I know, you hate more expenses. Well I got news for you, you have to spend to make. A lot of business owners don’t take digital marketing seriously and think that it’s the first expense they will get rid of whenever they get the chance.
Base Expenses
These expenses are sometimes hidden to the naked eye. but you should expect to pay these each month. Someone needs to manage and monitor everything no different than the electric company needs for the light at your place of business. This may be you, or someone inside of your business doing this. So you can consider this an expense that you are already paying for with a salary, no hard feelings. The truth is, it takes time to come up with ideas for a post and to even make something like a simple graphic, so in this instance, you are donating your time to it. Here’s an example of a few basic expenses that you should consider part of your utility bill each month:
- Web Maintenance – this could range anywhere from $49 – $250 depending on what you’re paying for exactly. A basic package should include Uptime Monitoring and Backups.
- Digital Presence – what’s that? you might ask. Well, you ever have a customer tell you that your hours are different online? That’s digital presence. This could range similar to web maintenance as well $49-$250.
- Content Creation – this isn’t necessary a necessity for all business owners, but I’d be a fool if I wrote for a brand called Growth and didn’t encourage you to create content that actually grows your brand. Plan to pay a few hundred dollars a month for content ranging from graphics to a single bog post.
Vendor Expenses
Now here’s where things get interesting. All these different social platforms are free to use, and when you post some thing on Facebook or Instagram, the same 3 people might like the post or comment each time and you feel good about it, but you’re either not reaching anyone new at all, or you are reaching very few new people with your posts. In fact, when you post, you are reaching exactly 3% of your audience. That’s it. If you actually want to grow your brand, reach a new audience to gain new followers, or make new sales you need to pay Facebook & Instagram in order to do that. This is what we call Ad Spend in the digital marketing world. This expense is ONLY contributing to placement of ads. It has absolutely nothing to do with using the actual platform that you use on a daily basis, it just unlocks new features for you to use if you’d like to expand your range for your posts.
It’s worth noting that at the original time of writing this article (9/12/2023) TikTok is the exception as growth is astronomical regardless of running ads or not. Matter of fact, I’d encourage you to NOT run ads unless its a specific campaign geared towards leadgen or a very specific audience for conversions.
Some examples of vendor expenses are:
- Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram)
- Google Ads
- TikTok Ads
- Jotform (the best website form product on the market)
Summary
Once you start thinking of things as an investment instead of an expense, which they rightfully are, it will be much easier to sign up for the right tools that you need. Always ask yourself whats the alternative, what’s the return of investment if you don’t pay $49 a month to make sure your hours are right, and you end up losing the biggest sale of the year. Everything comes with a cost, you just need to prioritize the important investments in order to better align yourself for growth.