Spend Money to Make Money – Small Business Blunders, vol. 3

Hi. My name is Adam, with Adam Lowe Creative. I help small businesses overcome the challenges that we all face. Today, I want to talk a little bit about marketing. One of the challenges that I see or one of the mistakes rather that I see a lot of small businesses make is that they don’t invest enough in their marketing. The Small Business Alliance says that the typical company should invest about 10% of their gross revenue into marketing their company. For a small business, I understand that sounds like an awful lot of money, but the thing is, you have to think of your marketing as an investment.

https://youtu.be/vM1vddsGrx4

What you put into it really should come back to you at least four times. Whether that is paying for Google AdWords, whether that is paying for a website, creating flyers, joining networking events, joining chambers of commerce, that all goes into marketing. Without marketing, people don’t know who your business is. Please, please, please make sure that you’re taking your marketing seriously. You can have the best product or service in the world, but again, if people don’t know about it, no one’s going to buy it. Make sure that you’re spending the appropriate amount of marketing so that you get the customers to keep your business up and running.

Now, in the beginning, you’re probably going to have to spend a little bit and probably a lot more than that 10%. Most people say that they get the majority of their business through word of mouth, and that’s great, but that doesn’t happen until your business is a little bit more established. That 10% rule during your first few years of business probably doesn’t even apply. You’re probably looking somewhere closer to 30 to 40% of your effort and your money into marketing because you need to get those clients in to get the buzz, to get the notoriety, and to just get known out there in the world, in the community, wherever it is that you do your business.

SEO is great. You can write all the blog posts in the world. You can go to all the networking meetings in the world, but you’ve got to spend the money to be able to get the traffic to your website to be able to get the business so that you can keep growing things. Invest now so that your business can actually grow quickly, instead of spending a little bit now and having that growth period stretch on for way too long. That’s my advice for this week. I’ll see you next week. Take care.