⏰ Inspiration for your annual marketing budget planning.
I couldn’t have said it any better, so before I say anything more I first want to say, thanks GAIL!
🙌🏿🙌🏾🙌🏽🙌🏼🙌🏻🙌
Anyone who’s been in the design industry even for just a beat has certainly heard of Gail Doby—a celebrated interior designer with a background in finance and banking. Her business acumen and wisdom has guided numerous designers, architects, and other creative professionals to profitability and financial freedom.
Gail’s monthly business advice column in Business of Home landed in my inbox THIS MORNING, and I really wanted to share it with you because I had been sitting on a draft of this post since last week and this was the push I needed to get it out!
Read her wise words here then come back to me.
This month’s she’s talking about marketing 💕, here’s what you’ll takeaway:
- When it’s time to hire marketing support in-house (the revenue number for this really surprised me!)
- When to outsource your marketing (for firms less than 4 people this is a MUST…yes, you can have it all! But no, you can’t do it all)
- How much time each week you should be spending on your marketing (Gail recommends ~10 hours even if you have help)
…and I’ll add to that some budgeting scenarios below for your marketing. I recommend small businesses in our industry budget between 10-15% of their annual revenue on marketing each year.
So depending on your ambition and goals, my napkin math looks like this in three scenarios:
📈 If your annual business revenue is $100K
…and you can manage 10% to allocate to marketing that’s $10K/ year.
I would spend this on a really well done brand design so that you have the solid visual and narrative foundations you need to implement it yourself across your website and socials—it will be consistent and GORGEOUS from the beginning, and you won’t need to spend the money (or time!) again in a few years to redo it all over again.
💵 For revenue between $250-500K/ year
…a 10% allocation for marketing is $25-50K or between $2-4K/ month.
At this level, I’d recommend investments in your content strategy, upleveling your website, outsourcing to take your socials off your hands, creating community engagement with an event strategy or email campaigns, etc!
🚀 If you’re at $500K-1M/ year
…a 10-15% allocation is $50-150K or between $4-12K/ month.
For this you might be tempted to hire someone in-house (depending on your market), but I’d still outsource to an agency that can more quickly and efficiently manage your website, social media, or content marketing (provided you have clear guidelines to direct them so they stay on-brand!).
📌 If you don’t have a solid (and inspiring!) marketing plan, but want one fast, consider signing up for a Marketing Planning Intensive.
In just one week you’ll get a fully customized, 12-month brand marketing plan created specifically for your business that outlines all the tasks and action items for you (or your team) to implement throughout the year in a detailed weekly and monthly planner. I’ll layout what, specifically, you should do to move the marketing needle and why it will impact your business the most effectively.
It’s easy to sign up for, requires only an 1.5h of your time during our kickoff meeting followed a week later with our review of your yearly plan. Easy peasy.
Here’s what you get:
- 1.5h virtual deep dive kickoff call to define your vision for your business in 2025+
- A 30+ page customized marketing plan outlining the specific path you should take each week and month to achieve your annual marketing goals, including what specific content and channels are best for your business to focus on and why (stop guessing or trying a new tactic every month!)
- A detailed, customized marketing budget outlining our recommendations for what to spend your marketing dollars on and what will yield the best return for that investment
- Timeline to receive your marketing plan: one week after our kickoff call!
Let me help make your marketing easier (and more fun!) by holding a spot for you.
If this sounds like the right thing for you at just the right time, you can book your planning session with me here.
Consider it only one and a half hours out of your 10h/ week spent marketing and just a small % of your allocated budget to have everything figured out for you for the next year.
| Book your planning session now >> |