Marketing Guide Part 1 of 4: Your Marketing Budget

In this four-part blog series, we’re going to talk about what it takes to market and grow your SMB. Throughout this series, we’re going to cover the following topics:

1. How much you should spend on marketing and what to do when there isn’t a marketing budget.
2. What’s the bare-minimum marketing infrastructure you need to grow.
3. How to budget and effectively launch aggressive targeted campaigns.
4. How to plan and justify the costs of marketing and get a return on investment.

For a lot of SMBs, trying to determine where to allocate your marketing budget to get the best return on investment can feel like herding kittens. We all have limited marketing budgets and don’t want to choose a method that isn’t going to show a return, so it’s easy to feel like we need to be choosy when we pull the trigger on marketing services. Let’s talk about how to determine your marketing spend, and what to do if your budget isn’t very high (or doesn’t exist yet).

How Much Should My SMB Spend On Marketing?

As a general rule of thumb, new and growing companies should plan on putting around 20 percent of their gross revenue into marketing. That number can start to go down for more established SMBs with massive brand recognition, but if you want to grow, be prepared to put effort into it. This is especially true when word-of-mouth growth starts to stagnate.

What If My SMB Doesn’t Have a Marketing Budget?

When times are tight, 20 percent can feel like a major barrier. For small one-man shops, growing your business might mean a lot of hard work and sneaker marketing. Sneaker marketing is where you are spending your evenings going to the chamber of commerce events and taking prospects, clients, and referrals out to dinner. In other words, whatever it takes to physically get in front of the people you want to do business with.

At the very least, you need to be active in the places that other local business owners are, making friends and sharing business cards. Drive people back to your website, and make sure the content on your website reflects the conversations you are having. There’s no easy way to say it; if you aren’t able to pay for marketing, you’ll need to bustle to get in front of people.

Encourage Referrals

If you are doing great work for your existing clients, there is no shame in asking for referrals. If you get one, whether you asked for it or not, make sure you thank your client with a thank you note. Including a gift card, a box of cookies, or a gift basket is an encouraged added touch as well. Do this even if the referral doesn’t turn into something.

Get Your List into a CRM

Even if you don’t have any budget whatsoever for marketing, you need a place to organize your contacts. For us, we use ConnectWise, which makes a lot of sense for us since we also manage our tickets, projects, schedules, agreements, and billing through it. There are plenty of other CRM platforms out there, but if the software you use to manage the rest of your day can let you categorize and organize prospects and leads, use it.

Of course, we save ourselves a lot of steps by integrating ConnectWise into our website using JoomConnect. When a prospect fills out a form on our website, it can generate service tickets, schedule activities, add new companies and contacts, create opportunities, and add that user to marketing groups and tracks. This automation helps keep our system organized and fluid.

Above all else though, make sure you take really good care of your contacts list. Leads and prospects need good notes and organize them into groups based on their industry, size, requirements, solutions they might need, and more.

Touch your leads regularly, either with an email or a phone call. Even if you can only make time for 2-3 leads per day, that ends up being 40-60 follow-ups per month, and a quick check-in can turn into a lot more on the right day.

Start this habit early, because as you start building out your marketing, you’ll really wish you had been taking good care of your lists.

I’ve Got a Marketing Budget, What Should I Spend It On?

In our next post, we’re going to talk about where your marketing budget should go, first by establishing a base of the bare-minimum ongoing marketing designed to sustain your brand presence, and then by exploring what the one-off, aggressive marketing tactics would look like to actually convert more and grow your business. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss it!