The Big Question: How Much is Marketing?

This is the question everyone wants to ask, does anyone really know the answer. Honestly, there is probably no definitive answer. It very much depends on your understanding of branding.

The real answer is what can you afford?

Here at leads4biz we start from a onetime fee of $10 which is the joining fee to have a basic info listing page to advertise your business in your chosen category, forever.

If you are at the ‘We just invented/ completed this, can you help us sell it?’ phase it will cost more as you need 3-6 months of a brand awareness campaign to get people to know about you and trust you, because without trust you have a very small chance of selling anything. Imagine trying to build a snowman in the tropics and you get the idea.

Brand awareness starts with a Search Engine Optimized, well-designed, website costing around $1000. Just creating a website and leaving it to mingle with the other billion plus websites on the internet will be like building a house with no for sale sign or no agents, then expecting people to call you to ask if it is for sale. It just won’t happen!

Even if you have an instant cure for cancer, or the answer to the universe, no one will know you exist without help with digital marketing.

To get people to know about your website and click to it needs education, showcasing potential customers why you should be trusted, what makes you and your product so great and what solution you provide to an eternal issue we all have. For a complete startup you need at least 2 blogs a week over say 6 months.

A decent business blogger will charge around $30 a blog. I am not referring to the hordes of sub-continent SEO operatives who churn out articles like 5 a day. The typical non-researched 750 words of over spun waffle you can get for $5 per article that contributes to the wall of crap out there, that only a Search Engine robot will read (and last time I checked Google bots don’t buy anything!).

If you have less than 20,000 likes and followers on the major social media business platforms, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, you will really struggle to get anyone to see anything you have regardless of how good it is. You will shudder to see that some influencers can ‘earn a sports car’ off a business to endorse one product. Yes, this is all well and good in the entertainment industry you say, but what about Business to Business?

There are still some of us bloggers who love the science of business and are well versed in many avenues of commerce and can still hold our own in many subjects, especially if it’s of an entrepreneurial nature. Maybe we don’t have silicone breasts and hair extensions but we can still drive people to your site with good keywords and interesting content. We charge $35 to write a 1000 word blog article with licensed images and follow links to your landing pages, and another $35 to share your blog on our social media reach which took ten years to get to over 300,000.

Did you know the average spend for a business on Facebook is $5000 a month, so when you come to us with $100 a month budget to spend on paid ads, we kind of have a good shrink on the site to prepare you to live with disappointment.

Then you need videos on your own Video Channel like You Tube and or Vimeo and with the right keywords shared to at least a 200,000 reach (to get 001% shown on social media feeds). Many companies charge around $300-500 for a corporate video but we can do them for $200 for a basic images and text video, as we have contracts with the top video platforms with licensed music and images. You need at least 2 a month to build your brand over 6 months. If you are wanting a green screen interview, then you need bigger pockets!

Online Press releases are pivotal, and you will struggle to find any successful business, especially in the B2B arena who do not use them a lot. Online press releases are news about your company, a new promotion, executive appointment, product or service, or even an anniversary. They are very effective in demonstrating longevity and success, all of which builds trust. They can be syndicated meaning you can have them published on digital news outlet websites around the world and this is fantastic for your back links which help your website rank on search engines notwithstanding the traffic they send direct to your website from the major business centres.

For a press release article, we charge $200 to write publish and syndicate. One per month over six months should be part of your strategy.

Then you need to have a good segmented subscribed list you email to every week with your blogs and news. What’s that you say? You don’t have a list? You must have heard Digital Marketing gurus tell you the money is in your list? To be successful online you must have been growing your subscriber list for the last decade? No? oops!

Well you then need to find someone who has a subscriber list who has been toiling away every week giving away gifts and blogging and sharing just to get a decent subscriber base to send newsletters to every week. Well as it happens you are in the right place , we have a list that we send to each week. To get on our newsletters you need to upgrade to one of our premium packages that start from just $10 a month. that or get your own email marketing platform like Mailchimp or Awebber, and if you have around 1000 subscribers then you are looking at around $60 a month to send out each week. Many platforms charge by subscribers so if you have more than 30,000 emails addresses you email to each week like we do it will be around $150 a month!

So, there are the basics you need to get a product from zero to hero. If you ask a marketing guy to do it for free for you, promising massive commission rates on sales, don’t be offended when they hang up on you. You want them to take all the risk for you, when you have so much faith in your product or service yet you are scared it won’t sell?? And want your marketing guy to do all the work? Think again and get serious about business.