When you’re a small business owner, the idea of spending thousands on marketing campaigns to potentially bring in only a handful of new customers is really not an attractive prospect at all. In fact, it’s the kind of business decision you’ve been avoiding like the plague.
You just don’t have the capital, to begin with, nor do you want to spend more money than you really have on a marketing effort that has no guarantee of a good ROI.
And that’s the same boat that a lot of small business owners are in right now. Marketing feels like a monolith, and an expensive one at that. You don’t want to be forking out for the kind of ‘exposure’ that just isn’t promised to begin with.
But at the same time, your business needs to get the word out. You need the chance to build brand recognition. And ultimately, you do need a marketing strategy that’s going to bring steady growth your way.
How can you make it all happen without breaking the bank? By understanding what needs to really go into your marketing budget and why. Here’s what you should focus on, as a small business with a small budget and a big need to become more visible.
At This Point in Time, You’re Going to Be Spending More
When you’re just starting out with a proper marketing drive, there’s a lot of money you’re going to be putting down to try and get things going.
Indeed, it’s very common for small businesses with no real marketing setup to leverage around 20% of their annual revenue on trying to achieve brand recognition.
But if you’re bringing in less than $100k per year, that’s quite a lot of cash going into the marketing pot.
And while a bigger business is able to spend more on their marketing, it doesn’t represent such a significant portion of their income. You’ve got less to spend, and less to allocate in the first place.
And that’s what makes putting together an actionable budget such a difficult thing.
Customers Are Going to Be at Different Stages in Their Buying Journey
Some will not quite know what they want just yet, while others will have a clear idea and just need to know where to go to find out.
You need to catch them at both points (and at every point in between too).
When you want to create a marketing budget that’ll work out, you need to account for these different stages and portion your resources accordingly.
Both Long and Short Term Marketing Methods
You’re going to need both to stand out online, as they target customers at different points in the sales funnel, and generally just complement each other underneath the same marketing umbrella.
But those aren’t the only benefits. When you use both long and short term marketing methods, you’re going to bring in an ongoing ROI that pays both upfront and in the future.
And when you’ve got all the bases covered, that’s the best guarantee of a profit that you can get as a small business.
As such, here are some of the most common short and long term marketing methods that tend to pay out best when you’ve created a budget for both sides.
PPC
Pay per click ads tend to provide a wonderful ROI after only 2 to 3 weeks. Think Google Ads or the ads that you can scroll through on social media.
They can be run for a few days to a few weeks at a time, and bring people straight to the product that’s caught their eye.
However, they do tend to cost a lot of money in one go, as you need to assign a PPC budget that’ll net you as many bids as possible within the advertising space.
They can’t be run for too long, and need to be well targeted towards people who are ready to buy.
Social Media
If you run a competition or a giveaway via social media, you’re guaranteed a short term boost to your engagement and number of followers.
However, you do then need to be able to translate these new followers into paying customers, and that’s where the ROI tends to get a bit complex to translate.
SEO and GEO
The best long term marketing method in the digital world, SEO is anything and everything you can do to get to the top of the search engine rankings.
On top of this, we now have GEO methods that make it more likely to be featured or mentioned within AI answers.
The ROI from SEO and GEO can take upwards of 3 months to come back your way (and usually closer to 6), but they provide an ongoing baseline for profit as well.
But as both SEO and GEO are long term commitments, it’s usually best to work with a team who know how to use the tactics to their full abilities.
Especially when it comes to GEO, as it’s a relatively new way to market via the online world. Be sure to check out the top 5 GEO agencies that are worth your time before you settle on any marketing contract.
What You Can Afford
It might seem strange that this is right at the end of the list. But in truth, it’s simply the final line you have to account for.
The budgeting factors above are all essential to forming the right kind of marketing budget that provides a pretty healthy ROI on the other side, as well as operating costs that won’t plunge your margins down too far.
But if you want to make use of them, you need to know what you can actually put into them before you go any further.
Create a Marketing Budget That Works for You
It needs to be proportionate, multi-faceted, and realistic enough for you to keep up with it. Create it with these factors in mind, and don’t forget about where your customers may be.
