Page 288 - Duct Tape Marketing

Commit to Your Marketing with a Plan, Budget, and Calendar

So at this point we jump back to your new revenue and new client
goals to start our thinking on a budget number. If you generated new
clients in the past year and can track what you spent on marketing as
well, you can theoretically determine what your acquisition cost for
each new client was.

Let’s recap: I’ve introduced you to a way to set revenue and new
client goals, a method to determine what a new client is worth to your
business, and a way to calculate your client acquisition cost. In a per-
fect world, you would simply take your new client goal and multiply
it by your acquisition cost and, voilà! A marketing budget. This is
fraught with problems because it assumes that you have been working
your Duct Tape Marketing system all along, which we know can’t be
true, or why would you be holding this book? So we’ve got to take
what we’ve learned in this chapter and start applying some Duct Tape
magic to it.

Create a Budget and Stick to It
The number we are trying to get to with all of this Duct Tape

math is a total marketing budget amount. I’m not really trying to give
you a proven method for predicting exactly what you should budget
for your marketing as much as I am attempting to teach you what to
focus on in order to correctly predict a return on your future mar-
keting expenditures. If you’ve never done any amount of marketing
budgeting, you’ve got to start somewhere. At best, we can come up
with a calculated guess—and then we’ll test our guess. Here are the
factors we have so far:

1. Your marketing goals (based on your projected goal for new
clients)

2. Your cost to acquire a new client (based on your past market-
ing expenditures)

3. Your marketing budget

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