Yelp ad spend that brought in $10,000 in revenue shows how measurement kills anxiety.
If the plan is keep spending on marketing so that you don't lose, you're managed by anxiety, not data. We're on a call last week, and the owner said, oh, I just don't want to stop spending because I don't want to go dark, but I don't really know if it's working. He's leading out of anxiety that he thinks that if he just stops spending, then he's going to lose all this visibility and all these leads, when really he needs to come from a place of being proactive and offense, not defense. And the way that you get offensive is that you have data. When you know the numbers and you know the data, then you feel very confident in your decisions. The problem is that people are operating from gut feeling on, should I spend money on marketing? They're looking at their bank account saying, okay, I got $5,000. Let me just go throw it to the Google gods. Maybe they'll bless me with some leads. That's not how you do it. You come up with a marketing budget that's 3 to 10% of your revenue. Then each month you have a budget that you can allocate. Hire a great marketing company, go and spend money on these different ad platforms, build a B2B partnership where you can get referral income coming in. Essentially, you need to have a system for the money. Once you figure out, I'm going to deploy this money on a monthly basis, then if you're spending money on ad platforms, you dial it all in. I'm going to spend $3,000 on Yelp ads. Each month I spent $3,000. I got this many leads, and that turned into $10,000. That's a 3 extra turn. Let me do more of that. Once you have the data, you can make good decisions and you can feel confident in the decisions. So that way you don't have anxiety that I'm just throwing money out there and it's going to help me grow my business.
