How much does it cost?

Chapters

• 0:00 Marketing Budgeting and Strategy Discussion
• 10:36 Film Industry's Financial Challenges
• 16:39 Podcast Recap and Anniversary Celebration

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the NerdRamp Podcast where we're going to talk about how much does it cost, what is the it Up in? To this episode of the NerdBrand Podcast where we're going to talk about how much does it cost and what is the it. You may notice that I am alone today on this podcast because it is Christmas week. Jacob is with family and with his in-laws, so that's called being a good husband. Jonathan and Mitch are out with families as well, and I am alone in my basement. Anyways, we'll get along fine, I'm sure, if you enjoy listening. So we're going to talk about how much does it cost. We get asked a lot.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Let's's start with marketing, because everybody's just like look, obviously you guys, that's what you do, marketing, right? Yeah, um, what we do, we start with the branding strategy, consulting. You know you need a website. Yes, we'll take care of it. Um, hopefully it's a good one, because you start doing paid ad campaigns. Oh my, does that reveal if it's a good or bad website? Trust us, and if not, you can always contact us and we will show you.

Speaker 1: 1:32

But let's start off by researching your industry. That should be your first goal really, to typically try to understand. Who are you? What are you doing? This is not a why question For a while and you can go to our website and look at our brand philosophy of the why, how, what it's based off of Simon Sinek, and that's not this question, though. This is here is like what do you do? Are you a baker? Are you a plumber? Are you in B2C, b2b, d2c, so what are you? So let's talk about canada, eh, because you know lately, apparently, if that's going to be a 51st state, why not? Seems funny, um, but a common rule of thumb anyways, regardless of what country. Uh, b2b companies should spend between two to five percent of their revenue on marketing.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Now I would argue and say that make sure that, if you really, really really can narrow it down, look at your profit margin and spend a percentage of that. You can also go to nerdbrainagencycom slash marketing hyphen calculator and you can also see some budgets and you can determine yours. If you would like, I'll put that URL in the at the end of the show here and I'll share it on social media. Put that URL at the end of the show here and I'll share it on social media. But for B2C companies that's going to be a lot higher because you're trying to reach customers. So you're going to be about between 5 and 10.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Now some of you may think well, that's outrageous, jason, that's just not realistic. Actually, if you look at your return on your ad spend and what you're doing, it actually quite is. I would argue that that is actually right and you should probably examine what you're currently doing, what tactics you're doing, and if you're really not sure, we're happy to look at it for you for free, for an hour, and sit with you and kind of go over those things, go over what the return rates are and figure out if it's actually working or not. I mean, there's always that question of where does my money go when I spend it on marketing. Well, if you're not tracking attribution, if you're not looking at, basically, where the traffic is coming from to get to the place that you want people to see, to buy, to make a decision, and whether or not, and how they're exiting, there's a whole flow to understand. So we can narrow the budget, though, with understanding the first thing, and that is what you do your industry. So, online marketing.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Let's look at online marketing Canada. I've got some things here in front of me A website less than $2 million in annual sales. Some companies can spend almost $20,000 on a website and this is over three years. Okay, so sometimes $2 million to $10 million annual sales. They're closer to 40,000 on a flight and a lot of people find those numbers crazy. But you got to remember if your annual cash flow well, if your monthly cash flow, if you're rolling over month to month, you know 30,000 in billing and you spend 3,000 a month in marketing. So what are you trying to do? What is the billing coming from? What are you currently billing to justify that $3,000? So, if not, that's where you need to start looking at new markets, new verticals, all of that. Our marketing team would be happy to talk with you about it, because online marketing for businesses less than $2 million in annual sales is around $15,000. Again, over three years, and $2 to $10 is closer to that $40,000. So you can spend between $30,000 to $75,000 over three years on marketing.

Speaker 1: 5:01

But it really comes down to what are you getting in return for that? So the industry you're in is where you have to start, because these numbers don't matter if you don't really know your industry and people that are in like the same industry as you, obviously, and what's going on and how that's working. So there is way you have to do a lot of research, is my point. The next thing you have to figure out is your goals, like what goals do you want If you can't name a goal and if your goal is philosophical, like I just want people to know my name more, well, that's hard because that's brand awareness. It will require multiple tactics and including a paid ad strategy. It will require multiple tactics and including a paid ad strategy. So when you need to benchmark to be able to know when have you reached that point of being recognized and it can't be sometimes it can't be you.

Speaker 1: 5:57

Sometimes you have to look at online metrics like how many views is your business page getting? How many new views versus returns, how many? How's your website performance doing? How's the traffic on that going? What pages are they going to? How long are they there? If they're on a page for a long time, they could be finding what they want or maybe not at all. Like there's. There's so many granular ways to measure um activity.

Speaker 1: 6:25

Saying I want brand awareness overall Isn't really. It's not a very strong uh metric. Uh, at least not one that we want to try to like continuously do, because you're talking about people seeing something more than once and remembering it takes a lot of money to do that. A lot of budget, a lot of a lot of creativity goes into that for that kind of advertising. So you know, um, unless you just want to make some really, really outlandish mistakes, I guess, or decisions, depending on your point of view, um, you know, for example, like all of the noise that Jaguar created versus, I guess you could say, others that tried to do this and didn't really go very far or very well. So, not all news is good news here.

Speaker 1: 7:11

But you know, marketing is just a complex thing to answer. When somebody says how much does it cost, when somebody says how much does it cost, starting at how much really just avoids, it's an indication that there's something else wrong in the business. Unless you can come and say this is the things that I've done, this is what I hope to achieve. How much would it cost to increase this by this factor? Now, that would be a way to approach the question. I believe in how much? Because now you're asking the professional an open-ended scenario type question, because if you just say like, well, I'm just looking to spend $500 a month, well, you're probably not going to get very far with that, depending on the tactic you're trying to do. But if you're doing just one channel tactic, whatever, then, yeah, it's going to be a lot, way more difficult for you.

Speaker 1: 8:08

So we always want to talk in these abstract terms and you'll hear it depends a lot, because most costs to any marketing is going to cost you between $1,500 to $10,000 a month, and that's why it's so broad. What is in that? Well, your business is for you, your strategy is for you. We don't want you sounding like someone else. We're selling you our brains, who we are as nerds. We like the data, we like to craft things that we know will resonate with the audience. So you're buying us as much as Google ads or Facebook ads or whatever you have in your mind, and so we don't really want people to hone in on that. So we avoid those conversations a lot because over the five years we've been in business and over the 20 years I've done this, it's been the same conversations over and over about how much, and you know there's no answer. If there hasn't been in 20 years, you're not going to have it. If there hasn't been in five years, you're not going to have one.

Speaker 1: 9:10

Search engine optimization comes up a lot. Well, what's included? Well, again, this is another $1,500 to $5,000 a month estimated cost. You know you've got keyword research, on-page optimization, analytics, setup, reporting, copy additions and updates, web page updates, technical SEO updates, link building from external sites buzzword, buzzword, buzzword, but all true words. But how they're applied and what order they're applied in really will matter on maximizing that budget to get you a return, and so that's something that we try to focus on. So that'd be marketing and what I could say about that. So a lot of times we'll look at the number of pages you have currently on your website. I've had people that come to us with like 12 pages. Cool, we can definitely budget that, because I get a photographer, a copywriter, designer, have a creative director to manage it and project manager, account manager on board. That's a lot of people. So it's going to cost a lot more than just getting a site and a template. Enemy keywords you want to target, well, that's that's copywriters going to know that, because how much site copy do you need is determined, and also how competitive your industry is too. That really, really, really matters because, again, knowing the industry. Knowing the audience is really the one of the top things that need to be considered before doing a project like that, even if you're making a commercial. So that's pretty much that.

Speaker 1: 10:36

Um, I learned watching the movie industry as nerds, nerd brand you know it's branding in the nerd culture we're seeing more and more movies start to be distributed. Um, I I don't know when the last time I went. I think the last time I went to the movie theater was in 2019. That's before the pandemic. I used to go on Sunday. It's one of the things I like to do, is kind of my church and, uh, before the pandemic, I used to go on Sunday. It's one of the things I like to do, it's kind of my church and because it's just very quiet. Maybe one other person is in the auditorium at like around noon, one o'clock, so but lately there's just not been anything. I watched for the Christmas season Red One. I am sorry. I am sorry and I enjoy Dwayne.

Speaker 1: 11:22

The Rock Johnson, I think, has hit his peak. It's one of those movies that I can't really tell you anything that, off the top of my head, sticks out about it, other than it's just a bunch of events and things that happened. That didn't make too much sense. And you know, santa Claus is played by oh, I can't remember the actor's name, but he played Commissioner Gordon in Batman v Superman, in the Zack Snyder universe, and so he himself has these guns. And in the film there's a scene where they're in a gym and he's pumping iron and he's working out and he's bench pressing what looks like 500 pounds or something. Because you know why not? He's Santa Claus. I've never thought of Santa Claus as a bodybuilder and you know, the Rock is his spotter and his chief bodyguard. It's very convoluted in that way, bodyguard, it's very convoluted in that way. And so clearly there's a movie that's made for Dwayne, the Rock Johnson, and not the audience, to buy into, to watch, and it was, I believe, streaming only, but then they threw it out in the theaters.

Speaker 1: 12:38

Now, I think the numbers on this thing it costs $250 million to make this film. So if you have Netflix or Amazon Prime or Paramount Plus one of those has the streaming of the red one on it You're watching a $250 million production. Think about that. Movies need to make three times the money back to get profit. So you're talking about a film that now has to make somewhere around 600 to 700 million dollars. Don't see that happening. So how much does it cost to make a film? Well, way more than it should. Now I don't have a guest with me that can talk about the film industry and why it would be expensive. I would love to have one, because $200 million was the average Marvel film pre-Endgame, and so there was only a couple others that I can think of, like Shang-Chi, that was $150 million, but they got a huge tax break by Australia. And Black Widow was another one that was $120 million. Maybe it was under the $200 million mark. Only. The Avenger movies were $500 million to produce and make. Now these are numbers that do not count.

Speaker 1: 13:52

Marketing you have to remember that these films require marketing and the marketing has to be intense and ongoing for quite a while. So you're looking at, say, a $250 million production. They probably, for Red One, spent around $120 million on marketing. That's a realistic number. So you start to have to take a look at it and go how did they make then? How would they double their money to make $700 plus million to get the film to be profitable? I mean, dwayne the Rock Johnson was $50 million for a salary for that film.

Speaker 1: 14:28

So there's costs in everything to understand and, like I said, it kind of goes back to the audience. Who are you making this film for? What are you doing this for? What is this campaign designed for that you want to send out into the world and have people contact you for xyz? These are important questions. Now, illustrate the film industry, because it's a really easy one to kind of look at. You can actually go see the film and then, after listening to this podcast, of course, and then kind of say to yourself you know, I I don't have $3,000 a month. I can pay you nerds to help me, but I have a little less. What is it that you can do with this amount of money if I was to bring this to the table? That's a perfectly legitimate question and one we love. You are open-minded and it is one that we are happy to answer and resolve.

Speaker 1: 15:21

I hope 2025 will be a very, very blessed and profitable year for everybody. I think that we've all been just getting by since 2020, since the pandemic, and I do hope that everything that is coming is success and well wishes and health for everyone, just in order for all of us to have a reprieve from the darkness that we've all kind of some of us have felt we've been in, or the fogginess of it, because I feel like that the moment that we can get our minds out of that, we will become motivated again and positive and start to really focus on what it is we're trying to accomplish, because when you do that, you have clarity. People see that clarity and that clarity brings trust that you are a source, a person that in a business that can solve the problem that they have. And now you're, instead of addressing and educating people about what you do, you're attracting an audience that already knows what you do. You just have to prove to them through your marketing strategies, your case studies, your brand and its message, that you know how to do what you do and you are the best at it.

Speaker 1: 16:39

Anyways, that's for this episode of the NerdBrand podcast. Hope you enjoyed it. We will be back to our normally scheduled programming next week. It will be our New Year's episode because it will be the first episode of the New Year number 228, I think and NerdBrand will be five years old come February. So if anybody wants to buy us a pizza, please do. We'll tell you where to send the pizza to if you want to have it delivered. But other than that, we want to thank you for listening and we want you to remember to tune in next week and remember keep your nerd brain strong.