Speaker 1: Million-dollar marketing budgets are great, but they're not always realistic for many small business owners and entrepreneurs. So with the reality of a more limited budget to work with, you need to be sure you're maximizing your budget's reach, impact, and effectiveness. Which is why on this episode we're talking all about the $10 per day marketing budget, and the best way to ensure you're getting the most bang for your marketing buck. Hello and welcome, my name is Adam Erhart and you're watching the Modern Marketing Show, where we take different marketing tactics, tools, tips, and strategies and break them down into bite-sized actionable clips that you can use to immediately take your business to the next level. Even though it's probably the least sexy word in all of marketing, a budget is still a pretty important tool to have, especially in the beginning or when testing something new where results aren't necessarily guaranteed. It may take more than a few tries to figure things out. To make things worse, it seems that everybody out there is suggesting some complicated combination of different tools and tactics to use in your business, all of which take time and all of which take money, eating up your budget and pushing you further down the rabbit hole of marketing confusion and overwhelm. So what should you do? And where should you start? And most importantly, how can you protect your precious resources while still growing your business? Here's my advice. The first step is to dedicate and invest at least 10% of your business's revenue towards your marketing, or if you're just starting out, then you can use $10 per day to start. $10 per day is really a bare-bones minimum marketing budget though, as marketing is a vital business function and ignoring it or dedicating any less than $10 a day towards it is a recipe for disaster in the long run. Now of course you can invest more and for most businesses, I'd advise prioritizing your marketing above many other business function and giving it the respect and budget it deserves. But if you're brand new to business or running with a really tight budget, it is okay to start with as little as $10 per day. Over time, as your business grows, you can scale up and invest more in the areas that are delivering the best results while cutting back on the areas that aren't. So here's how to make that $10 a day really work for you. The first step in maximizing your budget is to cut that $10 in half and assign $5 a day to training and ongoing education. With a smaller budget, many of the things needed for your business to grow and thrive are going to need to be done by you. In fact, even if you decide to hire or outsource some of the work in the future, it's still a really good idea to at least have a basic understanding of marketing and how to apply some of these tactics and strategies to your business. Training can be done in any number of different ways, but the most cost-effective way is likely through reading books, joining online communities like the Modern Marketing Community, and taking online training programs like Modern Marketing Mastery, the FBAds Lab, or the Authority Marketing Process, which are designed to help grow your business and all of which can be done for less than $5 a day. The next step will be to take your remaining $5 and begin working on the four pillars of digital marketing one by one. Rather than tackling everything at once, focus on training and ongoing education first, then use your remaining budget to put the rest of your marketing campaign together piece by piece. Here are the four pillars of digital marketing you'll want to concentrate on. Start with website optimization by ensuring you have a clean, modern, and efficient website that represents your business and helps convert visitors into buyers. This is your business's hub and the central piece of your entire digital marketing strategy. It doesn't need to be overly complicated to start, but it does need to be clean, modern, and strategically designed to help you achieve your goals. Next, focus on content marketing and creating helpful content for your customers through a blog, podcast, or video series just like this one. Content not only helps your website rank better in the search engines, but it also gives you multiple opportunities to be found online. Effective content marketing also builds trust, authority, and makes your business easier to refer to. After that, it's time to move on to email marketing and implementing an email autoresponder service like MailChimp, Aweber, or my personal recommendation, Drip, to help you better connect and stay top of mind among your customers. Email marketing provides one of the highest ROIs out there and is a powerful tool every business should be using. Then finally, it's time to invest in social media marketing and advertising. Fortunately, thanks to the targeting and retargeting options that are now available, reaching your ideal target market is more effective and cost-efficient than ever before. When working with a budget like $10 a day, the key is to take things slow, learn, implement, adjust, and keep moving forward. Over time, a steady and consistent investment will ensure you build up a solid and strong marketing foundation. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to the channel, give it a thumbs up, and if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for a future video, be sure to leave them in the comment section below. If you'd like more content like this, then be sure to download your free copy of the one-page marketing plan by visiting adamerhart.com forward slash plan, which will not only give you a great free resource, but it'll also give you insider access to my best tips, tricks, and strategies that I don't share anywhere else. Take care for now and I'll catch you next time on the Modern Marketing Show.