Marketing Minute: I’ve Got $10,000 a Month to Spend on B2B Marketing. What Should I Do?

From Our Sponsor: The greatest enemy of a fabulous ad is a poor site experience, so be careful. 

By Steve Krull

For $10,000, this certainly feels like a million-dollar question. Perhaps that’s because it’s a fair amount of money for smaller companies. Or perhaps it’s because we want to convert that $10,000 per month into $1 million in opportunity. 

Even if you have more than $10,000 a month to spend, what follows may very well apply to your situation as well. Regardless, as a business owner, you want those dollars to be invested and not just spent. 

The trick with $10,000 per month is that you know it probably won’t allow you to do everything you want to do—and certainly not everything you could do. You also know that at the end of every quarter and at the end of the financial year, your marketing spend is going to be analyzed to the very last cent, and you’ll have to demonstrate whats results that spend brought.

As your advisor, my first question to you is going to be: “Do you have digital marketing resources?” If you don’t have resources like an SEO person, a content writer, a web developer, or someone who knows their way around LinkedIn or a PPC campaign, we can still find success, but there will be fewer options. For the sake of this conversation, we’ll assume you have someone internally, a small agency, or an independent contractor who can handle some of these things. Assuming you’ve got resources in place, it’s time to build your budget.

For $10,000, I’d generally suggest that you break your campaign and activity into two phases. 

Phase 1: Get your website up to scratch

Spend 90 to 120 days really focusing on your site.

This is where you’ll be driving leads, prospects, and customers, so you need to make sure it works properly when they get there. During this phase, you should be drilling down on the details. Tweak the user journey to push people toward conversion. Spend time creating useful content that answers questions and provides the information customers need to make a buying decision. Create downloadable assets, such as white papers, guides, blog posts and the like. to generate new leads. And make sure you have calls to action around your site that make it clear what you want people to do when they land on a page. You’d be surprised how many websites don’t take this fundamental step.

The end result of this first phase should be a site that functions well and a content calendar that supports the site, social media and your lead generation activities. 

Phase 2: Expand your reach with LinkedIn paid ads

Once you’ve got your website up where you want it, I would suggest leveraging some of that content you’re creating for your website by building out some small LinkedIn campaigns. Why LinkedIn? With LinkedIn you can target your ideal customers directly. You might be surprised at just how granular you can get on LinkedIn. You can target based on geography, on job titles, even on the actual names of the specific people in your ideal companies.  By focusing your content, you can start to create meaningful conversations with prospects. 

Do you have a sales team? Are they active on LinkedIn? If both answers are yes, leverage them to compliment your marketing efforts by simultaneously reaching out to your ideal customers while leveraging ads for awareness. If you are both owner and sales team, my advice is to find someone trustworthy to do some of this work on your behalf. If you need ideas here, please reach out to me directly. I’m happy to share what’s worked and what hasn’t for me and for our clients. 

What’s great about leveraging LinkedIn ads is that you’ve already created the content you need on your website. You just need to tailor it more toward the specific people you’re targeting with your paid ads.

To summarize, if you’re working with smaller marketing budgets, you definitely need focus. To me, focus is taking on bite-sized tactics and having patience for the long game.

Truth be told, if your budget is 2x, 3x or even 5x, my experience shows that the order of operations shouldn’t change. Start with your site, follow with quality content and finish with advertising. Yes, with more money invested you can probably accelerate in some areas or operate in parallel. That said, the greatest enemy of a fabulous ad is a poor site experience, so be careful. 

Steve Krull is CEO of Be Found Online. If you have any questions or need digital marketing help, reach out on Twitter (@SteveKrull) or on LinkedIn.