When you think about your marketing budget, your mind probably goes to ad spend, paying for creative agencies, all of your fixed costs around marketing.
What I want to do today, though, is have you think about some of those underlying costs to your business when you are investing your time in DIY marketing.
So if you're a business owner or someone within your business that is not trained, has little or no experience, hasn't really done marketing before, but you're trying to figure it out because you figure you can do this yourself and not pay an agency or bring in a new employee, then you really need to consider the amount of time that you're willing to invest.
You need to know what that time lost to the rest of your business really looks like.
Not Just the Hard Costs — A Marketing Budget That Takes Your Time Into Account
I think this is something that a lot of people miss out on because they just think of marketing budget as those hard costs and they forget that when they're doing all the strategic works themselves, they're implementing campaigns themselves, that's taking their very precious time away from what they're really good at.
So think back on what you've done over the last year and what you plan on doing in 2019. I want you to set a time budget of the amount of time you’re willing to invest on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly basis on your marketing.
And then we want to think about this in a few different buckets because there's a lot more that goes into it than just spending time setting up campaigns.
The areas that I want you to think about and set yourself a time budget for are going to be:
- Education
- Implementation
- Reviewing, goal-setting, and analyzing
Education
Participating in courses like this, reading books and blog posts, listening to podcasts, etc. what time are you willing to budget to continue to educate yourself and become a better marketer?
I want you to also think about when you'll spend this time. Will it be listening to podcasts while you commute, or are you going to take some time out of your day to actually participate in courses and sit down and take notes, to be a very active participant? Because that's going to change the type of learning that you can do.
Implementation
Then I want you to think about the amount of time that you need to invest just to actually implement your tactics and strategy.
So the time that you're going to invest in creating and deploying campaigns, managing your website, writing content... all of the things that are actually involved in performing marketing and again think about when can you block out time for those items how much time can you commit on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly basis and when does that time occur. So you setting yourself certain days of the week or certain blocks of time every day to actually actively manage and participate in your marketing.
Reviewing, Goal-Setting, and Analyzing
And then the third bucket of time that I want you to budget for is going to be reviewing, goal-setting and analyzing.
So going back to what we talked about with SMART goals, we need to be able to actively measure how well we're performing with everything that we do, but we also need to dedicate some time to the review and analysis of how we're doing.
Now, for me, I work best with blocking out similar blocks of time every week. So every week I have some set times that I've blocked out for writing, for marketing campaigns, for reviewing analytics, for all these different buckets, and even for education.
I block out some time for that on my calendar, so I know every Monday at 10 o'clock I'm gonna sit down and I'm going to review analytics for an hour and I'm going to look at how well we've been performing the week before and compare that to the goals that we're trying to reach.
I know that every evening at 7 o'clock I'm going to sit down for 20 minutes and I'm going to write, and I'm going to work on writing blog content and ebooks and other content that we use in our marketing.
And I know that Wednesdays at 2 o'clock I block out an hour for education. I find a course to participate in or I spend time catching up on a podcast, and I really focus that time on being an active participant, taking notes, really considering how I can apply what I'm learning to our business.
Create a Time Budget as Well as a Marketing Budget
Beyond knowing the actual dollars that you want to invest in ad-spend and agency work and everything else that is a hard cost for marketing, I want you to also create that time budget and really try to stick to that so that you're not investing so much time that you're taking time away from your business and losing out on opportunities, that you're not spending so much time trying to run your marketing that you’re not doing the work of delivering your products and services and keeping your business running.
Our Marketing ROI Calculator will take you through the process of accounting for all of your costs, including your time, and help you calculate a true ROI for your marketing efforts both holistically and by each specific strategy.
Grab it here.
Next week we’re back and switching gears to talk about your visual brand. It’ll be a great session that you won’t want to miss, so watch your email.
