Starting a business is easily one of the most intimidating things to do because of the vast amount of uncertainty and the thin line between success and failure. The entire business model and strategy, however, can be equally enigmatic without a proper or well-defined budget. For this reason, it is critical to set a realistic budget that is strictly adhered to, especially within the first few years of inception.
When making a budget, it is important to allocate some funds to marketing in order to grow. In fact, if your company is doing less than $5 million in sales, the U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending between 7-8% of your Gross Revenue on marketing and advertising. In reality, you should have some amount of money set aside to formulate a marketing strategy, not just the basics.
But how does one go about doing such a strategy? Well, at Blayzer, we get a lot of questions about strategies and where to start. Often times, we find that clients don’t really have a defined budget for what they are willing to allocate to marketing or web design. Without this, it is hard to come up with an appropriate strategy. To illustrate how counterproductive this is for both the clients and Blayzer, we’ll use the Property Brothers approach.
The Property Brothers approach is to ask our client, without a budget, to tell us a marketing strategy, their dream website, or any other customizable part of their business. From there, we create the most incredible marketing strategy and web design possible (if we do say so ourselves). Now we present this to the client, and they fall in love. After all, it’s their dream setup. But then the dream-crushing cost follows the presentation, which usually ends up being an outrageous amount and way more than the client wanted to spend. This has not only broken the client’s heart, but it wasted both of our times.
This is why we ask you to have a set budget for these types of costs. Whether you want web design or a marketing plan, always have money set aside to be able to obtain your goals. At Blayzer, we ask what you want and give you various pricing options to help you make the best decision for your business.
For a FREE consultation to see what plan works best with your budget, contact Blayzer today.
