Brad Post, Create the Movement: You’re joining us for our next edition of Create the Movement podcast. My name is Brad Post. And I’m here with Josh Rich.

Josh Rich, Create the Movement: Hello everyone. Hello.

B: Josh, how are you doing?

J: Doing good, Brad. How are you?

B: I’m doing well. This is our Marketing Tips, and today we’re going to be talking about marketing budgets for small businesses. Right?

J: Yeah, so one of the things we kind of run into a lot when we talk with a new client, we ask them, “What’s your budget?” And we always, not always, but a lot of the times we get the response, “We don’t have one.”

B: Right.

J: Or, “What do you suggest?” Or, “We don’t really have a defined budget.” So, since the new year is kind of approaching, we thought it would be a good idea to kind of to give some tips on how to create a marketing budget. Because it is important to know how much you’re willing to spend, and how much you should be spending on your budget for marketing.

B: Yeah.

J: So, the first step that you really want to make sure, just whenever you’re focusing on this, is to be defined.

B: Be defined?

J: Be defined. Yeah. Don’t have some sort of vague number. Write it down. Make it a part of your company’s budget every year, or every month. However, you want to it. So, that way you know how much you can spend, and how much you should be spending. There’s kind of five questions you should ask yourself when you’re trying to set this.

B: Okay.

J: The first one is what do you need?

B: What do you need?

J: What do you need? So, that’s going to depend a lot on your industry, a lot on your company. So, do you need leads? Do you need sales? Do you need just brand exposure? Do you need traffic to your website? So, sit down and think about what you need. Because like I said, it’s really going to influence how much you’re going to spend, and where you’re going to spend it too.

B: Most of the time they might say, “All of the above.”

J: Right. Exactly. Like I said – be defined. You have to pick one. And your need will most likely change over the course of a year or so. When you’re starting out on setting that budget - be defined and pick one.

B: Okay.

J: The second one is figure out what you’re currently paying.

B: Okay.

J: For some people this could be zero. But for some people, they might just kind of, if they’ve never really thought about it, they might just spend a $1000 here, a $1000 there, and not really know where it’s going, or what it’s doing, or how to track it, or that kind of stuff. Just whenever they get an email, or some salesman calls them, they’ll sign up for it, but they’re not really keeping track of it. Not really sticking to any sort of set plan.

B: Right.

J: And so, go back and see what you did last year. Figure that out. Because that will kind of give you a good starting point. Once you have that number, you want to try to assess how that worked out for you. So, figure out your cost per lead, your cost per sale, or whatever metric you want to use. Find a way to evaluate how well it worked.

B:  Okay.

J: And then figure out if that’s something you’re comfortable with, or not. So then, the next step is to think about how fast you want to grow. Because a lot of us, I mean, as much as we would love to have 10 clients call us a day, and say, “Hey, we want new websites, and the most expensive SEO package.”

B: Right.

J: We’d be in trouble if that happened.

B: Yes!

J: We’d simply cannot scale that fast. You know? And so, try to figure that out. And if you can scale that fast, and you want to, then be really aggressive in your marketing budget. If you can’t afford to scale very fast, it’s going to be slow growth, then you need to back off, and make it more of a less aggressive approach.

B: Okay. Good.

J: You also want to figure out too, like, kind of going back to that second question, once you figure out your previous year’s cost per lead or cost per whatever, try to figure out what yo...