There’s an old quote from around a hundred years ago:
- “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
The good news is that’s no longer true. With digital marketing, we can tell exactly what’s working and what isn’t. And that brings me to the point of this article: marketing shouldn’t cost you money. It should make you money.
Small businesses that are getting started with marketing can start by spending small amounts – as low as $500 per month – and then take a share of the resulting revenue to ramp up their marketing and increase their income even further.
How does that work? For example, let’s say a small solar energy company came to us for marketing. We would start by looking at two things:
- Who are their most likely customers? (The target market)
- What’s the best message to get their interest? (Marketing content)
Based on discussions with the company, we might narrow the target down to people who live in a certain area, own their own home, and are at a certain income level.
Then we might brainstorm several different potential messages. For example, we might focus on saving money. Or on the benefit to the environment. We could then put content about each of those topics on the company’s website and social media pages and see which gets the most views. And we would develop a few different ads with those different messages, run all of them, and see which get the most clicks. We would then focus our advertising on the most successful messages.
Once the advertising results in increased revenue, the company can use that revenue to run the ads more often, creating a virtuous cycle that increases business. This can work so well that some companies find they need to pause their marketing so they can keep up with the business generated. That’s a good problem to have!
Would you like a “marketing machine” for your business? Just answer some questions about your business below, and we will develop a marketing plan for your business at no cost to you.