MBA2353 Q&A Wednesday: How do I spend my limited marketing budget?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenhom. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today is Q &A Wednesday. On Q &A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Marvin, and Marvin asks, Omar, I'd like to invest in marketing. I have a limited budget of$500 a month. I know it's not much, but I want to at least get started and start spreading the message about my products and services.

0:47What do you suggest? I absolutely love this question because many people think it's not worth marketing if you can't spend a lot of money, thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. That's absolutely false. In fact, it's actually great that Marvin has a small budget to start with because you can actually perfect your marketing without wasting too much money because of your limited budget. People that have lots of money and lots of budget often waste a lot of money trying to understand how to market properly. And in fact, you're going to learn today how$500 actually can get you a lot in marketing power, get you more leads, get you more sales, if you know how to use it.

1:25So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. There's so many ways to spend money on marketing. You can do print marketing, billboards, YouTube ads, social media ads. You could sponsor a conference. You can print T-shirts. There's so many ways you can spend money on marketing. But when budgets are tight, how best should you spend your money? Well, that's what we're going to answer in today's Q &A Wednesday. When you have a limited budget, like$500 a month, you need to make sure whatever you invest in, you can track your return on ad spend. That you know exactly how much money you're investing and how much it gets you in return.

2:04How many leads, how many sales, if that generates sales. so you can actually understand, okay, every time I spend X amount of dollars, I get X amount of customers. And most marketing out there does not do that. It's very hard to track. For example, if you have a billboard out there in the real world, it's kind of hard to know how effective this ad will be. You don't know how people are actually looking at it, reading it, then taking action because of it. Yeah, you can put up a QR code or whatever, and that can help a little bit with your tracking, but still not an exact science. This is why I always recommend people to get started with digital ads, particularly Facebook and Instagram ads.

2:43That's a good place to start to get some decent return on ad spend when you have a smaller budget. Yes, there's other options. You can advertise on Twitter and TikTok and YouTube and LinkedIn, but those can get pretty costly pretty quickly. And if it's going to cost you lots of money per click or per conversion, you're not going to have enough momentum to actually see it working. This is why I think you should start with Instagram ads and Facebook ads when you're getting started with a limited budget. You can get a pretty good return on investment. But how do you do it? How do you actually run these ads?

3:17Do you have to hire an agency? Do you hire somebody in your team to do it? Well, that can get really costly. And before you know it, that 500 bucks budget is gone. So the alternative is that you learn it. You learn how to do this yourself. And this is actually quite a great skill to have because you can then document what you learn, document how to create these ads, and then pass it on to anybody you hire on your team in the future or somebody existing in your team. So what resource do I recommend when it comes to learning Instagram or Facebook ads? Well, one of the best bang for your buck, cost-effective ways to learn how to run any kind of digital marketing or ads is with Laurel Portier's course.

4:02She's got a$7 a month coaching program, really. The website's adcoaching4seven, the number seven.com. I'm not an affiliate. I don't get a kickback. She's not a sponsor. I just know her stuff. I know it's good. And it's$7 a month. So it's pretty inexpensive to get started and to learn the stuff. If you have the time, if you can carve out some time on the weekend or in the evenings to learn what she teaches, you can create ads and run them on a pretty tight budget. In fact, one of the most popular courses in that training is how to run Facebook and Instagram ads for only$300 a month and get clients with it.

4:41I'm going to let you check it out. There's a lot of detail in there about what kind of ads and what kind of audiences and how they convert and all that kind of stuff. But for $7 a month, it's a great bargain. Even if you just use it for six or seven months, you train yourself up, you start running ads and you start seeing some conversions. The other great thing about this program is that she has monthly calls so she can coach you through some of the ads that are not working for you. So this is where I'd start. Learn how to run your own Facebook and Instagram ads and start running Instagram ads, Facebook ads to get more leads, get more sales.

5:14She will show you how to do that in the course. But the point here is that this is a way for you to be able to know how to turn on the tap. Every business needs to know how to generate customers. It needs to have some sort of way to tap into customer acquisition. And if you know how to do this, if you learn this, it's going to be very powerful for your business now and in the future. Now, as you start running ads and you start making money with your ads, you know, making a return on investment and making sales and making some profits, The next move I would make in terms of improving your ads and making even more money with marketing is using a tool called AdEspresso.

5:49AdEspresso is an online software that helps you optimize your ads on Facebook and Instagram, and I believe Google as well. And it's a game changer because it's going to save you a lot of time. It's going to optimize your ads so you can save a lot of money in the process. And basically what it does is it uses all the available information you could provide it to cross test all different types of ads, all different versions of your ad. So, for example, it will ask you for, you know, four headlines, four images, four descriptions, four calls to action, and then it changes it up. It basically uses all these variables to create hundreds of different ads.

6:29then it split tests them, and then it just keeps running the ads that are working and stops running the ads that are not working. So it does a lot of legwork for you. Ad espresso starts at$49 a month. If your ad spend is$1 ,000 or less, if it goes above 1 ,000, you're gonna have to move up to the$99 a month plan. In my opinion, it's well worth it. It's one of the best tools I've used when it comes to running ads. This episode is brought to you by The Jordan Harbinger Show. This is a podcast you need to add to your rotation. It's smart, it's interesting, and it's by far, in my opinion, the best interview podcast out there.

7:07It's hosted by my buddy Jordan Harbinger. I've known him for years, and in a lot of ways, I look up to Jordan. He's one of the best podcasters I know because he does his research. His episodes are really well done. He asks his guests questions that other shows just don't ask. It's almost like he's predicting what I want to hear from the guest and what I would ask him if I was in front of him. The Jordan Harbinger Show won Best of Apple in 2018, and it's for good reason. Let me give you some of my favorite episodes to get started with. I absolutely love his interview with T-Pain, the rapper. It's more than meets the eye.

7:39It's hilarious and such an education on how to live life. His interview with Matthew McConaughey was incredible, as well as his chat with Terry Crews. I also love his Sunday episodes. They're called Skeptical Sundays. The one he did on 5G was so, so good. I'm a huge fan of the Jordan Harbinger Show and Jordan himself. You can't go wrong by adding Jordan Harbinger Show to your rotation. It's incredibly interesting. It's never dull. Search the Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Here's a secret about running digital ads. Creating the actual ads inside of Facebook, the technology, the audiences, all that kind of stuff.

8:20the split testing, that's actually the easy part once you know how to do it. That's why you're taking that course. That's why you're learning. That's why you're trying to level up. But once you know how to do that, the challenging part is coming up with great compelling copy, great images, great headlines. That's what people actually are going to see and read and cause them to click and go to your website or buy your product or opt into your freebie so they join your email list. The actual content is what is going to take some work. You're going to need to get better at that. Luckily, there's a lot of technology for that.

8:54If you're on a budget, ChatGPT is your friend. Come up with one headline, one description, one title, and then ask it to come up with a whole bunch of other variations. Of course, you can ask it to act as if. Act as if you are a marketer. You're a great direct response writer. If you're using ChatGPT4, you can give it a link and say, study my website. This is what it's all about. There are other AI tools that are specific to marketing that are paid like Jasper. You can check them out, but these tools can help you come up with great copy, fresh copy that you can use over and over every single time you're running ads.

9:28The one thing I learned about running digital ads and marketing is that you don't know anything. What do I mean by that? The ads I always think that are clever and interesting and fun and the images look great. And I think that, wow, this ad is going to go gangbusters. Those never do well. It's the boring, weird ads that I just think, okay, I'm going to try and see how it goes. And those are the ones that always kind of take off. It's weird. And it's just a reminder that your taste is not the same as everybody else's taste. And what converts is not up to you. It's up to the marketplace. So that's why we have to split test.

10:02That's why we use tools like AdEspresso. This is why we have to create copy, new copy all the time, new images, new calls to action to make sure that we're optimizing our ads. Marvin, I hope that helps answer your question here on Q &A Wednesday. It's great that you have a budget. It's great that you're starting somewhere. Start with Laura Portier's$7 course or$7 coaching and start running your digital ads on Facebook and Instagram. And before you know it, you'll start spending more than$500 because you'll make money and you can up your budget to$1 ,000, to$1 ,500, to$2 ,000, to$10 ,000. I know entrepreneurs, companies, solopreneurs that are spending$50 ,000 to$100 ,000 a month on digital ads.

10:42Why would they do that? Because they get a return on ad spend. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. If you've got a question you want to ask here on Q &A Wednesday, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer right here on Q &A Wednesday. If you haven't subscribed or followed to the podcast yet, whether you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Overcast or whatever podcast player, go ahead and hit follow or subscribe right now so you get the next episode automatically and you get access to over 2 ,300 episodes in our back catalog. Before I go, I want to leave you with this.

11:12Anytime you're trying something new, try it with a small step, with a small experiment. And$500 is good enough money to experiment with marketing. It's not too little where you can't see results. It's not too much where, you know, if you waste that money or that money doesn't return on anything, it's going to be the end of your business. So it's always good to experiment with a respectable but conservative amount of money so you can learn. Because remember, you got to pay that ignorance debt in the beginning where you're not really sure what you're doing. And you're not going to be optimized 100 % because you're going to make mistakes.

11:46But as you get better and better and start doing this over and over, your money will go further and further and work for you better and better. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.