I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard small business owners say, “We don’t have any money for marketing.” After some exploration, I make the invariable discovery that the alleged lack of a marketing budget – which I will call “marketing budget famine” here – results from both the misallocation of resources and misunderstanding of what marketing is. How to prevent the marketing budget famine?
Famine and its causes
Let’s define famine as a shortage or scarcity of a food or other resource in a given area at a given time. The last two qualifiers are key: famines are typically confined to a certain geographic area and a certain time period. Food or other resource is available outside these confines and often even within them – during the famous 1845 Ireland and 1973 Ethiopia famines food was actually being exported from these areas. Rather than a resource shortage or scarcity, therefore, famine results from lack of access to the resource. Conversely, on the supply side famine results from skewed distribution of the needed resource.
Underlying the access and distribution issues are, in the case of food famines, natural disasters (droughts or floods), disease, war, civil unrest, overpopulation, migration and resulting population displacement, economic failure, or misguided government policy. Not only are most of these systemic shocks caused by man (yes, typically male, too), they’re also preventable.
Preventing the marketing budget famine
If you say you don’t have a budget for marketing, you claim lack of immediate access to marketing resources – the marketing budget famine. In your business, money is only one of the marketing resources. Typically businesses do possess the total sum of financial resources needed to build a successful business, it’s just distributed to other uses or even simply wasted. In fact, often money is misallocated within the marketing budget, cart-before-the-horse style – I’ve seen companies place ads without a strategy, build websites that are “for everyone”, or proclaim having no competition whatsoever.
False priorities, shiny object syndrome, succumbing to hard sell pitches, bad habits, inadequate hires, and plenty of other things may cause the misallocation of resources. Those are just the proximate causes, however. The underlying cause tends to be the absence of strategy. Kelly Quashnie once pointed out to me the 6Ps of planning; repeat after me: “Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance“. Indeed, proper planning prevents piss poor resource allocation and the marketing budget famine.
Leaving aside the rule, You have to spend money to make money, the marketing budget famine also results from the misconception of how much money marketing requires. In other words, it’s not about how much money you have, it’s about how you use it. Circle back to resource allocation and focusing on what matters in your business and your community.
I started Semiosis Communications in January 2008 with about $100: $50 for the business license, $20 for website domain registrations, $20 for temporary business cards, $5 for office supplies and $5 for coffee with my first client. Last month, this website cost me all of $87 for the Thesis premium theme and less than an hour of Cameron Design’s time to customize the header. Everything else on the website – content and customization – I’ve done and will continue to do myself. There are many free or low cost tools out there that will do the job just as well or better as the expensive versions.
The other major marketing resource is time. Time, too, can be misallocated and wasted. I stopped going to general networking meetings because I rarely meet my target audiences there (plus those meetings are usually boring). Networking, email, phone calls, blog, social media, are all free or very low dollar cost tools that only require you to put time in them, while following your strategy. If Bacon Salt can start a multimillion dollar business on Facebook, you can too. It all starts with a dream and a vision. It all grows with focus and consistency and allocating your resources where they can make the most difference.
As for the misconceptualization of marketing, marketing is more than promotion. If you think of marketing as understanding your customer’s needs and building a business to satisfy them (you are in business to satisfy real needs, right?), all business decisions are marketing decisions and vice versa! Triple bottom line business goals? Marketing. Niche? Marketing. What to sell, where to set up shop, how much to charge, how to promote? Four times marketing. Telling me you don’t have a budget for marketing? Yes, that too is marketing.
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Image credits: rogilde and Ti H20
