Marketing Budget Breakdown: Where You Should Spend Your Money | 88

We all know the saying, “You have to spend money to make money.” But what exactly are you supposed to spend on? And how much? Don’t worry - I’m sharing a marketing budget breakdown, so you know exactly where to be spending your precious bills (and get the most bang for your buck).

FAQ: How much money should I really be spending on marketing?

I know we all love a hard and fast answer, but of course, hardly anything is one size fits all. Your marketing budget is the same way. Generally speaking, 10% of your income should be spent on marketing.

What I like about this being a percentage is that it changes and grows as you do. What you spend on marketing when you make 1K vs 10K is going to be different! And it should. Now that you have an estimate on how much you should spend, what exactly should you spend it on?

FAQ: How do I allocate my marketing budget?

Marketing is an essential part of every business. It’s why even the biggest companies with well-known brands have a team of people dedicated to marketing. It runs the show. But, what exactly should you be spending your money on?

1️⃣Strategy

Think of strategy as the big picture. It’s your content plan, vision, audience personas, and growth plan. 

Strategy is one part of marketing that’s really hard to hire out. You can certainly hire people to coach or assist you in your vision and planning - but ultimately, you're the CEO… and only one who can set the big goal for your business.

In this area of your business, you might be spending money on coaching, trainings, and planners. But mostly, you’ll be spending a lot of time!

2️⃣ Content Creation

Content creation is how you begin to bring your vision to life! 

It can help you attract clients and market your business. This looks like lead magnets, long form content, social media content, email marketing, copywriting, and more. This type of marketing takes a lot of time in the beginning, but as you are able to hire help, you can lift the burden.

You likely will see your budget going towards social media templates, email swipe copies, Instagram captions, a contracted copywriter, and so on as your business grows.

3️⃣ Platforms and Softwares 

This last piece of the marketing budget breakdown helps your business run smoothly - sometimes, even automatically! 

These softwares can often be put on autopilot and decrease the amount of time it takes to do something. They can aid you with both strategy and content creation.

In this final area, you’ll see your money going towards a website, email hosting platform, Canva, client management system, Facebook Ads, and more.  

This is often the first place you’ll start to spend money to save time!

FAQ: Should I be running ads as part of my marketing budget?

As a Facebook Ad strategist, obviously I see huge benefits in what Facebooks Ads can do for your business. But I want to caution you from jumping into Facebook Ads before your business is ready. Typically, I recommend clients make at least six figures before doing ads.

Why? They are expensive! If you run an ad at $25 a day (which I recommend), then you are using up a large portion of your marketing budget each month when you are a smaller business. However, with time, you will get these! And Facebook Ads can be an essential and effective tool.

Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!

xo, Jenzaia 

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Episode Transcript:

Hey there. I'm Jenzaia and this is market scale growth. A podcast created for ambitious entrepreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world. Achieve freedom, and flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers, just like you. My goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.

Okay. So before we hop into the episode, I just wanna remind you to download my free guide to Facebook targeting audiences. It has been created specifically for teacher business owners, and I go through the warm lookalike and cold interest based audiences that you need to have set up to be running Facebook and Instagram.

There are checklists and brainstorming pages so that you know it, you have everything. As an exciting, special I'm opening up some audience audit calls where you can hop onto a 15 minute zoom call with me and you'll get my eyes on your audiences so that you can make sure not only you have all of the audiences, but they truly are.

Perfect for your business. So head to marketscalegrow.com/audienceaudit to book your free audience audit call today. Okay. Now into the episode. Welcome. Welcome to this Saturday strategy session. My name's Jen, I'll be your host today, and I'm super, super excited for you to be here. Now, before we jump in, I have a little personal something I just wanna say, and I don't do this very often.

So. Bear with me, happy birthday to my husband. If you are listening on the day that this was released, it is his birthday. We're super, super excited. And I hope that he's having a wonderful day. Of course, this is past gen Z recording this episode. So. I actually don't even know what we're doing yet, but we love you, honey.

Um, you'll probably never listen to this, but we adore you and thank you so much for being an amazing dad and husband. Okay. Safi. Sappiness done. Let's dive into today's topic, which is marketing budget. Now I love talking about money. I'll talk about money all day long with anyone who wants to talk about it.

And today we're going to do just that with marketing budgets. So for me, your marketing budget is something that is a non-negotiable in your business from day one, somewhere I heard, um, Somebody, the person who was speaking was talking about if you're looking for an investor. So think about shark tanks.

One of the most common questions or topics that gets talked about on shark tank is marketing budget. What marketing are you gonna do with this money? Like if I give you that a hundred thousand or whatever you ask for what marketing will. If the person's already laid out a decent marketing plan that might not come up, but very frequently they talk about it because marketing is so essential.

And this person I was listening to was saying that it's almost impossible to get an investor to back you, if you don't have a marketing plan, if you don't have a strategy that you're gonna be using a portion of that money towards marketing and all of the big companies do. They all are marketing. And so that means it works and that we should be putting money towards it.

Even if we're just these tiny little baby businesses. so I recommend that you're spending roughly 10% of your monthly revenue on marketing. And I like that it's a percentage because it grows with you as you grow. So when you first get started, that might mean you're spending $10 a month on marketing, but as you grow, you'll soon be spending a hundred, a thousand, $10,000 a month on marketing.

Now before we get into, well, specifics, let's break it down. What would actually go into marketing? So there are three things that I kind of believe go into your marketing budget. The first one is strategy. The second one is content creation. And then the third one is the platforms and software that you are using.

So let's break each of them down a little bit further. The strategy includes your content plan, your vision, your audience personas, and your growth strategy, all of these like a higher picture. Strategic pieces to your business to move them forward. Now, the unfortunate quote unquote unfortunate part here is it's really hard to hire these things out.

It's really hard to find software. That's gonna do this for you. It's really hard to pay for these things. Not that you, can't not that if you got like a million dollar business or a billion dollar business, that you wouldn't have found someone to support you and to help you and to be doing these things for you, but as.

Six figure businesses. These aren't things you're gonna be hiring out. Maybe your content plan, you might work with a, uh, social media manager or a content planner to help you plan out your content. My podcast manager, Brittany, helps me to plan the content for the podcast. Every quarter, we have a strategy session, so that is a way that I am paying for my strategy, but my growth plan, my vision.

My personas, that all comes down to me as the CEO, the strategy you're gonna be putting in time. So I should have probably mentioned this at the beginning, but in business it often comes down to time or money. And my dad who also owns a business, he always has said, you can do things however you want, but there's, like this triangle that he always talks about and the three points of the triangle are fast, cheap.

Quality. So you can have only two of those three points at a time. So you can have something fast and cheap, but you can't have high quality. You can have something fast and high quality, but it won't be cheap. You can have something cheap and high quality, but it won't be fast. Right? So you can have two of those.

It's very, very, very rare that you will have something fast, cheap, and high quality, but that really what it comes down to is the time and money. You can put your time into something, or you can put your money into something, especially if you want it to be high quality. And I kind of feel like it should always be high quality, that we shouldn't be going fast and cheap and getting low quality.

What we want is high quality. And do we want it fast or do you want it cheap, but we always want that high quality? And again, so this comes down to balancing time and money. So at the beginning of your business, when you only have that $10 a month marketing budget, you are gonna be putting in tons and tons and tons and tons of to, into your marketing budget.

That is, the fuel that is going to feed your marketing is your time. And for the strategy piece of your marketing budget. It won't change very much. You will spend tons of time here, tons of time, strategizing your growth plan, tons of time, strategizing your vision, your mission, your values, and the personas of who you are marketing to.

All of these things are gonna take your time as the CEO. Next, there is content creation, and this is creating your long-form content or your blogs or your podcasts, or video. This is creating social media content. This is creating your lead magnets. The checklists, E guides, webinars, training, video series, whatever it is that draws more people into your audience.

This is creating those emails that are going out on a weekly basis. It is all of the content that you need to create to keep your business running. Content should be the backbone of your business. Content creation and copywriting is just so, so important to a small business, online. . And so I want you to remember that.

And initially this is also going to be a labor of love. You are going to put tons and tons and tons of time into your content creation because it is that backbone and you have to make it a priority so that it gets done consistently, and that you're putting out high quality content. But the good news here is that you can hire support humans to help you.

So potentially a VA who's gonna help you with social media graphics or captions. You can hire a copywriter and, uh, like a podcast editor. Maybe you can hire blog writers for you. So, no, I can't hand off all of my content creation. I can. I mean, I probably could find someone who has the same voice as me, but I wouldn't, I love recording these podcasts.

So I always have to put the time in to record the podcast, but there's other pieces of the content creation that I can pass off to members of my team. And then the final part of your marketing budget is platforms and softwares. And this is actually probably where the majority of, at least initially the majority of.

Your money will go as your budget increases more and more money will go towards platforms and software. So this is things like CAMBA to help you create those social media graphics, your CRM, or your email platform. So convert it, MailChimp flow desk. and your website, all of these are part of marketing your business.

This is also gonna include, uh, like Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, TikTok ads, whatever ads you wanna choose. This would fall under platforms and software. And so. Some of the platforms like your website, Canva, your email provider, those are gonna happen much more quickly. Whereas ads, I would say you're probably gonna hold off on those for a little bit longer.

And what's great about platforms and softwares like flow desks, for example, or converted or MailChimp or whatever you're choosing to use. But what's great about that is it stays with you for the long. and you are going to be using that as part of your strategy. It's gonna make your life so much easier.

If you were to not have that. And you were building this email list, just like using Gmail, it would be so hard and. Nine out of like 99% of people would just like to give up, be too hard. So having that is gonna make your life so much easier. It also can help you to automate things. So when someone downloads your or signs up for your lead magnet, your CRM will automatically send you them, your lead magnet.

Add them to your email list and send out your welcome sequence automatically. So we're not relying on human error. Again, these are things that you can start slowly. You don't have to have a website right away. You don't have to have a CRM or, uh, an email provider immediately. You don't need to get Canva pro.

That very first month, but as your budget starts to grow because your revenue is growing, you can start adding these in. And I would honestly say that those are the first few things that I would recommend spending money on. And I don't recommend that you start running Facebook ads until you're making consistent money in your business.

I don't necessarily want to put a number on it, but like you should be in my personal opinion as a Facebook ad strategist, before you start spending any money on ads, you should be nearing or have hit six figures. Before that there's so many other places where your money would be better spent towards taking some of the work off of your plate, hiring a social media manager or somebody to help you edit your blogs or to write your emails for you to make sure you have all the systems and automations up and running and in place first.

And then once everything is running smoothly, you have your content strategy, your set, you're putting out your content marketing every single week. You're emailing your list every single week. You're building a community consistently then, and only then adding an ad is a powerful addition to your marketing plan.

And it might seem crazy that I'm a Facebook ad strategist. And I'm saying like, don't feel pressured to. Marketing your business. Start with ads today, do put in the time first. And then when the time is right, you can move to adding in ads. Now, once you start running Facebook ads, what kind of budget?

Should you be looking, I have a couple P trust friends, like strategist friends, and I think the recommendation is fairly similar for Pinterest and Facebook ads. But my recommendation is that you have $25 a day to spend on ads, which is approximately $750 a month. So. That is just on the ad spin.

We're not talking about the course or the, the service provider who's gonna help you run those ads or the, the fees of the person who's gonna be helping you, whatever it might be. Right. And so you just have to remember that you wanna have that marketing budget available to you. And you can start small with just that one list building campaign.

And then as time goes on, as your marketing budget grows, you can fill out your funnel with additional campaigns and you can bring in additional support to your business. So that's a little bit of a look at your marketing budget, how I'd break it up into strategy, which is gonna be a lot of time. That you're spending for most of your business, especially if you're a six figure business owner and you haven't hit seven figures yet.

Content creation is the second one, and you're going to be creating content. And this is where you're nurturing your audience. And there's a lot of time that goes into that as well. And then the third one is platforms and software, which is definitely gonna be more money oriented. And it doesn't there isn't really the time piece there.

You can't really put the time in instead of having a website. Right? So. And your platforms and software will probably be the first place that you're starting to spend money, getting all of those things set up and then moving into hiring people to support you with your content creation. And then once you've hit six figures, start to think about adding ads into the strategy that you're already working on.

I hope that this was helpful. Thank you so, so much for joining me on today's episode, I will be back with you next week with a brand new episode. So have a wonderful week and see you then.

Thank you so much for listening to market scale growth. We would love to partner with you if you're ready to build your email list and generate consistent leads on autopilot. Our growth package is perfect. For course, creators. Service riders and coaches look to inject their list with fresh leads so that they can amplify their amazing program and get it out to new people.

This six-week package is perfect for you. If you have a proven lead magnet that you're ready to turn into an established lead generation machine to get started today, head to marketscalegrow.com/worktogether, fill out the application and someone from my team will be in contact with you to schedule a free strategy session, to ensure that it's a good fit and to get you on the path to consistent lead generation with team JV.

Thank you again for listening. And I look forward to working with you.