ROI Of Time From a Marketers Perspective might have different terminology from an investor, but we essentially want to measure the same thing – is the time (or money) you’re spending on something worth the return or profit. Your ROI (return on investment) will be dependent on what you have more of this year. Do you have more time than money or more money than time? These two questions are essential in understanding your current state. In business, you need to either spend time or money; Time educating and doing or money hiring the experts. Today, Audrey is going to help you gauge which side of the road you’re on today and how you can stretch your ROI on time with either people or education because winging it won’t get you very far!
Links Mentioned In This Episode
Episode 34- Product Review and Deep Dive: Mailchimp Email and CRM System
ROI Of Time From a Marketers Perspective Summary
Let’s start with a quick definition of ROI and how it’s used in business and marketing
ROI- Return on investment (ROI) is a performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency or profitability of an investment or compare the efficiency of a number of different investments.
Now let’s take a look at not only a financial but time example.
Financial Example
From a digital advertising perspective: Monthly ad spend is $1,000 which results in an average custom sign-up of 1 customer per month. The worth of that new client is anywhere from $2,000 – 10,000 to your business. This is a pretty good ROI.
Time Example
In order to create the ad referenced above, you need to do the following things:
Set up an account(s) if you are using multiple platforms.
Write the ad copy
Select images for the ad
Create video for the ads
Decide on the type of ads you are going to run in Google (You can run many types of ads -search display, YouTube, etc.)
Specify a target audience
Create the ad in the ad account
Watch and adjust the ad to optimize it.
That’s a lot of work and requires multiple skillsets!
Now you need to ask yourself, What is your time worth? That is the ROI of Time.
Let’s walk through some questions you should ask yourself to decide if you should try to DIY your marketing or hire experts.
- Are you full time or part time in your business?
If you are full-time, are you making enough revenue to invest 20% of gross to a marketing budget?
If the answer is yes, outsource your marketing. If the answer is no, spend money on educating yourself to do marketing the right way.
If you are part-time, set aside money for hiring a marketing agency as part of your start-up costs. You will burn out really fast and your time to market will be much slower if you try to DIY your marketing.
Example – Building a website that is designed to attract your perfect client and get them to take action.
Strategic audience knowledge – do you know how to talk to your audience?
Writing Skills
Website design skills – learn how to layout a website and the things that need to be on it to make your site effective
Website Platform Technical knowledge – WordPress, Shopify – you have to know what and how the tool works in order to get what you need from it.
SEO knowledge and how to implement it on your Website platform WordPress has plugins like Rank Math, Shopify is launching YOAST but also has SEO Master so you don’t have to code for SEO any longer.
- What do you have more of this year?
If you have more time and less money, i.e. a smaller marketing budget, you may DIY more. You can offset costs by hiring a company do to the initial setup for you then taking over the day-to-day yourself.
Example: Implementing Mailchimp Content Marketing
Let’s say you want to send newsletters to clients and have a sales funnel for leads. You can hire a Mailchimp expert to set up your account, connect your client list to your Mailchimp system and work with you to make sure your website is set up with a signup form for the newsletter. They can also set up all your automations:
Welcome
Sales funnel
Birthday reminders
Create an email template for you.
Then all you have to do is write and publish your newsletter articles each month and send them out. You can also ask them to throw in some training, too, for your specific account.
Your 50-50, you have the same amount of time and financial equity for a marketing budget. This is that tipping point for many businesses when they have to ask themselves the question, should they higher or do it themselves. You are starting to get crunched on time but your budget isn’t quite big enough yet to outsource it all.
Get quotes for everything and then decide what you want to move off your plate and what you want to keep. Definitely offload the stuff you don’t get too regularly either because you don’t like it or you just really don’t have time for it.
Example – Outsource digital advertising, keep Social Media Posting.
The learning curve for Digital advertising is much larger than social posting and you can waste a lot of ad budget by not setting up the digital ads correctly. So you outsource the strategy and create and maintain the ads but you continue to do your monthly social posting (writing/ image selection and scheduling). The money you are not spending on outsourcing the posting can be your ad budget for your ads.
You have more money than time-This is when a business has finally made it and they need an agency to manage their marketing. The agency will understand your goals, create a strategy, evaluate your current campaigns looking for gaps and then manage and run everything going forward. If there are things you prefer to keep yourself or for your team, you can always carve them out.
