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December 29, 2020

How much do businesses spend on marketing?

Are you wondering how much do businesses spend on marketing? Well, here's what we spent in 2020 to help you out.

If you’re wondering how much businesses spend on marketing, well, we thought we’d share our actual 2020 spend with you. We think that you may be a bit surprised..

At Yellow Tuxedo we’re HUGE on organic growth and it’s for that reason that we thought we’d share our marketing spend with you for 2020 and a summary of the results we had from it.

We are even sharing with you what our most successful marketing tactic has been for 2020, that has no cost associated with it and accounts for approximately 80% of our sales! Read on..

Firstly, why are we doing this?

Well, we’re not doing it to be smug or to gloat, we’re doing it because we want to prove it can be done. We’re doing it because we see sayings like ‘your network is your net worth’ and ‘the moment you cut your advertising spend, your business stops’ and ‘in a crisis, double your advertising spend, don’t cut it’. Ultimately, we’re doing it because we want to share with you and hopefully empower, motivate and inspire you to start growing your business in a way that works for you.

Secondly, to help here’s what Hubspot lists as marketing. They have 41 different types on their list.

Our Yellow Tuxedo YouTube channel

How much do businesses spend on marketing? Here’s what we spent in 2020.

Advertising - £0  [Any form of paid advert including printed, PPC & online ads]

Formal Networking - £206

General Marketing - £73.99 [ie Christmas cards.]

Total 2020 spend = £279.99

Notes: 

We had a brand shoot in 2019 that has contributed to our content. Other than our main computers and smart phones, our tech spend is minimal.

What we didn’t do…

We didn’t market our business following the ‘ideal client model’, we marketed our business following the flywheel model of marketing and the Emily & Alan mass brand awareness and add value wherever possible model.

What we did do…..

We uploaded 150 videos to our Yellow Tuxedo YouTube channel. These gained us 419 subscribers and over 26,000 video views

We VLOGGED 100 days in a row throughout lockdown

We created multiple macro content projects to enable us to show up on line. These included..

6 x The Yellow Magic Hour

3 x That Light Bulb Moment

100 x 100 days of Vlogging videos

33 x How To videos

Most of these projects included an element of networking, collaboration and all were published on all platforms and as optimised ever green content to be found by potential clients forever.

We hosted 12 online coffee mornings

We hosted 3 FREE digital visibility skills sessions

We sent 44 ish newsletters

We published 65 blog posts on this very website.

We showed up on all of the following social media platforms and made sure that we followed the number one rule on social media.. #BeSocial

We also launched our membership in June - The Digital Circus.

Also…

We appeared on 6 podcasts as guests.

We appeared in 2 YouTube videos as guests.

We appeared in 4 other businesses newsletters that we know of!

And delivered 15 keynotes as guest speakers for other groups & communities [do get in touch if you'd like us to present to your group].

The Digital Circus | Yellow Tuxedo

What we learnt and what we got from it…

Well, 80% of our sales come from Instagram. Instagram is our favourite and preferred platform, so this does makes sense. 

20% of our sales came from everywhere else.

We also have traffic to our website from every platform that we regularly publish to.

Instagram Notes: 100% of our clients are B2B. We have just over 1000 followers as of 28th Dec 2020

A bit like Shakespeare saying ‘The course of true love never did run smooth’, neither do where our clients come from!!

Here’s where some have come from in no particular order..

  • Referrals
  • Voice DMs
  • Met in previous business / personal friends
  • A Voice DM to someone else, who asked us to present, where the now client was visiting.
  • Formal networking

Our number one sales technique to date and the most successful business growth concept has been sending VOICE DMs to people who follow us on Instagram!! Just let that sink in as you go and check out our advertising and marketing spend again and wonder what you can do to grow your business!

Doing this has lead directly to… New clients, invites to speak, invites to podcasts, invites to YouTube videos and more.. This is us meeting new people, collaborating and continually growing our brand online.

Summary.

So, what’s your marketing plan for 2021? What are you going to do to grow your business?

Are we at capacity? No. Do we want more clients? Yes. Is there anything else we could do to grow our business? Of course… This article is just about what has worked VERY well for us in 2021 and we wanted to share it with you..

Thank you for reading and I hope that you have fun always..

Alan Braithwaite.

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