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

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

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 0:23

Well , it's more fun for me as an agency owner , because many people don't

Marketing Budget Expectations

Speaker 1 0:27

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 1:04

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 2:40

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

Maximizing a $500 Monthly Budget

Speaker 1 3:11

fees and stuff that you have with the marketing .

Speaker 1 3:14

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 4:36

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 5:31

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 .

The 10% Rule for Marketing

Speaker 1 6:29

And that's because it's really not .

Speaker 1 6:30

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 7:23

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 7:51

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 8:39

If you could hire this stuff out and that's a goal too for small businesses If you start with your marketing now

Balancing Money and Sweat Equity

Speaker 1 8:46

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 .