Free Marketing Costs More Than You Think

Traditional advertising was pretty straightforward.  You decided where you wanted to advertise, decided what you wanted advertised, and then you paid someone to do it for you.  The nature of the media dictated that you needed to pay someone to do it for you, because business owners and entrepreneurs didn’t have the skill sets to create TV spots, or full-page magazine ads.  New technologies and new media are changing that.  Advertising is more self-serve than ever.  As a result, small business owners and entrepreneurs are doing more themselves, and saving money.

In all this excitement over the free advertising opportunities provided by the web, and social media, people often forget to factor in one cost: their own time.  Keeping up with a marketing strategy that involves blogging, posting on forums, checking Facebook, checking Twitter, running your own PPC ad campaigns, etc., can easily become a full-time, forty-plus hour per week job.

The fact is that while you’re running your marketing strategy, you’re not doing everything else that needs to get done in your business.  It’s easy to read blogs like mine and forget that there are other aspects to running a business than marketing.  You still need to create a product or service to sell.  You still need to keep track of the financials.  You still need to manage your supply chain.  So, while you’re spending all this time on web marketing, what else could you be doing?

Small business owners and entrepreneurs quickly find out when they start out that running your own business is easily more time consuming than working a full-time job, but what they often forget is that running your own business doesn’t mean that you need to do everything yourself, or that you have to do everything you think you do.

Before you jump into all these “free” forms of advertising with both feet, do a quick mental calculation.  How much is your time worth?  The best way to figure this out is to figure out how much you would pay yourself per hour for the work you do (sometimes, the hourly figure can be a little bit depressing, but bear with me).  Once you’ve figured out what your time is worth, figure out how much time you’re spending on running your “free” marketing.  Now, multiply what your time is worth by the number of hours you’re spending on marketing.  Suddenly, all these wonderful free forms of advertising aren’t so free.

Ask yourself if your time might not be better spent doing the things that you are actually making money from.  If you’re a plumber, maybe you can make a few more calls a week.  If you make custom furniture, maybe you can churn out a couple more pieces a month.  Remember that what makes your business is the product that you’re selling, and your expertise lies in that product, so focus on your area of expertise.

“But what about my marketing?” I can hear you asking.  “It’s not going to take care of itself.”

No, it’s not, but now that you know what it’s really costing you, maybe you should see if it might not be a wiser investment to use traditional media?  Or perhaps to hire a consultant or an agency?  It’s almost sacrilegious to suggest such things on the web where there’s an intrinsic virtue associated to “free”, but from a dollars and cents perspective they’re the logical course of action.

In my next post, I’ll talk about the real value of using an expert for your marketing needs.

What do you think?  Am I completely out to lunch?  Is there really no value to traditional media anymore and businesses should focus as much as possible on free media?  Let me know in the comments.