My answer to a LinkedIn question from Leanne Smith
Short on money? Substitute time. For most of us small-biz types, marketing is time intensive. So you’d better have a time budget plus a money budget.
Where do you get the biggest bang for your buck? or for your hour? List all the things you do for marketing down one column. Ads, press releases, networking lunches, social media, taking a prospect for coffee, etc. Whatever you spend money or time on related to marketing.
In other columns, list for each of these things:
— How much money you spend on this in a year
— How much time you spend on this in a year (Multiply by what an hour of your time is worth.)
— What results you’ve gotten: contacts, prospects, customers, nibbles, “laters”, etc.
— How much revenue this has brought in over the past year
Now you rate all these things you do, and compare them. What’s paying off? What isn’t? How could you improve the payback from any of these?
I hereby give you permission to STOP DOING THE THINGS THAT DON’T WORK! Networking groups? Yellow page ads? Online directories? Feh.
Do more of what works, and tweak it so it works better.
If your marketing pays off, brings in customers, and boosts your revenue and profit, then you won’t be on such a tight budget.
But beware! Marketing is like a yacht. If you’re around boats, you’ve probably heard people say, “A yacht is a hole in the water that you throw money into!” Marketing is the same way. There’s no end of ways you can spend money on marketing, and most of them don’t pay off.
