4 Core Components of Marketing Budgets

As learned by a small startup that’s bootstrapped its establishment, using only personal post-tax dollars:

Intro / backstory to this post:

Porteolas is a veteran entrepreneurship initiative seeking to bridge corporate data & information strategy experience into a consulting service that eases these endeavors for small businesses.

Through this evolution, I’ve learned marketing “on the fly” – this was my highest hurdle. In doing so, the research and application has revealed to me that my skills lend very well to marketing! Furthermore, I enjoy it!

These efforts have drawn from my aptitude for:

• • Technology  –  researching free & low-cost options; how they integrate with one another to ease end-user experience
  • Research  –  discover my ‘hole’ in knowledge / awareness, close those gaps
  • Data  –  what’s needed, sources of , governance of
  • Strategy & storytelling  –  analytics, data science, visualization

A few critical take-aways for me are:

• • Marketing spend is up more than 200%, ever increasing competition for attention
  • Small businesses nominally spend 10 – 20% of their monthly revenue on marketing
  • It’s easy to overpay (be over sold) for what you need to market your small business
  • Current & on-going shifts in social algorithms are proving to be major game-changers
    • Shift being away from # of followers / subscribers to engagement with content
    • Content (marketing assets) volume/quality need to be significant ramped up

What I have come to understand & how I’ve proceeded:

If time is on your side (you have more time than money), try to explore & do as much as you possibly can for yourself  –  within your interests  –  for free (or, essentially free).

• • There’s a lot of freemium content & tools out there
  • Doing so will enable you to:
    • Discover & establish your voice, style, brand  –  which will ease your ability to communicate that when you’re ready / needing to hire marketing support
    • Familiarizing yourself with the skillsets & technologies involved, as well as the time needed to create a marketing asset / campaign  –  which will enable you to understand / recognize fair-appropriate pricing once you’re paying for these services.

What I paid for  –  early in my process:

• • Logo
  • Trademarks
    • Trademarking early gave me the peace of mind that no one could usurp my name &/or logo… then… turn around & sue me for use  –  this does happen;  it can turn into 6-figure litigation to prove “first in use” 
  • Website
    • Infrastructure:  Ensured I got the domain name I wanted
      • Then (at no cost), I proceeded to secure my company name as my ‘handle’ on the social media platforms I wanted to be on
    • Creative:  hearing how it’s common to spend ~ $3-5K on a website and either not get one, or it not being close to what you thought you’d get… I skipped all that – paid $149/mo for screen share / virtual coaching == built my own site.  I’m all in for both ‘creative support & infrastructure’ at ~ $1,500.
  • Printed media / swag
    • Business cards, address labels, & thank you cards
    • Pens & a retractable banner
      • The banner serves well as a backdrop for virtual meetings (significant improvement over green screens) & can easily be taken to onsite events

What I wished I’d been aware of:

• • The cost to attend trade shows  –  luckily,  the one that would have been “pay to play” occurred before I was actually ready to be of service to others.  It was an event that was very close to my being ‘open for business’.   Since I’m building this business debt-free & without grant funds (to not be beholden to others), I chose to forgo the event this year.  I’m sharing this with you for your awareness & planning.

Given my research & experience, this is how I’m approaching estimating my marketing strategy & budget  –  tiers are approximated by revenue &/or stage of business achieved:

* the %s stated below aren’t “hard’n fast, gospel” – simply attempting to reflect prioritization & how it shifts during development & evolution: 

At first, doing your due diligence research & covering initial creative needs are highest priority.  Then, you’ll want to begin integrating data & infrastructure into your business model (mind you, don’t push this off any longer than you absolutely have to — you’ll create a backlog, potentially even lose early data).  Finally, you’ll be better positioned to understand which marketing content to “boost” with paid ads.

Eventually equitable focus may well-serve you to remain strategically relevant & competitive.