Cost of Marketing: What Is the Average Budget?
As today’s savvy businesspeople know, to have a strong business people have to know who you are and what you offer. You need good marketing. The first step is a marketing budget to help you figure out practical steps to achieve those goals. But, how much should you spend?
Sales Renewal’s insight:
We agree, this is the best way to think of your marketing budget if you’re a small business:
“Allocating a specified percentage of sales revenue is one of the most popular methods for developing a marketing budget. The average allocation usually ranges between 9-12% of the annual budget, while the smallest businesses may go as low as 2%. … The main advantage to using a percentage of sales is that the marketing budget will increase, or decrease, with the sales revenue of the company. The marketing budget will never spin out of control and deplete sales revenue.”
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Free Marketing Management Course from MIT
15.810 Marketing Management is designed to serve as an introduction to the theory and practice of marketing. Students will improve their ability to develop effective marketing strategies and assess market opportunities, as well as design strategy implementation programs. In addition, students will have the opportunity to communicate and defend their recommendations and build upon the recommendations of their peers. We will explore the theory and applications of marketing concepts through a mix o
Sales Renewal’s insight:
This and 2, 200 other classes are available from MIT OpenCourseWare which “makes the materials used in the teaching of almost all of MIT’s subjects available on the Web, free of charge.”
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What Skills to Look for When Hiring or Assembling a Marketing Team
Since our beginning in the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, Sales Renewal has been extolling the importance of hiring a broad and deep team to grow a business' revenue (aka, Marketing). While we understood that there would always be need for brand-focused and creative people, we also understood that the Team would have to expand beyond the boundaries of traditional and digital Marketing to include business analysts, marketing strategists and a fair number of technologists too.
How to Make Your Outdated Content Outstanding Again
Old content isn’t dead content. Breathe new life into your old content by following these steps.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Does “republishing” an older blog post somehow feel like cheating?
When I coach clients about republishing their evergreen blog content, I find they are quite often hesitant to push the button. After all, shouldn’t a blogger be able to turn out fresh, interesting content every week?
This article from uberflip provides some good reasons for reviving your older content as a regular part of your content marketing strategy:
- Having fresh, up-to-date content helps you demonstrate your brand’s reliability.
- Keeping popular posts up to date helps you continue to build on their good ranking to bring visitors to your site.
- Updating gives you the opportunity to improve poorer-quality posts, which will help you address Google’s Panda update targeting low-quality content.
- Updating, like curating, is a lot easier than writing a brand-new post. You can give yourself a break once in a while!
- Updating is an opportunity to give the old content a new SEO pass. You probably know more about optimization and good-performing keywords now than you did when you wrote the post.
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Ready-Fire-Aim Marketing And Why It Will Likely Blow Back On You
Too many businesses today practice Ready-Fire-Aim Marketing:
The truth is that changing human behavior (also known as Marketing) is damn hard and very complex, so to be done well, it requires thoughtful strategies, plans and goals carried out by experienced practitioners who are correctly motivated.
Another problem with this scattershot approach is that marketing’s many different tactics are dependent on each other so to act on one point specific tactic alone is often a recipe for failure. For example, even if you got the best advertising advice in the world from Mr. Adwords himself, if your website is poorly designed or you have no content to offer ad clickers in return for their email address, you are likely going to waste your ad money (i.e., because advertising’s effectiveness depends not just on advertising but on how well it “integrates” with all the other marketing tactics you’re using). So to be effective, your tactics can’t be handled in isolation, you need an integrated, comprehensive approach.
This is made much harder by the recent explosion of sales and marketing tactics, and the vendors that sell them. ChiefMartec.com has reported a doubling of the number of sales & marketing providers in one year, growing to 1, 876 vendors across 43 categories:
So what’s a business owner to do? It’s not like you can call any one of these 1, 876 vendors and ask what they think you should do (because, not surprisingly, the SEO firms will tell you SEO is the solution to all your problems, the ad agencies will say advertising, PR firms, PR and so on).
Instead, you need a firm that’s thinking about it from your perspective (what are your business’ lowest hanging needs) not what tactic they sell (SEO, advertising, PR). And while it’s great to be open to new advice as you encounter it (even from your brother-in-law), and there is a role for “gut instinct”, there is no substitute for having a comprehensive, integrated sales & marketing plan implemented, and continuously improved upon, by a skilled team motivated to grow your sales.
Two Solutions that Prevent Marketing Fails
Sales Renewal’s two growth solutions-the JointSourcing Solution and the Marketing Essential Solution-overcome the challenges that too often cause small business marketing to fail. Both begin by developing a growth plan specific to your business and both provide all the people, expertise and tools needed to implement the plan and grow your sales without you having to pay their full-time cost in salaries, benefits or management time.
And unlike Inbound Marketing firms or single-tactic vendors who have a vested interest in their specific approach, Sales Renewal is a Marketing General Contractor that can deliver all possible marketing strategies & tactics. Sales Renewal’s only bias then is towards the quickest and most cost effective ways to grow your sales.
JointSourcing Solution™ (“joint venture” + “insourcing”) is a comprehensive strategy, marketing and technology solution that insources all the expertise (drawn from across the entire sales & marketing spectrum) in just the right proportions your business needs. This team handles all the day-to-day marketing and technology work that grow leads and sales (and demands so much of your time now), while Sales Renewal shares with you its management, and a portion of the rewards and risks (similar to a joint venture).
Marketing Essentials Solution™ is a easy-to-adopt, guided marketing and technology solution that grows small businesses. It is tailored to your specific business to deliver the essential mix of the marketing tactics & programs and sales-enabling technology that all businesses need to increase leads and sales (and includes online advertising and search engine optimization).
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Too many businesses today practice Ready-Fire-Aim Marketing.
Learn why:
- Going with your gut can be very expensive
- “Do it yourself” is not the way to grow your sales
- There are almost no vendors who you can ask for help and trust their answers
The New Search, Content & Social Marketing Sweet Spot
Columnist Jim Yu asserts that brands seeking to create successful digital campaigns need to focus on fostering collaboration between search, social and content teams.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Whether you have separate teams for search, social and content, individual employees who handle the different areas, or you’re doing all the tasks yourself, the sooner you can coordinate the activities the sooner you can maximize your efforts, those of your staff, or your teams.
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A buyer’s guide to marketing technology
The wide assortment of marketing technologies available can create confusion in a fast-moving world, and buying the wrong one is a costly mistake, so keeping outcomes and objectives in mind is the first step towards making sense of the options.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Tools for data management (DMPs), social media for “listening”, automation, personalization, the options are nearly limitless. So many tools also means your marketing team needs skills and talent to use them. This means hiring people with experience in these areas, training existing staff, outsourcing, or some combination of all of these.
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February Digital Marketing Advice Roundup – Outsourced Marketing, the Role of SEO and More
Looking for more information like this? The Sales Renewal Advice from Across the Web page features a selection of the best, actionable marketing and technology advice and, importantly, adds our perspective. Think of it as a Marketing Clipping Service for the modern world.
Here, then, are our favorite tips for the month:
Marketing Plans: From Hubspot, some advice about What to Cut From Your Marketing in 2015. As is so often the case, the rule of thumb is, “everything in moderation.” Sure, it’s fun to jump on every bandwagon that comes along, but by keeping the big picture perspective, you can be sure your marketing efforts are targeted and – more importantly – something you’re able to do without being overwhelmed.
Outsourced Marketing: If you’re running a business, you may feel that digital marketing is something you can do yourself. But a recent survey shows that even small businesses- 35% of them – hire outsourced marketing firms to help them create content and maintain a strong digital presence. Learn about the many advantages of such a firm here.
Local SEO: How do you make sure your local digital presence is as strong as your physical presence? According to Search Engine Land, it’s important to look at the big picture. In Local SEO In 2015 – Look At The Big Picture, author Greg Gifford summarizes: “You’ve got to work on everything” and “You have to be a jack-of-all-trades.” Sounds overwhelming, but it can be done with the right tools and support.
LinkedIn Advertising: Many businesses have been successful reaching prospective customers on LinkedIn with Sponsored Updates. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. This article has some useful takeaways when considering a sponsored post on LinkedIn:
- Don’t talk about yourself.
- Keep it simple.
- Images matter.
Read the full article here.
Content Marketing: Got a blog? Get sharing. Get more from your blogging efforts by sharing and re-sharing (that’s the key). When you’re scheduling your blog posts, be sure to take the time to “re-schedule” them. This social sharing schedule timetable is a good guide for getting started.
ROI and Measuring What Matters: The customer journey is complicated! So is measuring the different types of marketing programs, because there’s really no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison. How do you attribute a “value” and ROI to each? This article from Click Z has suggestions for a good place to start.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Each month we offer a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve extracted the most useful information into tips you can use, and we’ve also provided a link to the full articles in case you’d like to learn more. This month, our roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields covers SEO, ROI, online advertising, local marketing, and more.
February Digital Marketing Advice Roundup – Outsourced Marketing, the Role of SEO and More
Looking for more information like this? The Sales Renewal Advice from Across the Web page features a selection of the best, actionable marketing and technology advice and, importantly, adds our perspective. Think of it as a Marketing Clipping Service for the modern world.
Here, then, are our favorite tips for the month:
Marketing Plans: From Hubspot, some advice about What to Cut From Your Marketing in 2015. As is so often the case, the rule of thumb is, “everything in moderation.” Sure, it’s fun to jump on every bandwagon that comes along, but by keeping the big picture perspective, you can be sure your marketing efforts are targeted and – more importantly – something you’re able to do without being overwhelmed.
Outsourced Marketing: If you’re running a business, you may feel that digital marketing is something you can do yourself. But a recent survey shows that even small businesses- 35% of them – hire outsourced marketing firms to help them create content and maintain a strong digital presence. Learn about the many advantages of such a firm here.
Local SEO: How do you make sure your local digital presence is as strong as your physical presence? According to Search Engine Land, it’s important to look at the big picture. In Local SEO In 2015 – Look At The Big Picture, author Greg Gifford summarizes: “You’ve got to work on everything” and “You have to be a jack-of-all-trades.” Sounds overwhelming, but it can be done with the right tools and support.
LinkedIn Advertising: Many businesses have been successful reaching prospective customers on LinkedIn with Sponsored Updates. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it. This article has some useful takeaways when considering a sponsored post on LinkedIn:
- Don’t talk about yourself.
- Keep it simple.
- Images matter.
Read the full article here.
Content Marketing: Got a blog? Get sharing. Get more from your blogging efforts by sharing and re-sharing (that’s the key). When you’re scheduling your blog posts, be sure to take the time to “re-schedule” them. This social sharing schedule timetable is a good guide for getting started.
ROI and Measuring What Matters: The customer journey is complicated! So is measuring the different types of marketing programs, because there’s really no way to do an apples-to-apples comparison. How do you attribute a “value” and ROI to each? This article from Click Z has suggestions for a good place to start.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
Each month we offer a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve extracted the most useful information into tips you can use, and we’ve also provided a link to the full articles in case you’d like to learn more. This month, our roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields covers SEO, ROI, online advertising, local marketing, and more.
Quick Tip Tuesday: Putting the Social in Social Media
Quick – how many people do you have working on your content marketing team? At large organizations, this team can involve many players, from bloggers, content managers and community managers to social media strategists, social media managers, and community moderators. How can a small business keep up?
We periodically discuss ways to tackle some of the overwhelming amount of work blogging and social media can be for a small business owner, including setting realistic goals for what you have the time, budget and talent to take on. For example, scheduling three blog posts a week is unrealistic if you only have enough time to write two a month. Better to start with what you can handle and focus on writing two good ones. Focusing on one social media site and consistently offering content, monitoring and responding is a much better strategy than setting up accounts on six social media networks and having them inactive after a week or two.
But even this minimal level of social activity is a big time commitment, and it can also be a lonely job!
Don’t Go It Alone
Working with a team can go a long way to lightening the work load. It is also in keeping with the “social” part of social media and social networking. (Of course, one of the first steps to a successful program is making sure your employees are aware that you have one!)
Those who give social media advice often draw a parallel between social media networking and interactions at parties or in groups. Well, a party of one is no fun, and obviously provides no opportunity for interacting, learning, and exchanging of ideas, which is the ultimate goal of all of this. (To quote Andy Warhol: “One’s company, two’s a crowd, and three’s a party.”)
If your budget allows, hiring a community manager, bringing in an intern, or outsourcing your content marketing are always options for building your team. Remember, though, that anyone you hire will be speaking on behalf of your company, so even if you go this route, you’ll want to stay involved at some level to be sure your “voice” is consistently put forward. If hiring is not an option, consider looking to your existing staff for help. Is there someone in your office, or even a family member who spends some time on Facebook and would be willing to lend a hand?
Once you’ve determined how much time and resources you have for content and social media marketing, and who will be on your team, you can start working towards your content marketing goals. Teamwork starts at the planning stage (What are we writing about this month? What do our followers seem to react to on Facebook? What will we include in our newsletter?) and carries through to the actual implementation – writing the posts, sharing them, building your social community. We’ll cover this process in more detail in our next Quick Tip Tuesday post, Managing Your Editorial Calendar. Subscribe to our blog to be sure you receive this and for more tips on managing your content marketing program.
Sales Renewal’s insight:
At large organizations, the content marketing team can involve many players, from bloggers, content managers and community managers to social media strategists, social media managers, and community moderators. Working with a team can go a long way to lightening the work load. It is also in keeping with the “social” part of social media and social networking. But how can a small business keep up?