Transcribed Podcast

Hi everyone I'm here with Clwyd, hie Edwin good to meet you. Uh you too, well we know each other quite well .Urrm absolutely, we just had our meeting today and we gonna be talking today a little bit about urrm budgeting spend .Yes, which everyone is quite sensitive about. It is an interesting topic and its urm its something that we come across a lot when we talk to some of our clients. Its a very difficult thing for a, particularly a small business to figure out exactly how much they should be spending on their marketing coz what happens is that some of the larger organisations out there, tend to sale them things uh and they buy because they have been sold by a good salesman.

So in terms of selling, being sold to by a good salesman is everyone's greatest, fear of course, urrm when it comes to marketing there is a lot of how, but we always say why does someone need to invest their hard earned profits into marketing to either stay where they are or more importantly to expand the business.

Of course, well you have kinda answered your own question there hahaha yah ok most businesses want to grow or at the very least they don't want to shrink and unfortunately everybody else around them is competing for their clients so even if they want to just stay where they are they have to work hard and  unfortunately  that means spending money on things like marketing and sales urrm but its not often clear where that marketing spend should be put or even the scale of it. urrm so like i would say the best way that we approach this is to look at industry standards what's the best practise out there what are other people saying urrm what are other people spending in your industry . that's always a good base yea,

so if if you have a turnover of so much then percentage of your pre tax profits should always be invested into marketing now we are a data driven company so we like to analyse things so i would always say that urrm there is no right or wrong answer to where your money should be spent, what you should do is spend it and then test and see what comes back in terms of business that has been generated and that's one of the things that we have spoken about in our earlier pod cast with Gareth was about having the ,marketing mix and having that marketing  mix really means that you don't put all your eggs in one basket but you have to put your eggs in a series of baskets and you have to test them right. its even common and particularly with small businesses where they will put aside a certain mount of money they will sign up with one particular supplier, they will go down one particular route and that route for whatever reason might not be perfect for them. so they will become frustrated they will not get the results and then at the end of that it might be in a 3 or s 6 month period they will say well oh that marketing thing didn’t  work for me and they will go and spend it on something else .yes or they wont spend it at all well this is the point. they need to spend it and they need to spend it across different channels so its something does not work you should stop it but you should do something else on the marketing side with that money so if you putting your money on paid advertising or Google ad words that's fun but if that's not working with you or for you then maybe you should put it towards search engine work or maybe you should out it towards improving your website, maybe you should put it towards tele-marketing or an email company.social media or even not just digital or even some of the old school work like direct mail for example, absolutely leaflets , networking getting out there , talking to people this is all marketing yea , all of these things should be costed an analysed , even a small business a one man operation can do this and you just have a simple spreadsheet or piece of paper, how much have i spent how much business have I got back oh we have actually got that uhh I will put this we have got a link to one of our urm budgeting like marketing budget you can download spreadsheets and see exactly how they look, yes and create your own. one of the things i would like to ask is what's the difference in your eyes between and everyone says its money but a big business and a small business like a one man band does not always want to be a one man band , yea a one man band i believe if you have got aspirations to be bigger you will be bigger , yes so urm what would you say to someone or even any company on the marketing journey coz it is  a journey it isn't just a one hit, one you know one hit one success right its not a 100 percent one shot one kill. yes you need to have a  marketing mix, you need to have failures. what would you say would be the key points of managing all of this , what would you say they need to have to make this effective for them. its very difficult and its one of the advantages of being big is that you can  tend to afford to make mistakes so if you have a marketing budget you can make maybe you have got a million pounds a year that you gonna be spending , you know you can take a portion of that and you can play you know you can try something different you can try something new and the smaller businesses don't have that luxury so they , got to be much more rigorous and a lot more careful so urrm the difference to answer you question between a small and big is that bigger companies tend to have more structured processes in place , more ways of testing where as smaller businesses tend to be  a bit more reactive you know a salesman would come and they would sale them something and they would sign up for it because they think its a good idea , they have got to resist that and they have got to step back a little bit and work on their businesses as a machine and the best way to do that is to look urm instead of jumping at the first thing that appears in front of you is to try and look at what industry best practise is talk to other people in your industry, find out what's working for them and then maybe put some budget towards that and find out what's not working for them coz sometimes its easier to stand and show as they say, absolutely, what we are gonna do is we gonna rap this one up today urrm we will be doing  a few others pod casts on the subject, so thank you for listening , thank you doing our cast today urm you welcome OK speak to you soon.