Yes, I know we are in September, and I want to discuss how to maximize your yearly marketing budget. The thing is, more and more small business owners are just winging it verse planning. Some people say they over plan and never get stuff done. Honestly, I believe they have added too much to their plate causing the lack of achieving goals. For a business to truly to succeed, they must create budgets, goals, deadlines and more. Personally, I believe a $2,000 marketing budget for the year is a great starting point. It can yield you high ROI if done correctly.
Break The Funds Down By Quarter
First, you will need to break down your yearly budget into four quarters. This will help evenly disperse the funds need for those three months every quarter. If you know business is lighter in certain months, you can either focus on revving up your marketing, or you can allocate those funds to the 4th quarter. Personally, I would allocate funds for 4th quarter to insure heavy traffic during November and December. Here is a couple of examples of how you can break down your quarterly marketing budget.
The above graphic provides several examples of how you can break down your marketing budget depending on your company needs. It’s important you always have funds available to position your business in the right direction. You see depending on the niche your individual business season are going to be heavier than others. For instance, I have a friend who has a monogram business. Her business is super business in the 1st quarter, 3rd quarter and 4th quarter. Those months she would need to spend the most money advertising to help tide her over during her slow three months in the second quarter.
First Purchase + Next Purchase Flyers
Well-designed flyers are my favorite marketing tool for small business owners on a tight budget. You can design your graphics in Canva or Picmonaey for free. Creating the graphics yourself can save you a plethora of money, and the rest of the funds can be shifted elsewhere. Towards quality card stock and different designs. Last year, I showed you how designed these type of cards step by step. If you, do not feel comfortable design your cards you can utilize websites such as Taskrabbit, Olance or Fiverr and get a gig for less than $50 maybe. The great thing about these cards you have several options made and then printed. You can select a big company to print or go locally with Office Depot or Staples. The reason I prefer handing people these style flyers or over business cards because they are bigger in size. You’re able to provide them with more information regarding your business. In addition to that, you can create custom promo codes to track the purchases through them. Suggested making four different options for the four different quarters, or at least two choices for data collecting purpose. Your cost for printing and design you will utilize between $150-$400 of your budget.
Call To Action Banners
If I am visiting a website for the first time, I prefer that I can navigate with ease and to be directed. Too many times we land on small business websites with no direction. There might be a beautiful picture, but no words are telling us what to do. The reason you’re adding this into your budget is that you will be shooting your products or making graphics. For example, with all my digital products I have lovely images like below. I made none of these pictures. Nor did I make the style photography that they appear on. I invested in styled photography, font and graphic designer. As you grow your business allocating the funds monthly to have a polished look on your website helps you increase your companies bottom line.
Below is an example of a Call To Action Banner that appeared on my old online high-end resale boutique. You might think, well Tasha that’s all great and dandy, but I do not have a significant marketing budget for models, photographers, style and more. Guess, what neither did I at that time. Everyone who worked my photoshoot did it for free. Only money spent outside of the cost of purchasing my merchandise was on the food I feed them. After that shoot, I wrote Lack Of Money Doesn’t Stop This Train. It shares behind scenes of everything. Also, if you want to learn how to make a call to action banners you can read; 7 Awesome CTA Banners for Websites, Designing CTA Banners in Picmonkey or 3 CTA Phrases You Alter Today.
Brand Audit
This might truly be the second one that you should do before designing your Call To Actions. Even if you have been in business for years, its best to get another person perspective on how things look. We assume that our brand is polished and looks amazing. However, its outdated, the colors scheme doesn’t match, we are using the wrong phrases and have no unique position for our market. Last Christmas, I did 90-day action plans for small business owners that were brand audits to help them see their business clearer. Providing them with insight on how they can market their business better. You can do a brand audit through my Buy Tasha Coffee option now.
Take An eCourse
I believe in honing out skills and becoming a better business owner. If you’re lost in the sauce of understanding a social media platform, fonts or even doing flat lays. I believe that you should have a line in either your regular yearly budget or your marketing budget to do an eCourse on that subject matter. It’s always important to learn and understand. No, you don’t need to wear every hat in your business but before signing a check over to someone to run your social media at least learn how to probably use them and maybe learn some insight on how to use automation.
Facebook Ads
At least $180 of your quarterly marketing budget should go to this type of marketing. People might complain about the constant changes and everything else, but if you actually leverage it, you can win. You see with Facebook ads you can target the markets you want to reach. Later this month, I giving you a complete break down on how I used Facebook Ads to surge the sales of the launch of Kick Start Your eCommerce. If you study the numbers for your site and realize you receive more sales from Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta you can set your target ads for those areas.
I know this post is rather wordy and trust I did not realize that until the end. However, I want you to win and establishing a plan helps with that. Create a marketing budget for your small business and see how it changes things.
