The other day I was logged into my Twitter account (natively- not through a tool like Hootsuite or Hubspot) and I decided to have a conversation with someone. Someone I had networked with before replied to something I tweeted on the tweeter. I thought to myself, wow, I have a chance to engage in a conversation. I remember when I first set up my Twitter account in 2007. I used to have all kinds of conversations and I used to meet lots of new people. Well, these days we just auto-publish droves of information that hopefully people click on, read ,and share. The rest felt like history.
So I decided to go down this road with a conversation. I replied back. It was a humorous reply to me, so I hit back with a little humor myself. A couple jokes led to a conversation about business. How are things going for you? Are you still doing _________? Are you still over at ____________? The next thing you know we started sending a couple DM's about how we might work together a bit in the future. I realized how naturally a conversation in social media can turn into a sales call, a recruiting opportunity, or relationship with a new vendor. And sometimes, it just turns into a new friend. Sure, call them whatever you like, a follower, a connection, a like, but they are still a new friend.
It started back with a chance to have infinitely more conversations than were possible in a normal non-social setting. There was Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and then Instagram. People could find lost acquaintances, reconnect with high school mates (Aussie much), and easily make new friends at an event with the click of a button. We could now come back from a conference, a meeting, or a networking breakfast and go make connections with those we just met. It made business cards less important, that's for sure.
So what has happened to this great new world we had at our fingertips? It's gotten completely away from conversations and onto streams of content. Not many people are talking (aside from sports and politics). Most people are just sharing. What a pity.
Let's you and I start the conversations again and make these tools become what they once were, and what they were intended for.
If your business is like our business, then the key leadership team or owners are likely sitting down this month and laying out goals and budgets for 2017. If you operate your business on a calendar year versus your tax year (for C corps) then this post will hopefully catch you at just the right time— to make you think. Think about what? Adding a line item to your budget for marketing.
We meet a lot of businesses who are looking at hiring new sales people. They have a line item in the budget for sales. They are always willing to hire an additional sales person. We love selling and love sales people, but is hiring that sales person always the best decision— especially if you haven't added a line item to your budget for marketing? When I say marketing, I'm also talking about digital advertising. We see a lot of small businesses up to 10 million a year in revenue that don't have a marketing line item in their budget.
Well, first let me say that we are recommending it to clients as we meet them, but I wouldn't say it's a novel idea. The USSBA (US Small Business Administration) recommends businesses with revenue less than 5 million per year invest around 7-10% in marketing. The one caveat they mention is that these businesses would typically be operating on a 10-12% net profit margin.
So I like math. Let's do some math. If you don't like math, just bear with me, it'll be over shortly.
If your business is pulling down 1 million per in revenue you'd invest $70,000 on the low end and $100,000 on the high end into your marketing.
Let's break down a couple more scenarios:
So that's a good chunk of change, but it's well worth assuring that your sales people have leads to follow up on and to make certain your brand reaches a growing audience.
Let's focus on how to start planning and creating your unique marketing budget for 2017.
First, let's get started with a list of marketing expenses you should already have:
Things to consider adding:
I tend to think it's best to lay out which expenses are recurring (monthly, quarterly, or annually) and which ones are one-time expenses. Whether you use a spreadsheet, Quickbooks, or a tool like LivePlan to build your annual planning, the key is laying out your budget in annual numbers (start with % goals and work into specific numbers) and then break it down into monthly expenses.
Let's look at an example.
For example, you may say staffing is going to be 40% of your overall budget. You might think ongoing digital marketing is 30%, with digital advertising at 20%, and 10% would cover all other expenses like brand collateral, networking, events, and etc.
Using the midpoint of investment for the 5 million revenue business we'd be at $265,000 annually.
$265,000
From this high-level approach, you can then break these categories down into as many line items as you like and build this out into a monthly budget.
These are just ideas and are not the gold standard for budgeting. The SBA has some great marketing budget information that can also help. We don't have a monopoly on good ideas so feel free to share what's working for you in the comments below. Thanks for reading along and good luck building your budget and achieving your goals in 2017.
Someone at The Squad (her name is Kristina, and she will hunt you down to get your content 🙂 ) asked me to write a blog for Halloween. A few weeks ago, someone else said it would be cool to write a blog in the form of a Mad Lib. So I'm writing a Halloween post in the form of a Mad Lib. Why not?
Take a moment and grab a piece of paper or just type in the comments. You've got 10 minutes and you look like you need a diversion. Trust me. Put the work down for just a second. Fill in the blanks below on your paper or in the comments.
The other day one of our marketing consultants came across a website that was so scary it didn't _____________ when it loaded in their browser. They initially thought they needed to reach out and ___________ the business to see if they were willing to sit down to discuss __________________.
Since Halloween is about wearing costumes and hiding behind masks, they initially thought the website was just ____________ but after a second look it really did ____________________________.
The black background and white fonts were very old school, spooky, and hard to read, but they weren't nearly as bad as the _______________. The website wasn't mobile responsive and didn't show up on search engines with the keyword phrase _______________.
The website didn't have any call to actions leading to landing pages, so there was no chance to convert ________________.
The website kept getting scarier and scarier the more the marketing consultant dug in. Every new page was like watching ____________ on Friday the 13th.
The website user flow was as contorted as a _____________ and it led to a bounce rate of _______ %.
Our team took this business through our website redesign process. We completed a questionnaire, a strategy and user flow meeting, developed custom wireframes, a sitemap, and a design mockup. We got approvals, coded up the new mobile responsive website, added in the copy and other content, and then launched it.
Now this unsightly website can take off its __________ mask and be proud to face the world. Plus, it will convert visitors to leads.
If your website is scaring people away, then give The Squad a call. We can help today.
If you're reading this, then you NEED to know you're 90 days away from a new website. It's fall and before long it will be winter. As many businesses start to plan budgets for 2017, business development and marketing are sure to come up in the planning and conversations. As a business owner, marketing director or general manager, you may find yourself tasked with the responsibility of managing your presence on the web and thus a big part of your business development, marketing, and sales.
Well, wherever your website is right now have no fear. You are 90 days away from exactly what you want and need. The factors are understanding where you are right now, developing a strategy and vision of where you'd like your website and digital marketing to be, and partnering with The Marketing Squad to make that strategy and vision a reality.
I am working with a few assumptions. I'm assuming you have a logo and a brand that is solid. I'm assuming you know who you are. If you don't then we're still able to help, we're just not 90 days away from a brand new website. We need to add a month or so to figure those things out first. For the majority of you out there, you have a solid brand, and you have a vision—you may just need some tweaks to your website. Some of the things we see time and again that you may be missing are:
Some of you reading this may not even have a website yet. It's becoming less common to NOT have a website, but you're out there. Don't be ashamed. Some really great word of mouth businesses never needed one. However, just for validation, added credibility to the next generations, and to magnify that word of mouth referral train, you need one now.
Maybe you're a startup and are just going to market. We can have you up and running by early 2017. That's exciting to think about.
So as you make plans for 2017, why don't you ring in the New Year with a brand new website or a website redesign? You owe it to your bottom line. It moves the needle. Trust us. We see if all the time.
Talk to someone on our sales team. We'll walk you through the discovery process, develop proposals, and have your agreement signed before you say boo on the 31st. Then we'll be off and running toward a new website for the New Year.
P.S. It will also be a nice Christmas present for your sales and marketing team. Thanksgiving will abound and you'll be in love it with by Valentines. .... End of cheesy Holiday references.
So next week, we're hosting an Open House over here at the SQUAD. If you haven't yet, take a quick second (well minute) and RSVP. We'd love to have you stop by, see our place, meet our team and have some fun. If it's a SQUAD event, you can bet we're gonna have some fun.
So now that you know we're taking a pause to celebrate the name change we made back in the spring, I want to assure you that one of our greatest core competencies and differentiators, content marketing, is still alive and well.
We hear time and again from clients that agencies they have worked with in the past may have been strategic, and they may have been creative, but they often struggled with execution and implementation. I'll be honest, as one of the partners in this business, I've seen first hand the challenges to staffing and managing the ongoing marketing programs of 25 + partner programs. It's not easy. It's much easier to have a starting and stopping point. Start a project. Finish a project. Call us if you need us. Here are your keys. Have at it. Please don't call— fingers crossed.
That can be the MO (aka modus operandi) of many digital marketing agencies. I'm not faulting them. It's the easier path to staff and plan for. If these agencies do engage in ongoing support of their clients, it's often in the form of hosting, boiler plate SEO services, or digital ad management. Some of these are set it and forget it strategies that don't require monthly strategic meetings, editorial planning, constant refinement, and analytics reviews for the sake of making meaningful decisions. If you just give me consulting and advice without the help I need to execute, then I feel a little cheated. Maybe you feel the same way. Well the good news is that we can help you on the front end and help you execute along the way. It's in our DNA as an agency. We're not perfect, but we are striving for perpetual improvement.
When you differentiate yourself with ongoing content strategies and management, then you have to have a focus on business development or it's all for naught. That's why everyone in our sales conversations, and every strategic monthly meetings has overtones of business development. If you're not looking to grow your business, well we're probably not the best fit to work together. And that's okay.
All that being said, please take a moment and RSVP for our Open House. Technically you don't have to, of course. You can just stop by the day of, but Brooke Moody, our office facilitator loves when a plan comes together. So make her day and sign up now.
When I'm out selling or even when I'm speaking into our marketing, I try and put myself in your shoes. You being the person that's reading the blog, navigating the website, following along on the social channels, and considering hiring us. I think it's usually pretty obvious to a prospective client that a marketing agency like The Squad offers creative website design as one of it's services. You can check out our web design portfolio, and see a few of the websites that we've designed over the last 8 years. It's a very tangible thing.
In the last few weeks alone we've launched this site, and this site, and this site. I almost forgot about this site and, oh, this site as well. It's easy to look at our design and development skills by clicking around to those links. You can judge us based on what you see on our website.
What's a little more difficult to judge is our ability to partner with a business for an ongoing digital marketing strategy driven by inbound methodologies. That's pretty hard for a business owner, marketing manager, or VP of sales and marketing to grasp. Many times they want to pursue the ongoing relationship with us, but they don't have a tangible way to see it. Well, that's the goal of this blog post in the next few hundred words.
I want to give you a glimpse inside a real live ongoing partnership we have. You see, the dirty little secret in our industry is that you can set it and forget it. Launch a cool website, turn on some ads, sprinkle on some SEO and you're in business. It just doesn't work that way. To get sustained results, it takes an ongoing commitment to the following:
Well, it's not smoke and mirrors, and it's not set it and forget it. It's comprehensive. It's hard work. And it's rewarding when done well.
Take a glimpse inside an ongoing marketing program we have right now and see if this level of investment is worth a chance at increased leads, sales and a larger, more engaged audience than ever before.
This program (I'll save the name to protect the innocence) is at the $4000 investment level. They also pay a couple hundred dollars in software expenses for hosting, automation, reporting, etc. The agreement we have is month to month (as all our agreements are) but they are entering their second year. Most all of our partner clients follow the flow of a monthly strategic meeting and a weekly call. At the monthly strategic, their dedicated Marketing Consultant and Account Manager will meet with the owner, marketing or sales team. Sometimes there are representatives from all 3 areas.
During this meeting we'll address any urgent issues, cover some basic analytics, and then plan out the next 30 days of tactical work. We also reserve time to cover 60-day planning, and the 90-day outlook. This allows our team to come prepared to each meeting ready with fresh ideas for what we've heard in previous meetings, and it allows us to plan out the editorial calendar far into the future. This drives email marketing, blogging, content offer production, automation, social campaigns, and social sharing.
The weekly call is usually a 15-30 minute touch base between the Account Manager and an internal champion for the partner client. This call builds upon the monthly strategic, covers the next steps in the current week, and plans for the following week. The call is also a great place to hear about real time events, opportunities, and challenges. On the many calls I've participated in, you can cover topics like: blog ideas for the following week, determining a great social share that has to go out in a timely manner, and learning that the business is ready to kick off a webinar series. Sometimes there is a new event at their office like a lunch and learn or an open house. This call will also reveal a turnover in staff, requiring a change to the website about page, or a segmented email that needs to go out to a list about a hot new offer. This call and the monthly strategic keep us on the pulse of what's happening with our partner clients.
Each week for this $4000 level client we publish 2-3 blog posts and then share daily social content on multiple channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Youtube. Other clients may also use Instagram, Pinterest, or even Houzz. We typically send out a monthly newsletter and about 2-3 email blasts promoting events, segments of the business, or an upcoming webinar. We write the content, coordinate with the marketing director for approvals, and stick to a very consistent publishing schedule. Part of our job is boosting key social media posts and managing a small budget geared toward building their audience, as well as promoting key events like trainings, webinars, and lunch and learns.
Not a week goes by where we don't add some new call-to-action graphics to the website, develop custom social media graphics, or build out a new landing page for lead conversions. We optimize the website for SEO on-page and we put some time into monitoring results with tools like MOZ or SEMrush.
Occasionally we handle some graphic design or video work for this client and bill those hours on top of the ongoing program agreement. We do this in a very timely manner. A program of this nature would typically be between 32 and 40 hours of time investment for our agency. We work to be as efficient as possible and only bill overages when they are agreed upon.
This client has a few additional strategies we are working in as we have time within the program. Those are content updates to the website (not the blog), building out marketing automation workflows between the website, email automation, and the CRM. And, lastly, we're developing new content offers to condition the market and build our lists at the top of the funnel. These offers are usually ebooks, white papers, free guides, and infographics.
So, hopefully you can see that that's a lot of stuff to do in a month. Can all of this be done for $2500 per month? No. Can more be done at $5000, $7500 or even $10,000? Sure it can.
It all boils down to the following:
#1 is easy. We can discuss that and make sure your marketing and sales are playing nicely together.
#2 is up to you. We can advise you, but you have to decide how much gas you want to put on the fire.
#3 is about committing to digital ads in the beginning, while organic growth comes 3, 6, 9, and 12 months into the plan. If you're content to wait, we can play the long game. If you're impatient, we have to play both.
#4 Do you know what profitable business you desire? And do you have the scale to deliver it? Again, questions we can help you answer, but ultimately the answer lies with you.
Hopefully this post gives you a glimpse of what we're like. We're a fun bunch who are highly focused on results, and we love long-term relationships with our clients. We have many of our partner clients who have been with us for 6 or 7 years. Many more have been engaged with us for 3-4 years.
If you want to get started by talking to one of our marketing consultants, then click here and fill out this short form. Otherwise, just give us a ring at 502-618-4200. Ask for Jay, Joel, Bryce, or Adam. We'd love to connect with another growth-minded business in our area.
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