Don’t spend – test

An important part of any marketing plan is knowing what budget you have available to spend on marketing.  Only you can answer this question, but there comes a point in every business where you have to commit to spending money to grow.    When you start out, costs can rack up.  Getting a website, buying equipment and ingredients, spending on advertising, they all soon eat through your money.  This is why it is important that you don’t do any of this until you have proven that your idea works.  Before you pay for a website, start out with a Facebook page to test the market.  Before you buy equipment to automate making thousands of your product, make tens by hand until you know that they sell.  Don’t buy in materials or stock until you already have the first orders in the bank.  And don’t spend money on marketing until you know that the people you connect with will buy what you are selling.  If you’ve already got your business in front of 100 people and none of them have become customers, don’t then spend money getting it in front of 1,000 people, because you will likely get the same result.

Don’t put £1,000 into Google Pay Per Click; put £100 into it and test and tweak until you are getting the best possible return for each click you pay for.  Get your first logo on Fiverr or design it yourself in PowerPoint, then go engage with a designer once you know you can get orders.  If you think your logo is the reason no-one is buying then you’re ignoring other huge issues you need to fix first.  Don’t spend a penny if you can help it before you get your first order.

And when you do have to spend, work out what is going to get you the best results first and then work out which of those your budget can fund.  Test first, check the results, change and tweak, then test again.  Before going for the full magazine double-page spread, take a quarter-page with a unique discount code so that you can track how many new enquiries it generated.  Take the cheap stand at your first event that just has room for you and a pull-up banner, then find out how your pitch works with the public before taking the bigger stand at the next one.  Always use the free service to test something out before signing up for the paid twelve months.

Are you getting my message here?  The only time you should ever spend money on your business is to build on something that you have already proved is working.   If not, you could be left with a business loan to pay back, or your savings completely drained in return for something that YOU thought everyone would want but no-one actually did.