As small and medium sized business owners, facing the world of digital marketing and advertising can be quite daunting. You are probably not expert in this domain,rather being expert in your industry. There are many so called “marketing gurus” selling their expertise and the ALL are saying different things. I’m in marketing myself and I acknowledge all these things.

Having been in marketing for over a decade, I have gained some insights on what should work, and what probably won’t. So I created the following video for you, to help at least set a positive foundation for your own marketing strategy. Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t bullet proof. Marketing still is dealing with human nature, so you need to take a long term approach and be prepared to test, measure, fine tune and improve as you go. But hopefully this video will give you a good grounding in the concepts you should be considering. There is a transcription below if you’d prefer to read. (And sorry this video is a bit dark)

What Questions You Should Ask When Creating Your Marketing Strategy

Hello everyone. I thought today I’d share a bit of a video about mindset for small business owners, when it comes to spending money on advertising and marketing. And the main reason for this video is that over the recent weeks, I’ve seen or been asked many questions that are from small business owners that I think are probably the wrong questions to be thinking about, or the wrong angles to be approaching when spending money on advertising or marketing. And some of these questions are things like, I saw on Facebook recently, someone posted up as a business owner, he was tired that he keeps liking other peoples pages when requested, but he doesn’t get the reciprocation.

Today I had a gentleman talk to me about Google AdWords and his comment was that the model’s flawed, that he doesn’t want to look at it because the model’s flawed because of a potential for click-fraud. You know, people and bots deliberately clicking your link to rake up your costs. Previous to that, you know I’ve had people say I don’t want to do Google AdWords spending because of the problem with university kids or students who are looking for information, they see your ad and they click on your ad because they think that there’s information there that they can use on an assignment and that’s a waste of your advertising budget.

There’s many examples of these type of questions that as a business owner you might think about. You know another one just for Adwords is really, really common is “Wow 7, 8, 10, 12 dollars for one click to my website and that’s just to see my website. That’s way too expensive you know? That just doesn’t make sense that I’d spend that kind of money on lead generation, you know with such lack of clarity on what happens when they get to my website.”

You know all those questions while they seem valid, they’re all kind of fear based. But they’re not actually commercial questions that you’re asking. And I think if you’re thinking about advertising for your business you need to ask commercial based questions, and there’s really only one that you need to ask. And it’s pretty simple, and it doesn’t matter what advertising you think about, whether it’s Adwords or SEO or social media or putting a billboard up or a TV commercial.

The question you need to ask is:

1. I’m going to spend this much money on this advertising channel. Is it going to bring enough business to me to:
   1. pay for the advertising;
   2. pay for all the expenses of delivering the product or the service we need to deliver and
   3. make a profit at the end.

So, that’s the question you need to answer. If the answer to that is yes none of the other stuff actually really matters. You know the other stuff you can refine and get better at to get a better result with your advertising budget but to not consider an advertising platform or an advertising strategy for non-commercial reasons in a business sense, it doesn’t make sense. There’s no business sense to that at all.

So, you know, the example with the cost per visit at your website using Adwords you know if your industry there’s plenty of trades like painters you know and pest control where the industry average could be $12 for a visit to your website. Now, if you look at that and think, “Wow that’s too expensive. I’ll never make money out of that.” Without even trying it, I assure you your competitors who are paying for that, because it’s quite high, they’ll be making good money out of that spending. And they’ll probably be cheering and clapping that you’ve decided without even trying that you’re not going to have a look at it.

You know, similarly if you don’t do AdWords because you’re afraid of a university kid costing you a few bucks to have a look for stuff for their assignment, that’s blocking your reaching potentially hundreds of your prospects every month. You know, it doesn’t make sense that you fear about one university or five university kids costing you, you know, 10, 20, 30 bucks is gonna hold back your business.

So you know, it’s quite tempting particularly when you know cash flow is tight. Which tends to be quite often for small businesses. It’s quite tempting to write stuff off for the wrong reason. So I just wanted to put this video out there just to make it just pause and think, “Well what am I actually trying to achieve with advertising?” Which is growth in business. Can I measure that and only that? And you know, make a proper decision. You know, maybe a start with a small test, but make a proper decision as to whether something is going to have the commercial impact it’s supposed to rather than make a decision on other stuff that’s probably not all that relevant.

So, I hope this video helps with your thinking around marketing and advertising.