How to Allocate My Limited Marketing Budget To Promote My Company?

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Friday, 13 March 2015 02:01

How to Allocate My Limited Marketing Budget To Promote My Company?

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How to Allocate My Limited Marketing Budget To Promote My Company?

This post is the continuation of our previous post “Online Marketing On A Tight Budget - How To Prioritize Your Marketing Efforts”. Please read the previous post first, so that this post will make more sense to you.

Our previous article summarized the Top 5 Internet marketing tools and services to consider when promoting your business online. Let’s recap what they are:

In order of importance, the top 5 online marketing tools we recommend are:

A Business Website: The home and basis of all your digital marketing efforts
Online Advertising: The tool to drive people to your website immediately
Social Media Presence: Helps you connect with your target audience instantly
E-mail Marketing: Lets you stay in touch with your existing leads and clients
Content Marketing, Blogs and SEO: Provides in-depth and valuable information to your end users, and proves to you audience by “showing” your company’s expertise and value proposition rather than just “telling them” what your company can do.

Small business and the Internet marketing world

At Bloominari, we mostly work with local small businesses which are either brand new to the Internet marketing world, or have used some digital marketing tools but don’t quite know exactly how to best use them to generate leads and grow their business.

Our marketing team is constantly talking to small business owners who are usually too busy managing their own company and don’t have the time, expert knowledge or know-how for how to market and promote their products and services in the most efficient way. That’s where our team of experts come into play and help our clients to focus on their business, while we focus on marketing it.

How to promote a business on the Internet with a limited budget

Let’s assume you have a new or existing company called “Baby Cubs” and you want to promote and market your business online. For illustration purposes, let’s assume you have a limited marketing budget of $5,000 USD to get started. How should you spend it?

First, let us recommend that you divide your marketing efforts into two stages.

Stage 1: The Essentials - Build a very professional, and mobile-friendly business website, drive traffic to it and connect with your existing and potential customers on social media.
Stage 2: Keeping Your Audience Engaged - Follow up with your customers through an e-mail newsletter: share your news, new products/services, and tips on how to help your clients. Then continue to bring value to them by sharing your expertise and valuable tips and tricks through a blog - which in turn will help increase your search engine rankings.

STAGE 1: The Essentials

Based on the example of the “Baby Cubs” company, we recommend that you invest your first $5000 dollars on Stage 1. Then, once your company starts (or continues) earning money you could move to Stage 2 and invest an additional $3,000-5000.

Step 1: Build a professional business Website

First thing we ask our client is “Do you have a company website?”, if the answer is yes, it’s a good sign they understand the value of having an online presence. If they don’t have one, we discuss the importance of having one built and they key elements it must have in order to be used as a powerful marketing tool for the rest of their digital marketing strategy. Learn more about the importance of the website on our first post.

Recommended allocation of your marketing budget to build your professional small business website:

25-40% of $5,000 ($1,250-$2,000)
Price range for a 10 page website: $1,000 - $5,000

If your Baby Cubs company already had a website, then you could invest the website design budget on the rest of your marketing strategy.

Step 2: Drive traffic to your website

In the same way that physical store owners try to get people through their door to bring in sales, you also have to drive virtual web users (Internet traffic) to your website, which is your company’s digital headquarters online.

Your Baby Cubs company is a small business, and your goal is to stretch your marketing budget to the fullest. This means you want to get the most users to your website for the least amount of money. In today’s 2015 digital marketing world, the most common advertising tools for small business are: Facebook ADs, and search engine ADs (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc), as well as local search portals like Yelp and other location based services.

Recommended allocation of your marketing budget to drive people to your website:

40-50% of $5,000 ($2,000-$2,500) for a minimum of 6 months.
- $300-$500 per month.
Price ranges for online advertising platforms:
- Facebook ADs (Most affordable, and our pick!): Price will vary depending on your target audience selected. Yet here are 4 different sample target audiences and their cost to reach them within San Diego, California.
  - Audience 1 - 32,000 potential reach: $1 = Showing your AD to 130-330 people.
  - Audience 2 - 3,600 potential reach: $1 = Showing your AD to 84-220 people.
  - Audience 3 - 4,400 potential reach: $1 = Showing your AD to 89-230 people.
  - Audience 4 - 2,400 potential reach: $1 = Showing your AD to 52-140 people.
- Google ADs: The most expensive, yet popular PPC (pay per click) keywords based platform. Everyone knows it, everyone uses it. It’s effective, but expensive for many high-competition small businesses.
  - Range: From few cents per click to $15+ per click (local market)
- Bing/Microsoft & Yahoo ADs: The second best PPC platforms. Less expensive, very well target, but less users on it compared to Google.
  - Range: From few cents per click to $10+ per click (local market)
- Yelp ADs: Local based searches for mostly brick-and-mortar businesses. There is mixed reviews of whether Yelp ADs are a good or bad investment. Most of our clients have had a bad experience with Yelp, so we recommend that you are cautious. Here’s the pricing as of March 2015.
  - $2,375/mo - includes 7,200 targeted ads per month ($0.33/AD)
  - $1,775/mo - includes 5,100 targeted ads per month ($0.35/AD)
  - $1,225/mo - includes 3,300 targeted ads per month ($0.37/AD)
  - $925/mo - includes 2,375 targeted ads per month ($0.39/AD)
  - $600/mo - includes 1,375 targeted ads per month ($0.43/AD)
  - $375/mo - includes 550 targeted ads per month ($0.68/AD)
    
    Mentioned features include: picture slideshow, video hosting, Call to Action button, competitor ad removal, call tracking, tracking in your business owners account, and account support.

Keep in Mind: The budget allocation for building a digital advertising campaign should include the cost of setting up and designing the campaign (if you hire a marketing company or freelancer, or free if you set it up yourself) plus the costs of the ADs themselves (Paid to Facebook, Google, etc).

Roughly speaking, a marketing agency may charge between 5% to 20% of the money you’ll invest on AD costs as part of an advertising management fee. Yet this is not always the case, as it may be a much higher percentage or one-time setup fee is you’re running a small campaign and there’s a lot of one-time setup costs for the agency (Such as setting up multiple campaigns, designing many AD graphics, creating content for the ADs, conversion tracking, installing website analytics, doing keyword and target market research, etc).

Step 3: Connect with your target market through Social Media

Today more than ever individuals have the power to interact with the brands and companies they love directly through social media. Whether on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, or Tumblr, people like to stay up-to-date with the latest news, tips, buzz and information about the products and services they love. This includes any local small businesses, or online shops and brands they purchase from - for this reason it’s very important that your small business also establishes a social media presence.

Choosing which network to create a profile on depends on your specific business. For some Facebook is the best platform, for others its Twitter, and for other Pinterest. Yet, it can also be a combination of many of them. Most big brands have a social profile on pretty much every media outlet available.

Facebook is the most popular, so starting with that is probably a good idea. Joining these communities is free and anyone can join and start sharing their news, content, updates and photos. Yet, if you don’t have the time to do this yourself or need some coaching, the Bloominari team can help answer any questions and also maintain and manage all of your social media activity. Checkout our social media marketing plans.

Recommended allocation of your marketing budget to maintain your social media profiles active with valuable content to share:

0%-30% of $5,000 (FREE to $1500) for a minimum of 6 months.
$150-$300 per month to start off.

STAGE 2: Keeping Your Audience Engaged

We’ll discuss this stage on our next blog post. Make sure to get back here for an updated link soon!

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Jaime Nacach

Marketing Strategist

I love helping small businesses with their digital marketing and business strategy. I'm a young man with a passion in entrepreneurship and international experience in business development, marketing, sales, and web/graphic design.

Find me on: Team Page | LinkedIn | Google+ | Personal Website

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How to Allocate My Limited Marketing Budget To Promote My Company?

In order of importance, the top 5 online marketing tools we recommend are:

Small business and the Internet marketing world

How to promote a business on the Internet with a limited budget

STAGE 1: The Essentials