Marketing Budgets and Adspend Ego

Be careful the ego that may stem from, and remain attached to your ad spend and overall marketing budget.

Before going all-in on Tally and Mass, I was a Chief Marketing Officer, a one-man Marketing Band, and before that a Director of Client Strategy at an SEO agency. I talked to maybe 200 marketing leaders over the course of those years and there was almost always a sort of ego attached to one’s ad spend that I couldn’t quite understand.

In serious marketing circles, people ask about what main channels you are focusing on, what seems to be working, but very few people talk about their blogs. I can understand it’s not as sexy as driving six or seven figure ad budgets, but I am convinced that the blog is the single most under-valued, under-appreciated, and misunderstood asset in the toolbox of the modern marketer. With a blog, you can speak directly to your customer, in a very very specific way, and find 100 different ways to prove real value to them without managing bids, negs, match types, etc. and the growth of this doesn’t have a shelf-life. Write something meaningful once and own it forever. Be useful to a future prospect. As you do this over the life of your company you will build an asset base of value for your prospects, clients, partners that lasts. Ad spend has a shelf life.

With this in mind, I would recommend we always make sure the budget you manage is based on effectiveness and goals, but also what I call “real value”. Try to remind your CEO that an MQL is a real human person, and one of the ways they will want to work with us (in time) is by extracting value from us before we make them pay… We should be a trusted partner before they talk to sales… in our content, vision, promise, direction, technical documentation, etc. and a blog is one way to do that in a very very specific way.

Manage your budget the way you need to… but make sure there is room for the long-game. The specific game. The customer-oriented game.