G'day Justin Hogg from Right Source happy to join you guys again especially in the
bright outdoors, today I wanted to talk about social media and marketing and
specifically in relation to business how much, how do you work out how much you
should spend or or whether you should do it in the first place? So this is a
question I get a lot in terms of the clients where they're spending a certain
amount on marketing and they're like well is this is this how much you should
spend? Like how much should we invest in marketing and social media and brand
awareness? All that type of stuff, now, I suppose that the thing that's important
here is again, this is very much a not, there's not a one-size-fits-all to
social media and marketing, it really depends on what your purpose is in what
you're trying to drive and I suppose that's the first thing I look at with
anyone when they ask that type of question is well, not what or how much
you should spend but what first, the first question you need to know is what
are you trying to get at? What's the goal? Why are you doing it? You need to
understand that what is the purpose you're trying to achieve in your
marketing/social media now, obviously it's not a well, everyone else is doing it,
because that's not a goal that's just following the crowd, so it's really
sitting down and this is what you need to do is you need to sit down go, well am
I advertising my business or doing marketing to get sales? Am i doing it
to just create awareness? Is it to create leads? Which is slightly different to
sales, is it just to educate people? And what is the purpose behind that process?
And these things have a different time period as well so if you're looking for
like you're doing an end of financial year sale, your time period for that
promotion is really short, you're usually like two or three weeks
and that's it, if it's more about brand awareness well that's a long play.
That length of time that you're looking to do this campaign or achieve the goals that
you want is important, well as important as the goal because you want to
understand the life of that campaign, how much you're going to spend over the
whole period time saying working out how much I'm spending a month doesn't
necessarily equate to anything because it doesn't equate
to the goal, if you're doing brand awareness and you want to build your
brand well that's a 12 month or more process so you should set a concept of
how much you going to spend on that period of time not how much I'm
spending each month and similarly if it's a short period well then it's a short
amount of money you're spending but you're spending it all very quickly, so they're the
first two things that it's always important to get a clear understanding
of before you start even thinking about how much you're going to spend, so once
you've got those two things then it's about like okay, well, if I do a brand
awareness campaign and I do it for 12 months, how much value am i creating?
Now this is where it gets a little tricky but you do need to have a
concept for it, if at the end of this activity that you do at 12 months time
you have a brand that's recognisable and you know, people can go: oh yeah I know
what that is and they do, you need to have a concept of how much that is worth
to you, so in doing the activity if it's successful at the end, how much is that
worth? That then sets the ceiling on how much you should spend, because you don't
want to spend more on something than what it's worth because then you're
throwing money away, similarly if you've got a sales campaign
you're going to run, end of financial year for example, sales campaign, and you're
thinking it might increase sales by 10%, this is a little bit easier to quantify
the value, well, revenues up by 10%, it helps give you and then the profit on
those sales then helps gives you an indication, well, it's going to make this
much difference to my business by doing something successfully so therefore I
shouldn't spend any more than that otherwise what am i doing? I'm wasting
money, so that is I suppose the first process I would go through with someone
in terms of how much should we spend on any type of campaign or marketing or
social media. The next thing then is because we don't have endless supply of
money, how much can you afford? So you know what you want to do and the value
it's going to create, but you quite often will have more than one option so you
can't do everything, so it's working out well then okay, from a business point of
view, irrespective of what you want to do, how much
capacity do you have to spend on marketing? Now this can be, if you're a larger, more
established business you'll probably have a bigger pot, if you're a startup
that's where it's really hard because you do normally only have the ability to do
one thing or maybe even part of one thing, so that's where it's very important
the first step in terms of understanding the value that you're getting from those
campaigns and being clear on what you're trying to achieve, because that then
allows you to prioritize which ones are best, so for example when going through
startup processes and working with those there's always a question on what
social media platform you should use and how you do it, do you do
Facebook? Do you do LinkedIn? Do you do ads? Do you do tik-tok? What do you do
and then how do you create those ads? So there's a like, do you get someone
professionally to do it? Or do it yourself and this gives you an
indication of one: how successful they'll be because, if you pay for ads
you tend to get more reach but it costs you more, if you get your media
production done for you, you look more polished, again it costs you more so
there's this balance of how much value you're going to be able to get and how much
you can afford by, having a think about the value of what you're trying to achieve
and what you think's the most likely process that's going to get you the results
will then allow you to go: well, I've got three different campaigns I want to do,
I understand the value of each, this one's going to give me the biggest
bang for my buck, that's one will do, well that's one we'll
do first and then if that goes well and we've got more cash, well
then we'll do the next one, so that's very important to not just dive in and
just do the first one you see but look at the whole strategy, what is your whole
marketing strategy? And what are the campaign's that fit into that and
prioritize. Then lastly you you've had a look at all of that, you've had a look at
the different campaigns you do, you know what you can afford, and you execute.
You go away and you launch something and you start it off, there's still a final
step that happens even after that and that is the monitoring process, so,
especially if it's a longer-term campaign, you want to, as it's going along,
revisit it and go: well, is this still going to achieve the value I
was looking for it to achieve? Is it still remaining within the cost profile
that I thought it was going to be? Has the time period that I need to invest in
this changed? Because if any of those three things change, it gives you
different answers to whether you should continue doing it and when I say
continue doing it, it's important to look at, not what you spent, because what
you've spent's done, to keep going through a marketing campaign, "oh we've
already spent ten thousand dollars on this campaign, to give up now would be a
waste of money" well that money is already gone, it's not actually part of
the decision anymore, the decision now, when you're mid way through a project is
go: well, how much value can I achieve if I keep going and how much is that going
to cost me and what time frame? Same decision as when you start, now if at
that point, at any point during that that process, you go: okay it's now going to
cost me more than the value I'm going to achieve, you should stop. That ability to
to look at a project as you're going through, whatever project it is, and
understand at some point that it's not going to plan and it's now going to cost
you more than the value you're going to get out of it, that's really about
making a good fold and understanding that every decision you make in business
is about trying to make sure that the value you get from spending or investing
something is more than what it cost you, because that's how you grow a
business, that is how I approach marketing and advising people and
helping people through how much they should spend on social media or
marketing or advertising, it's really understanding your goals, making sure
that you don't spend more than the value going to get and continue to monitor it
through that process. I hope you found that useful and I hope that gives you a
bit of direction in terms of your own challenges and fun in terms of
working out how you market and brand your company, if you found this video
useful please feel free to subscribe there's a lot of other, over 50 videos
now so going well in terms of information that helps you in your
business, find your purpose and find the way to continue to deliver that purpose
both now and into the future, also feel free to reach out because part
of what Right Source do is we help businesses move forward and achieve
their purpose so something you think we might be able to help
you with, please feel free to reach out, I'm happy to have a conversation and see if
we might be of assistance but otherwise, stay tuned there's some good videos both
that we've done and coming up, it's Justin Hogg from Right Source, thanks!