The Truth about Your Marketing Budget

Most business owners inherently know that to be successful, they have to market their business. With a nebulous idea that they ‘should’ market, they determine a dollar amount to be put towards their marketing efforts, lumping every form of marketing into one broad category. This makes it difficult to determine what is actually being spent on content marketing versus other forms of marketing.

As a result,many business owners think of their marketing budget as simply a line-item in the corporate budget. While this may be the monetary value assigned to spend on marketing, it doesn’t take into account the full price of marketing.

Dollars vs. time

Often, especially if a business is just starting out, the marketing budget is small, or even non-existent. It’s understandable that an owner or manager handle the marketing on their own, or at least have it done in-house. This approach can be successful and meet the needs of the business for a short while. Because of this, business owners fail to appreciate the full cost of marketing. While it may not be incurring an additional monetary expense, the reality it is that it does cost the business in time.

What’s your time worth?

There comes a point where the marketing needs of the business may exceed the abilities and skill set of the person in-house. At that point, marketing costs in time will start to exceed the cost of outsourcing the same work.

By evaluating the value of your own time, it becomes easier to see the benefits of ‘spending your time’ on handling the needs of your business as opposed to figuring out the intricacies of marketing. The truth is that TIME does equal MONEY. Is your time better spent handling your business or handling your marketing? Put another way, are you worth more to your business in generating new business or in taking care of the business that you already have?

The value of new business

A determining factor in establishing a marketing budget is the value of new business. What is the value of a new customer over the normal course of business? What is the expected profit from developing and cultivating a relationship with a new client? While the addition of marketing to a budget may seem prohibitive or even unnecessary, marketing done right should ultimately pay for itself in the generation of new business.

Maximizing your marketing

Developing marketing content will cost your business either time or money. To capitalize on the investment, content should be repurposed and reused across various forms of marketing. By hiring a professional to handle the creation, use and repurposing of marketing, you are effectively using the resources at your disposal – both time and money.

“The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”  – Theodore Roosevelt