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How much time and/or money should a small business spend?
Professional marketing companies will recommend 7% to 8% of your revenue. Others will suggest that small businesses spend 7-20 hours a week. Larger companies more. The truth is there is no perfect formula for how much time or dollars you should spend. There are so many variables that need to be considered to determine the amount of investment and where to spend it that most businesses go about marketing as if it were a dart game. They throw darts hoping to hit the bulls eye.
The problem is that without some solid marketing information it’s like throwing darts from 30 feet away. If you can gather up lots of information so you understand your customers better, your competition better and your marketing opportunities better you can move the target much closer. Once your darts are hitting the dart board you can start to zero in on the bulls eye.
Marketing Stress
There are three stresses that make up the majority of marketing stress for small to mid sized businesses.
Lack of time to manage the marketing
Lack of funds to higher a professional to manage the marketing
The difficulty in finding and retaining someone to manage marketing with the needed skills for your business
If you started a business with the knowledge that you would be responsible for marketing the business you should have time budgeted for those tasks and have some background that made you feel confident you could manage your the marketing for your company. If you started your business so you could work less or to run the business, you probably don’t have the time or the knowledge to do the marketing yourself. In fact trying to do the marketing when you are ill trained to do so can quickly take up all your time and probably not give you the best results.
How to know if you have the right person for you marketing
Digital marketing is changing so rapidly that a small marketing office should probably only specialize in one part of digital marketing in order to master it. If you want to stick to one office to manage all of your digital marketing needs be sure the office has a lot of resources. If you have developed a marketing plan you should see if the company has qualified resources in each digital marketing area that will be needed.
Before you dive into a marketing plan consider investing in some research so you better understand your customers, your competition and the marketing options so you can direct your marketing efforts in a more profitable direction. The money will be well spent as it can save you countless dollars in future marketing.
WSI-We do it all because we can. We have over 1200 offices and production centers in over 80 countries. This office in located in Asheville, the Western North Carolina regional office.
