Make your marketing budget count

What will a $19.2 billion marketing budget buy you? The popularity and success of TikTok!  Yup, they spent a mere 5 billion more than Meta to grow their platform.  And the result of that spend has been a platform so popular that many others have had to adjust their platform to try to keep or attract users from TikTok (for example, Instagram’s emphasis on video and YouTube’s intro of Shorts)

For 100% of our clients, these numbers are just unimaginable expenses and one that seemingly could be dismissed out of hand as not relevant to their struggles. But it has a great deal of relevance.

1. You need to spend to grow. Sweat equity is the currency of startups, but often long after a company’s start-up days have passed, they still hold the sweat equity mindset: work hard, smart, and fast, and you will win.  In actuality, you will burn yourself and your employees out.  Invest in yourself and your team by investing in marketing that will provide vital infrastructure so you can use technology to lighten the load, be more creative and measure your results.
2. Invest without too many restraints. So often, we have precious dollars to put into marketing, and we expect big returns disproportionate to our spend. We want to try a little of everything. which leads to getting nowhere, or we repeat what we did last year and are disappointed when the same dollars don’t buy the same results.  Fail fast. Make a good investment into one tactic, give it reasonable time to perform, evaluate (the most important part), and then course correct as needed. Keeping what is working and refining what is not. Marketing is a cycle of testing, refining, measuring, and repeating the process continually.
3. Fear of failure = the absence of progress. When you let your fears hold you back, you miss the opportunity.  Think of a baby learning to walk.  There is a tremendous amount of literal and physical ups and downs.  We often forget that we got where we are through loads of micro failures and recoveries.  The more success we have, the more we resist the risk of failure.  But you will survive. You have more of a track record of success than failure; odds are you will overcome a few ups and downs in spending money on marketing.

You don’t need billions and not even millions in a marketing budget (although that is always nice), you just need to evolve past what you have (or have not) been spending to make bigger gains – suppress your fear and focus on your success.