Are Your Marketing Expectations Aligned With Your Wallet?

Marketing budgets need to align with realistic expectations, starting with at least $500 monthly for small businesses and growing to 10% of your revenue goal. Strategic spending on tools like Canva Pro, targeted Facebook boosting, geofencing campaigns, and email marketing can maximize impact when combined with significant sweat equity.

• Facebook business page, Instagram, and Google Business Profile are free marketing tools that only cost time
• $500 monthly budget breakdown: Canva Pro ($50/year), strategic Facebook boosting ($100), geofencing ads ($150), email marketing platform ($50-150)
• Plan for 10-20 hours of monthly sweat equity creating content, networking, and updating profiles
• Calculate your ideal marketing budget as 10% of your annual revenue goal
• Consider the opportunity cost of DIY marketing versus hiring professionals as you grow

Chapters

• 0:53 Marketing Budget Expectations
• 3:37 Maximizing a $500 Monthly Budget
• 6:55 The 10% Rule for Marketing
• 9:12 Balancing Money and Sweat Equity

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:27

Hey guys, what's up? It's Shelby here with the Marketing Happy Hour podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in again. I hope you have learned a lot so far on this podcast, because I love sharing my skills as well as my knowledge that I have learned over the past 13 years in the marketing industry with you guys. Today's topic is really fun.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Well, it's more fun for me as an agency owner, because many people don't educate themselves about a marketing budget and what they should be spending their money on. Whenever I am in a consultation with a future client or a potential client, my number one question is always what is your budget? If I send them a proposal and it's outside of their budget, how do I know it's outside their budget? Because they don't give me one right. It's just like any kind of service or product that maybe you provide your customers and clients. You want to know what their budget is too, so that way you can offer a service that is equivalent to what they are expecting. Now, sometimes I'm never. You know, I may not ever fit in someone's budget.

Speaker 1: 1:30

I saw on Facebook yesterday that a woman was asking a group of professional women for a website developer and her budget was literally $200. That included developing the website. She said designing the website, writing the copy, and she wanted it to be professional. So, okay, that budget not very realistic. So let's talk about what a realistic budget is before we go into how I would spend a small business marketing budget every month. So let's start with expectations. What kind of expectations are you going to put on the person that you decide to hire for this, or even yourself when you're doing your marketing? Let's use that website as an example. If she's spending $200 on a website, she's not even going to get anything close to professional. If she decides to hire an agency, I would literally give her one hour of my time to inform her and educate her about creating her own website, rather than actually doing the work for her. I believe that she has completely disrespected the industry and coming at us like we don't. We're not like worth the time maybe, and I understand if that's her budget, but she needs to learn how to do it herself, because $200 is not even going to give her a one year of annual hosting fees on something simple like Wix or Weebly or whatever, even Squarespace. So her expectations are not aligned with the budget that she is placing out there.

Speaker 1: 3:07

So let's talk about if you had $500 a month. I believe that that is a good start. When you have a small business and you're just starting out, $500 a month can be used very well. It can also take a lot of your time, though. So if you're only spending $500 a month on advertising or marketing, you will have to put a lot of sweat equity into it, outside of just paying somebody else or all the fees and stuff that you have with the marketing.

Speaker 1: 3:41

So, if you have $500 a month, I'm going to give you a couple free things that you can do. Obviously, you can create a Facebook page, an Instagram page, as well as a Google business profile. All of that stuff is free and only costs you sweat equity. So when you have your Google business profile, you can go on there, you can update it, make sure that people are leaving your reviews. As you know, you can also do all of your Facebook content and posting, and all of that let's also talk about. With the Facebook stuff, you will have to have Canva, and I recommend Canva Pro. It's only $50 a year, but that does take up some of that marketing budget that you set aside. I also would recommend boosting two to three posts on Facebook and using like $100 to do that. So $50 a post if you did two Facebook posts. But they need to be very strategic. It needs to be something that brings in leads, so it could be a lead magnet, or it needs to be something that will take people to your website and book a service, so make sure that those are strategic ads. You can also do some geofencing ad campaigns, which is going to be hyperlocal. I would recommend doing $150 on that. So that's $250 so far, and then an email platform setup.

Speaker 1: 5:03

So I recommend doing email campaigns once a month minimum for your business. Now, the cost on this can vary because some CRMs are a little bit more expensive than others. So my CRM is $149 a month. I use a CRM called Leadly. Brian Pappalardo is the owner of that company and software engineer. He's amazing. If you want to reach out to me, you can. I can give you a referral link on that and it will give you a little bit of a discount. But I use his stuff for my CRM. I use it for my email campaigns, I use it for social media posting, so it does more than just emails. But you can always do something like MailChimp or Constant Contact. It's a little bit cheaper around $50 a month to be able to send out those emails and make sure that you are staying the forefront of the mind of your client.

Speaker 1: 5:58

I also recommend doing a professional photo shoot. This means getting a headshot. This means getting stuff for your content for Facebook. It could be products, it could be all of that stuff. So everything I just listed would be about $500 a month, and you would have to pair that, though, with a lot of sweat equity. So I would recommend about 10 to 20 hours in that month that you are writing blog posts, that you are updating your Google business profile, you're recording reels, you're taking photos of your work, you are getting out networking to people because that's another free thing that you can do. You're actually posting content that is educational, so you're creating that content in advance, while maybe you're a little bit slower at the beginning, but $500 a month doesn't seem like it goes very far, right? You're like man, that just doesn't seem like a lot of things that you can do for $500. And that's because it's really not.

Speaker 1: 6:57

We want to make sure that we have, when we're starting our business, that we have an idea in our head like, okay, I need to increase this budget to $500 or I need to increase this budget to $5,000. I always recommend that whatever your revenue goal is for the end of the year, 10% of that needs to be spent on marketing. So I have goals of $250,000, $300,000 a year to make in revenue, so that means I need to spend at least $30,000 in marketing. And for me that includes geofencing, that includes emails, my CRMs, that includes boosted posts. It also includes any kind of event that I want to sponsor or go to or spend money at. So that kind of stuff is what I look at when I'm marketing business to business.

Speaker 1: 7:50

And if you're marketing business to customer or business to business, then that stuff can also be fit into your marketing budget as well. So what is your goal at the end of the year? And then let's go back 10% of that and that's your marketing budget annually. Then you take that and you divide it by 12. That becomes monthly. Then you can be like, okay, at the beginning of the year, let's talk this month, this month, this month. These are the things that I want to do. I want to make sure that I put my money towards this and then you can be strategic.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Towards the end of the year, if you need extra tax write-offs or if you need to do something else to make sure that your income is a little bit less than what you did so you don't have to pay as many taxes, then your CPA and your bookkeeper can help you out with that kind of stuff as well. But remember, when we start out with that small budget, even if it's less than $500 a month, you are going to be putting in a lot of sweat equity with that, and so that right there costs you money too. If you're like, oh, I can do $500 and spend 20 hours a month on social media posts or content or something like that, and really, if you think about it at 20 hours, what are you actually? What could you make in 20 hours? Like if what do you get paid an hour? And what can you get paid for 20 hours of your work?

Speaker 1: 9:06

If you could hire this stuff out and that's a goal too for small businesses If you start with your marketing now and then you build up to that point three to six months later maybe, or even a year, in that you can hire an agency to help with your marketing. So I hope this kind of educated you a little bit about things that you can do with a $500 budget. We were talking about geofencing, boosting posts on Facebook, email platform setup, doing some professional photos, as well as downloading Canva, and making sure that when we are doing this, we are pairing it with sweat equity and creating strategy to make sure that in a year, we can hire someone to do this for us.