Brandon Welch: 0:00
But if you’re asking that question, that principal question is this the best? All advertising is good, All advertising will produce some sort of result, but the best one for the dollar you’re going to spend and let go from your pot of gold. That’s what we’re after. Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m joined by Caleb. What are you asking for Christmas, AG?

Caleb Agee: 0:27
Oh, I don’t even know anymore.

Brandon Welch: 0:28
What’s Santa?

Caleb Agee: 0:29
Claus bringing you AG.

Brandon Welch: 0:30
Come on.

Caleb Agee: 0:30
Oh, santa Claus, what’s he bringing me? I’d like a new pair of shoes. You know it gets really practical. The older I get, the more practical my gift Well.

Brandon Welch: 0:42
I broke the kitchen spoon last week. I could use another one of those. Yeah. It’s like the wooden spoon yeah.

Caleb Agee: 0:48
It’s like a yeah, yeah, got a. Well, I got a vacuum at the–

Brandon Welch: 0:54
Yeah, that was a good one. That’s very practical, though, that is a good one. Yes, well, you know that gift kind of sucks. What a sucky gift.

Brandon Welch: 1:05
Hey this is the place where we help you eliminate waste in advertising, grow your business and achieve the big dream. We are on week three, part three of Building your Marketing Plan for 2025. This is the final episode for Building your Marketing Plan. We’re going to have a lot of follow-up topics after this, but just as a quick recap, if you haven’t listened to part one and part two, that was the last week and two weeks ago and we went through strategy first, messaging second and media last.

Brandon Welch: 1:38
The order of these in and of itself is a lesson, because if you were like most businesses or you’re like most marketing salespeople, the media traditionally gets the focus first and then you go backwards and maybe kind of do some messaging and strategy gets left out. So by really planning and going through the things we went over the last few weeks, just if you do things in that order, even if you only listen to the titles themselves, you’ll be ahead of the game. But we have made it to media, which tends to be the most burning question of where do I spend my money? What’s the best thing to do and the answer to that is in the last two episodes is if you do those last two things right strategy and messaging, the money sort of starts to take care of itself. But why not build the most efficient delivery for your media? Why not have some guidelines about what to choose? That’s right.

Caleb Agee: 2:27
There’s a lot of nuance to this, which we’re going to do our best to navigate.

Brandon Welch: 2:32
This one is the hardest one to write through because there’s so many. But yeah if, but, yeah, if.

Caleb Agee: 2:38
We’ll do our best. In case you don’t remember from the last two episodes, we are following Best Windows Springfield is our kind of fake business. Steve and Sarah are the owners that. We’ve been walking through this, but it was pulled off of a real business.

Brandon Welch: 2:52
These are real business numbers we copied from somebody you don’t know.

Caleb Agee: 2:55
Yep, we do. We’re kind of working from their plan into the media selection we would do for them. We want to understand really the principles of the three types of customers and really the three categories of media we would choose. So there’s a really cool grid. If you have a copy of the Maven Marketer you can grab it. It’s near the back of the book. You can check that out. Basically it helps to lay out strategy message media in line with today, tomorrow and yesterday customers. And so we’re in this last column, brandon’s pulling it up.

Brandon Welch: 3:32
So this grid right here and we’ll put a link to it in this podcast. Nate’s writing that down right now so he can make a little pop-up thing that goes blip and you can click and download the Maven Marketing Grid. You’ll find all of the principles that we’ve gone over contained here. Yeah, the big takeaway is you want to have a today strategy paired with a today message, paired with a today media, tomorrow strategy paired with a tomorrow message, tomorrow media yes, yesterday, so on and so forth. So there’s three types of customers and three components of a good plan, which is strategy message media.

Caleb Agee: 4:05
Yep. So we’re going to talk about the three types of customers first and we’re going to talk about the principles, not just the specific medias that we’re aiming for while we do this. So the principle in today media selection is where can I target people buying right now? Is where can I target people buying right now, and that when you force yourself to think about it that way, it causes a lot to change and a lot of options to be eliminated very quickly. Yes, Right, If you say I want people who are buying right now.

Brandon Welch: 4:37
They don’t drive out to the highway and look for billboards to find their plumber in that moment. Nope.

Caleb Agee: 4:44
Not likely.

Brandon Welch: 4:45
Yeah, they’re either searching online or they have recently done research online, and Facebook and some other creepy targeting media knows that they’re in that mode or about to be in that mode, and so they serve them an ad Used to be phone books and directories, but now it’s simply search engine driven to some degree.

Caleb Agee: 5:03
Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 5:04
Or they consult their own knowledge and inner circle. Yes, which is so. They consult what they already know to be true. That’s where people actually stop off first. Then, if they don’t have somebody that pops into mind, they go looking, trust and think of first, which is why, for Tomorrow Media, we always want to be building your name, your likeness, your trust and familiarity with them. And how do we do that in media? What’s the?

Caleb Agee: 5:27
principle for tomorrow media. The principle for tomorrow media is where can I talk to the largest group of people every once in a while? Every day, every day. Where can I reach, where can I talk to the largest group of people daily?

Brandon Welch: 5:41
Let’s just stop there for a second, because that, in essence, is like those are the two biggest components of the things you can control and will spend money on. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 5:48
The way that sucks like your Christmas gift is to have to depend on that search engine for people to know and remember you. What you want to have happen is where they consult their own mind and you are in their mind before they ever go to that expensive, cantankerous, leaky search engine that is displaying you, hopefully, but also all of your competitors Bunch of other people. So wouldn’t it be great is when they have that plumbing moment and all things are going down the drain for them before they even hit the search engine. They think of your plumbing company or they think of your window company, or they think of your window company or your law firm or your medical firm, or whatever it is you sell. That’s why we’re picking the big groups of people daily, right?

Caleb Agee: 6:33
Yes, Because without that, we’re a forgetful people. I don’t know if you knew that I forgot about that, but I remember just now. We’re pretty forgetful. I think our attention span as Americans is less than that of a goldfish.

Brandon Welch: 6:48
Fun fact it is.

Caleb Agee: 6:49
Yes so a goldfish can pay attention longer than the average American.

Brandon Welch: 6:54
That’s true, it’s pretty wild. It’s because we’re pelted with over 5,000 advertising messages a day, which is why you need to make your message memorable which we talked about last week and relevant and connecting to what their needs, pains, hopes and fears are. But when you go to deliver it every day, you want that repetition factor. That’s what adds up. Just like a good friend, just like an old, familiar coffee shop you go to, just like your favorite pair of shoes, it just feels right and you become that provider. That becomes that natural response. Yeah.

Caleb Agee: 7:25
So today, principle where can I target people buying right now? You need to put yourself in those places where you can literally catch or intercept them on their way to the finish line. Tomorrow, principal where can I talk to the largest group of people daily? We’re going to talk about which medias go with these here in a little while. And then yesterday, principal where can I continually communicate with my past customers? So yesterday, customers are the people you’ve already done business with or who have already contacted you and you want to continue to do more business with them. You get referrals from their friends and family, but then also you get repeat business, yep.

Brandon Welch: 7:55
And repeat goodwill and just all of those fun things, yeah, good reputations and all that, yes, okay. So we give you those upfront when people say, well, how should I spend my media budget? We want to go to principles first, and those were the three principles that matter. Where can I target people buying right now? How can I reach the largest group of people daily? And where can I target my past sorry, communicate with my past customers consistently? What we’re going to share today is applicable to 80 to 90% of, like, localized type businesses, local and regional businesses. If you just kind of ripped off this plan, you would be very close to, I think, the best answer in your market. But there are always nuances. There are always market factors. There are always some people who are going to be in a smaller town and will have these medias available. There are always budget restraints and constrictions.

Caleb Agee: 8:48
There’s unique issues with your business itself, right?

Brandon Welch: 8:52
Yes, your business is different in profitability and your budget and your spend and all of these things that’s probably the biggest factor is like the maturity cycle and the phase of your business. Yeah, but what we’re trying to do is put this mechanism in place that, before you reach for your wallet and say I’m going to spend money on media, you stop and ask these three questions A what is my goal here? Am I trying to earn future customers because I know those are the best, most profitable customers in the long run? Or am I really so dry to the bone? I’ve got to have some action today. I can’t afford to wait for it, even if it’s a better long-term result, Like I’ve got to get that quick day trader type gain so I can afford to pay my people. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 9:33
And if you’re going to do that, ask, you know, the today media question and then, at all the time, like every single time, don’t spend money until you’re already focusing on your past customers, like that’s where everybody should start. So, okay, that was already a lot and I think I just want you to remember this Before you reach for the wallet to spend any money. Ask those questions and if you’re in the category of tomorrow, marketing or what a lot of people would call branding, we ask how can I, is this the biggest mechanism, is this the? Is this the biggest amount of people that I can reach daily? It’s frequency and reach. How often can I afford to reach them? And and is it the biggest audience I can afford to reach daily?

Brandon Welch: 10:19
If we’re asking that question, it doesn’t really matter if it’s tv, bill, billboard, radio, sometimes social media and YouTube can trump those other options, sometimes depending on the market size, or sometimes it’s what you can afford to do, and digital media will generally scale down to a smaller budget, way less result comparatively, but it will scale down. But if you’re asking that question, that principal question, is this the best? All advertising is good. All advertising will produce some sort of result.

Caleb Agee: 10:49
It’ll do something.

Brandon Welch: 10:50
Yeah, but the the best one for the dollar you’re going to spend and let go from your you know pot of gold. That’s what we’re after. So, let’s sorry, go ahead, I think it also comes back.

Caleb Agee: 11:02
We’re we’re looping back to the strategy in each of these categories today, tomorrow and yesterday and you have to make sure that your mindset and expectation of the result is clear. So when we make these decisions and we say I’m going to buy a TV or I’m going to do Google ads or whatever combination of this that you end up with at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you know what kind of result you’re expecting with at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you know what kind of result you’re expecting. A tomorrow campaign might get the phones ringing, today it might, but that is not the expectation.

Caleb Agee: 11:32
It’s not its highest and best use. That is not what we’re doing it for. We’re doing it to grow the business over the long haul because we built one three and five-year goals. A today marketing campaign is trying to get the phone to ring today or tomorrow, and so those kinds of expectations of results are really, really important.

Brandon Welch: 11:49
Yes. So the two big questions we arrive at with media are what media do I choose? And how much do I spend on each media? Yep? How do I diversify my budget in that way?

Caleb Agee: 12:02
It’s usually in that order too. It’s like which one should I do? And then, what should my budget be? Yeah, how much? And I think we have to make sure we flip that first a little bit and establish a budget based on our goals. If you remember, back at our strategy thing, we’re going to go over Steve and Sarah’s example.

Caleb Agee: 12:19
We talked about how much, what percent I think it was about 12 that they were spending on marketing last year 12% of their top line revenue, 12% of their top line revenue and we have to make sure we have an expectation of what we’re going to spend this year as well, and so if we can talk about how much to spend, it’s important first, and then we start dividing that up and selecting meters from there.

Brandon Welch: 12:42
So step one decide what you’re going to invest in your business Like pick the grand number, the 12% of your revenue, the 8% of your revenue. Some of you guys, that’s just out of the cards. You can’t do that yet. You can only spend five or six, but that grand number. We’re going to set that aside and then we’re going to ask where do we allocate it? Okay.

Brandon Welch: 13:15
Luckily for all of us some very, very smart guys Peter Field and Les Binet, or Les Bennett if you prefer published the most comprehensive study that has ever been done on advertising, and this is where we tap into the. A wise man learns from his mistakes, or, sorry, a smart man learns from his mistakes, but a wise man learns from the mistakes of others. That’s right. Well, if you employ this knowledge, you will be leveraging the experience and the experimentation of billions of dollars. Over a thousand different ad campaigns were studied in this. It was a 10-year long actually a little over 10-year-long set of data.

Caleb Agee: 13:46
Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 13:46
And what these guys did. They looked at, like I said, over 1,000 different ad campaigns and they studied the mix of the types of messaging, the mix of the types of advertising that were used, and they evaluated in reality not in hypothetical principles, but in reality what was the sales growth, what were the market share gains, what were the profitability and what were the, what were the what they called price sensitivity? But essentially, what was the value of the product, what were From the customer’s perspective Yep.

Brandon Welch: 14:16
Which, yeah, which customers ultimately were willing to pay more for the, for the products. Now stop and ask yourself would you like to have some sales growth? Heck, yeah, we would. Would we like to gain more market share our bigger piece of the pie. Bring it on. Everything gets better. Yep, would you like to be more profitable while we’re doing it?

Caleb Agee: 14:36
That’s the big one.

Brandon Welch: 14:37
And would you like to charge people more money with smiles on their faces. So we are going to do some serious deep diving into this whole study, because it could be months worth of podcasts on its own, but they found a big takeaway you need to know the companies that grew the most profitably, most sustainably, had customers happily paying them more money and gain more market share. Spent 60% to 70 yourself in line with the most productive advertising done in history and scientifically studied. You would put 60 to 70% of your budget based on customers that you don’t necessarily expect to pick up the phone and call you right now.

Brandon Welch: 15:40
These guys in the name of the study, by the way, Nate’s going to pop it up, he’s going to go boop and it’s going to come on your screen. They did it through data with the Institution of Practitioners in Advertising and that just sounds fancy, oh yeah, but it’s the fanciest, smartest dudes in advertising. That’s right, the guys that are actually collecting the data and they let me give you the contrast here versus companies that said promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion. Think JC Penney, Think yeah.

Caleb Agee: 16:10
Um, if you were going to I can’t even name a specific PC brand, but if you, if you went to buy an Apple, you expect it to be at a certain price, they lock it in. Nobody can ever cheapen their brand. It’s against the rules. Which is HP or Dell, or but if I go buy a PC, I kind of expect to pay, you know, five, six, 700 bucks you know, whereas I would pay $2,000 for the same. Yes, very good example. Yeah, you know.

Brandon Welch: 16:36
Or car brands are the same too, you know, think about the ones that push, push, push, just price and don’t build emotional campaigns. And then think about the companies that get to charge $100,000 for their cars. Why do? They do it. Are the components that different? No.

Brandon Welch: 16:49
They’ve got a little bigger engine. They’ve got a little fancier trim. Yeah, and they colored it, maybe a little bit more speckles in the metallic flake or whatever. But it doesn’t warrant twice the price of an average automobile. Right, you could apply this to every category, but the brands that are becoming premium, like profitable brands, are putting 60% to 70% of their budget into emotional campaigns instead of saying buy now, you’ve got to buy it today. It’s the best time to buy until next weekend right, saturday one day only sale.

Caleb Agee: 17:25
Yeah, until next Saturday.

Brandon Welch: 17:27
And we’ll do another one Now quick stop off because somebody emailed us and asked us like well, should I not put a call to action on my tomorrow campaigns? No.

Brandon Welch: 17:40
That’s not the point. If you go back to the method, we always put a reasonable next step at the end of every message. That’s right. However, the stuff in between the 20, 30 seconds before that is making them feel something about a larger need pain, hope or fear, instead of here’s the product. Buy it now. Buy it now. Buy it now. Buy it now. So it’s the substance and the weight of your messaging.

Caleb Agee: 18:03
Yeah, because there’s a moment where your tomorrow customer will become a today customer. Yes. And if you haven’t given them the next thing to do, then you’ll miss them. Yes, you’ll miss that moment.

Brandon Welch: 18:13
Okay, so we’re talking about media allocation. Where do I spend my money, when do I spend my words and all of this stuff? So you know by now, 60% to 70% of your budget. If you can swing it, if you can afford to wait for it for a minute to work, if you’re starting from ground zero, should we put in emotional tomorrow campaigns? Okay, Inversely, like the other 30% to 40% of your budget would then go to more transactional, or what they called in this study, activation. But it’s everything we talk about with today customers, Yep, and what we’re doing there is just it’s kind of like the Seth Godin talked about the jab, jab, jab right hook. You’re priming, priming, priming, priming special offer, Priming, priming, priming special offer, and so you could think of this seasonally. You could also like you could think of this for two months I’m going to build up this goodwill and then I’m going to give them an offer they can’t refuse.

Brandon Welch: 19:04
Or you could think of it that if I’m running, I’m just going to make something up 10 spots a week on TV. I’m going to put seven of them in the more emotional category and I’m going to put a call to action on the other ones. You could split that budget a lot of different ways, but the takeaway is you still want that 30%, 40%. That’s really activating and calling people out of their slumber in your category.

Brandon Welch: 19:31
Yeah, so, and then where did we put yesterday in all of that? Why didn’t we assign some of that to yesterday? Marketing.

Caleb Agee: 19:39
I mean yesterday. Marketing can be. It’s an activation measure. It can be Right, but also it’s one of the cheapest marketing ventures you can usually do.

Brandon Welch: 19:47
It’s virtually free, yeah, yeah, so if you’ve usually do, it’s virtually free. Yeah, yeah, so if you’ve got to assign a number to it, cost of a tool really.

Caleb Agee: 19:52
But it’s not that expensive.

Brandon Welch: 19:55
Most of our people are doing yesterday marketing at a high level, spending $300 to $500 a month on the email platform. That’s just managing 20,000 or 30,000 emails, right? Yep, no-transcript. And if you have less than that, it’s way less right.

Brandon Welch: 20:09
Mm-hmm. So we’re going to focus a lot of the budget conversation on today and tomorrow. We’re going to get to yesterday in a minute. So here’s the thing, spinning that tomorrow media result up and for clarity, we’re probably talking about your larger megaphone-type medias. In most markets that would be TV, radio, billboards. Some print gets into that and then if you’re on the lower end today, it’s kind of shifting to reach a millennial audience and younger. There’s a strong argument for efficiency to be made, obviously in YouTube and social video reach campaigns. I’m not talking about targeted like conversion campaigns. I’m talking about where you can go to a YouTube or a meta platform and you can deliver those video impressions. It’s getting to be where it’s as cheap or cheaper to do that on those platforms than it is to try to reach them on traditional. Okay, yep.

Brandon Welch: 21:06
And some people are going well, no, duh, that’s what I’ve been doing a long time. That actually just now became true. Yes, they just crossed over. It’s neck and neck and actually in some markets it’s not Like I have a New York market right now. That is, we’re proving it to be more efficient to reach a subset of the population via YouTube. Because YouTube has gotten cheaper, more people are using it and supply and demand means more impressions, less money per impression, and then also TV rates have gone up enough there. That’s not typical in most markets, but in there they have. So just saying it’s going to be probably one of those five.

Brandon Welch: 21:43
If we’re talking about going back to the principle and tomorrow media, how do I reach the most amount of people daily? Okay, so now we know of our overall budget, in a perfect world, we’re putting 60 to 70% of that into tomorrow medias. You’re going to select that tomorrow media um based on where can I reach the most amount of people daily? And I’m going to go through a couple of your options. We just listed them out, but we’re going to go through um through TV, radio, billboards, youtube and the streaming type services. So maybe you can kind of self-select with this. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 22:17
So what’s TV good for Caleb?

Caleb Agee: 22:18
TV is good for a 50 to 100 mile reach. So when you have a large service area business where you’re not afraid to drive a long ways, or your customers aren’t afraid to drive a long way to get to you, um, we, that’s where, maybe a local, so we’re talking usually TV. Broadcast TV is a to a DMA and if you don’t know what that is, go Google it. Look at your type in DMA and your city name and you’ll probably find it or find a map of where that reaches here locally.

Brandon Welch: 22:48
Yeah, I’m thinking of like Tulsa, oklahoma, and then around that you’ve got Bartlesville and you’ve got Broken Arrow and you’ve got all these little you know big suburbs that trickle out to rural areas. Yeah, but everybody knows, the plumber I probably have to have is in Tulsa or the lawyer I have to hire is probably in Tulsa.

Caleb Agee: 23:07
If you live in a suburb. More than likely, even if you live in the suburb, you’re going to type plumber Tulsa, right, right, Even if you live in Broken Arrow, right. Very often that’s what you do. So with TV, we find that’s really good for lawyers, roofers, hvac events, those kinds of things. Hvac, you know, events, those kinds of things is very, um, a lot of professional services are going to land in that range, um, because there’s usually a longer buying cycle, yep, uh, and then also there aren’t. There’s not one on every corner, right.

Caleb Agee: 23:42
And so people are willing to wait and buy the best one at the right time.

Brandon Welch: 23:47
Correct. So just a quick tip If you’re not familiar with what a DMA is, I’ll make a really big thing. Just easy to break it down. Essentially, the FCC Federal Communications Commission, commission, federal Commission of Communications yeah.

Brandon Welch: 24:07
Somebody’s going to correct us on that FCC. You got it.

Brandon Welch: 24:09
The people that manage radio waves and basically say who can blast their amplitude of a big signal all over.

Caleb Agee: 24:16
Yeah, regulate the TV stations and all of that.

Brandon Welch: 24:18
Naturally they split out the whole country into like 210 or 212 markets or something like that, but it’s all of your major cities.

Brandon Welch: 24:26
Like it’s going to follow the major city and every time there’s a major city they put a big blanket around that and they say Mr TV station, nbc, abc, cbs, your big local stations, you can broadcast this far, and then you have to make your signal basically two weeks to go any farther from there. That really designates a lot of your reach on local broadcast TV. Now some people are asking about what about cable TV? You can buy that and you follow a lot of the same principles here. It’s just going to be a much, much, much smaller audience. Cable TV is like you can target it by zones. So if you want to do TV but you can’t either afford or don’t have a need to be out all the way in these large, large areas, you could target some with local cable. Yeah, it’s just not going to be quite as efficient. So in TV land, okay, what you’re wanting to do remember the principle is to reach people daily. The way we do that is we advertise in programs that people come back to every day. Yes, which would be?

Caleb Agee: 25:28
News is a big one, yep.

Brandon Welch: 25:30
That’s very common. People have their news that they.

Caleb Agee: 25:33
People watch Wheel every single day, or Fortune, or there’s especially there’s some like daytime programming. That’s very cyclical.

Brandon Welch: 25:42
Could be Jeopardy or Price is Right or in some markets it could be like a market watch type thing, could be a specific local type channel that has like lifestyle type things. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 25:55
But think about habitual TV. Now a lot of my millennials and youngers and I’m in this crowd too are going dude. Nobody does that anymore. Are you joking me? And it’s like yes, if you’re over 45, you still do, but the masses still do. Okay, how do we know that? There are companies that used to measure TV audiences by people mailing in diaries and then they said after like 50 years, that sucks.

Brandon Welch: 26:21
We can track this digitally. This data, these ratings, these audience measurements are coming from real life digital signals. So if you’ve got a smart TV and it’s turned on and most people have a smart TV it is sending this information back to the companies that collect and measure audiences. Okay, audiences have shrunk, but not near as much as people think that they have, and especially not as you go up the, you know, to the 40 plus demo. And it’s more true at 50 plus and all of that stuff.

Caleb Agee: 26:52
And we’ll give you a hint those people have more money. They still have more money. That’s changing.

Brandon Welch: 26:57
You know two, three five years from now it’s going to be less and less true, Because the millennials are starting to get money Like they’ve paying off their debts and all that stuff. So, but a lot of the products and services we’re talking about are $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 products like local services. We’re talking about home improvement, legal, medical, all these small businesses that are worth branding, right? Yeah, Okay, One last thing on TV. So you’re buying those programs that repeat every day. So it’s a news program, it’s a 6 am news or a 12 pm news that we know people come back to every day, or maybe it’s Wheel of Fortune. We’re going to buy five spots per week Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday before I add another program to the schedule. So I’m spending my money filling up one audience before I say, cool, give me another. And if you have enough money left over, by all means add three, add three, four or five spots in another program and rinse and repeat until you’re out of money out of your tomorrow marketing budget.

Brandon Welch: 27:51
Yeah, make sense.

Caleb Agee: 27:52
Yeah, and we’ve talked about this in the past, but having a strong schedule is what we do first, until before we add what we would call the gravy items, the little sponsorships or the other things. We have an episode on sponsorships that you can look into as well.

Brandon Welch: 28:07
So core schedule the thing that’s going to make you famous amongst that group of people is repetition with small audiences, and your reps are going to try to sell you like a bunch of different random things, often because they’re incentivized to do so and you just need to say no, I want to commit to one audience at a time, then I’ll add stuff, okay, radio.

Caleb Agee: 28:27
Radio has a smaller reach, or when I say reach, I mean physically the footprint of radio is only as strong as the frequency of the tower. I don’t know if you guys knew this, but different radio stations have different towers with different power. Essentially that hey, I’m rhyming here with different power and the radio frequency can only go so many miles. Yes, so Typically 50.

Brandon Welch: 28:52
50 miles or something maybe 30 to 50 mile range is typical for a radio station, and there’s some that go farther.

Caleb Agee: 28:56
But so a radio station is really powerful when you don’t want to reach we just talked about that DMA that reaches, you know, big chunk around a city. If you want to kind of stay tight to a city or a suburb or something around roundabouts, there radio works really well for a smaller service area.

Brandon Welch: 29:13
And this would be more in line for smaller ticket items too.

Caleb Agee: 29:15
Yes, I was going to say like shorter buying cycles. Um, like retail restaurants, hair nails, the, the things you would go. You’re not going to drive 45 minutes or an hour to go get your haircut, you’re going to find one between work and house.

Brandon Welch: 29:32
Yes, that’s where it’s going to happen. Okay, so, to be successful on radio, go back and listen to our episode on. Do this before you buy TV or radio. It has all this stuff in here, so I’m not going to go super in-depth, but you want to be buying at least 40 spots a week between the hours of 6 am and 7 pm, monday through Friday. That’s your core schedule. That’s the stuff you need to be spending your money on, and do that on one station before you add money to another.

Brandon Welch: 30:00
okay, Because the station group has multiple stations right Most media sales reps are incentivized to sell you multiple stations at once because it makes the stations look more valuable to their investors and they want multiple revenue streams instead of one. But you don’t care about that. You’re the local advertiser and you want it to work, so you need to stick to an audience. Frequency is more important than reach. Frequency is more important than reach. Frequency is more important than reach. I repeated that three times to accentuate the point that when people hear you over and over, they remember it better. Frequency is more important than reach. So we want to buy 40 ads between 6 am and 7 pm. That should guarantee you like a three to a four frequency per week for the average audience. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 30:43
That just means the average person listening to that station has heard your ads three to four times a week. Okay, yep, go up to as many as 60 to 70 spots per week before you consider that station full. Okay, so we’re doing 40 spots a week, monday through Friday, before we add other stations, and then, if you can afford it, do another station 40 spots a week. Somebody right now is going. But which station do I choose? If I can be frank, we spend a lot of time focusing on demographics and thinking, oh, this station has my perfect audience. There’s some common sense logic to that. Like I’m probably not building an hvac campaign. Like my first choice isn’t probably the you know rap station?

Caleb Agee: 31:24
probably not, right, I’m probably going to have a younger audience on it. Yeah yeah, I’m not going like 18 to 24 demo.

Brandon Welch: 31:29
They might not be homeowners, your rep will be good at helping you figure that out. Yeah. But I pick the station that makes sense. It’s like country music or top 40s or like you know.

Caleb Agee: 31:39
Maybe oldies. Not oldies but, like you know, would listen to and choose that one, but the formula pretty well maintains the same.

Brandon Welch: 31:52
Okay, yep, quick nuance there. If it’s talk radio, you can probably get away with 25 to 30 spots a week, because people listen more often and they listen longer, longer, yep. Okay, Billboards. My best advice for billboards. They work awesome when you’re already a well-branded company. No-transcript.

Caleb Agee: 32:34
But you’ve only got seven to 10 words to. You’re not convincing anybody of anything new in seven to 10 words.

Brandon Welch: 32:37
Very, very often that’s their weakness. It’s hard to persuade. It’s just a really good tool to help them remember, or aid, like in a visual perspective. Like, oh, that’s that goofy guy I see on TV, gosh, golly, I like him. That’s a three-second emotional experience.

Brandon Welch: 32:49
But guess what? What’s the principle of tomorrow marketing? Reach as many people as we can Daily. Daily. Do people drive Same way every day? They typically take the same routes to their same places every day. That’s right. At least multiple times a week. So a thing to watch out for on billboards least multiple times a week. So a thing to watch out for on billboards. Usually, a billboard rep will have this option to put you all over town and move your ads around and you think, oh, that’s great, I’m going to reach a lot more people that way. It’s tough because you’re not reaching the same people daily. Okay, so you want to anchor your billboards? Now you can do this with a digital billboard or a vinyl, thank you. Like a static billboard? Yeah, but I would pick the same spot and be there for a long time before I added others or moved them around.

Caleb Agee: 33:35
Yeah, remember, these are all tomorrow medias as we’re looking at them. We’ll talk about how they could be used other ways, but generally we’re talking about tomorrow medias. The expectation is not making my phone ring today. Yes, it is growing my audience and the real estate that I’m earning in the minds of my customers.

Brandon Welch: 33:54
So YouTube and social media.

Caleb Agee: 33:56
Yeah.

Caleb Agee: 33:57
For tomorrow marketing, you can definitely reach younger audiences, like we said just a few minutes ago. Youtube and social medias, especially on social, there are different target options and there’s some of that on YouTube as well, especially if you say I just want reach. If you put less, you’re not expecting lead generation or clicks or anything like that. When you let the algorithm just say put this in front of as many eyes as possible, the costs are getting very low and what we’re finding is, if the targeting or the geography is tight enough, we can watch the frequency grow as well. That’s the struggle with this media is with YouTube the same people daily.

Caleb Agee: 34:37
Yeah, we don’t know if it’s the same person daily. They’re kind of just showing it to random people daily.

Brandon Welch: 34:43
We don’t know until after the fact, yes, so it’s a little bit of a play basis, but let me give you a formula that I think will get you close. Okay, so when you buy stuff from YouTube, they’re randomly throwing your impressions. Places like Kayla was telling you yeah, it could be 1,000 different people one time each, or it could be 10 different people 100 times each, yep, and you want that average frequency of three per week. Is which what we actually want to shoot for? So I would pick a, a community like a suburb or a or a radius, and you can do this within youtube, and I would put um, whatever you’re going to spend on that.

Brandon Welch: 35:21
You know media, but let me just I’m giving I’m putting like as much as 10 to 15 percent of some of our budgets into YouTube right now, and so I’m picking like a 10 to 15-mile radius and I’m loading that up and I’m seeing what my frequency ends up being at the end of a month, and I want it to be that 5, 6, 7 frequency at the end of a month, before I expand that radius, and that’s kind of my way of figuring out what the YouTube frequency distribution is in that month. Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 35:48
And then I expand it from there. So it’s kind of cheating because you can’t really just YouTube will kind of sort of go out and find the same person, the same person and you can put like age, demographic restrictions on it and maybe even gender. But in some interest, but without getting too nerdy, I will just tell you start with small radiuses, look at your frequency, which prints out inside YouTube, and then add from there.

Caleb Agee: 36:11
Yep.

Brandon Welch: 36:12
Make sense.

Caleb Agee: 36:14
Tell us about OTT and streaming.

Brandon Welch: 36:16
Okay, a lot of people are going what about Hulu? What about OTT? What about? What is it? Fubu? And yeah, fubu and all that stuff. And every media rep, media rep in the country has some sort of vendor. They’re selling this to, selling this through, and they’re, you know, they’re asking you to spend. Oh yeah, I spent $4,000 on my radio station and do you know I could target you to the perfect home. You know, we just spent another $1,000 a month on OTT and you’re going. Well, that’s cool, I want to be fancy and your budget to get the same reach. Let me repeat that, even though they will sell you a smaller, you can scale it down. Your budget may be $1,000 a month instead of $5,000 a month. That does not equal the same ratio of results.

Brandon Welch: 37:15
Here’s why We’ve talked about the cost per reaching 1,000 people, known as CPM. And just ask your rep what’s the CPM? Okay, TV is roughly $10. Radio is roughly $10 to $15.

Brandon Welch: 37:34
Billboards can be as low as two or three. Youtube and Facebook can be as low as 10 to 20. Yeah, OTT and streaming cost at the lowest I’ve seen it $35 to reach 1,000 people. Yeah, so literally three times more. Most of it that you’re going to get sold because it’s getting marked up is going to be like $40, $50 CPMs, especially if you’re adding a lot of that fancy targeting on it.

Brandon Welch: 37:57
So it is a media that has its place, especially if you need to reach a really, really specific age of person, but it fails to be as attractive as any of these others because it’s just more expensive to work with for starters, and OTT and streaming is generally getting delivered in random places way more than YouTube and Facebook are. Yeah, okay, that’s why I don’t spend hardly anything on that Out of the millions of dollars we spend. If I’m going to spend that kind of money on a digital streaming thing, I give it to YouTube because it’s way better and way cheaper.

Caleb Agee: 38:34
We’ll go back to the principle. It’s where can I talk to the largest group of people daily, not the most targeted group of people? Yeah, dollar to dollar. If I’m having to pay $30 to reach 1,000 people, but I could pay $10 to reach a thousand people, I’m going to reach a larger amount of people on $10 daily than I can with 30. And so it’s just kind of logic. That’s why media is here at the end, because there’s no emotional charge bent on it. Where we’re it’s math, it’s just math. It’s a little bit of intuition and math that we’re doing here, and when we follow the principles, it takes all of that out of the way.

Brandon Welch: 39:10
Yeah. So somebody’s going well, what about? I have this other thing that somebody proposed to me. I have this print magazine somebody showed me, or I have some fancy other type of advertising that we’re not listening talking about here Maybe it’s direct mail or something. Go back and ask what’s the CPM? What does it cost me to reach a thousand people? And, and can I afford the minimum frequency? Can I afford to be on enough times or be in the part of town you know where the billboard stays there static and and pay that money and pay that bill every month? Can I afford to do that? And does does the other thing you’re wondering about, does it beat it in terms of CPM? Yeah, okay.

Brandon Welch: 39:51
Now certain exceptions to like if it’s a luxury magazine or a very specific like lifestyle magazine or something, and if that group of people in and of itself is the most important group, you could give some exceptions to that. That’s right. Anyway, okay, we’ve gone over. Tomorrow media, pick the big megaphones, especially if you’re in a 40-plus demo. That’s got the money to spend money on what you’re doing and that gets us out of the tomorrow marketing category. We said a lot about that, right?

Brandon Welch: 40:23
Yeah, now we’re over to today, so ideally this is the remaining 30 to 40% of our budget. Yep. What are the today?

Caleb Agee: 40:32
medias, Today medias. Now we’re going to say Google, I’m going to say Google search. Every single time I say Google, I’m going to say Google search ads because Google’s currently there are. Google is pushing products that are multimedia products, and so you are trying to buy a today media, which is where somebody is buying right now. If you buy a display ad, that is more of a tomorrow media, if we want to think about it that way. So make sure you pay attention to if somebody’s placing your Google ads. Google search is what we’re building in this plan. Google search is where you are going to pay. We talked about those CPMs. You’ll pay, gosh. You could pay $500. You could pay $1,000 for a CPM.

Brandon Welch: 41:13
Most of our Google search campaigns are $600 to $1,200 right now.

Caleb Agee: 41:17
Yeah, and so you think about the efficiency. I’m just we’ve used this analogy You’re just literally putting out a net and catching people as they fall through the finish line. Yes, and you’re catching a few of them, a few of those fish at a very, very expensive rate. It’s. They’re highly. They have a high intent to buy, because they searched plumber near me or you know, we’re going Steve and Sarah windows near me and we caught them. That’s great, but they didn’t have any preferential or maybe they didn’t have much.

Brandon Welch: 41:52
If you were thinking short term about what did I do yesterday and what happened today, yeah, like literally yesterday, literally today. You will be like Google all the way. But if you want to get more people over time and you want your marketing to get more efficient over time, today will become very, very unattractive.

Caleb Agee: 42:04
So the from the study of the ipa that we just talked about the long and the short of it, they said. The study quantified how campaigns optimized for short-term returns often underperformed in roi when compared with those with a branded approach yeah literally proven by science times billions of dollars, times thousands of campaigns that the more you focus on short-term results, the harder and harder and harder and harder it will get. Yes. And your business will be stunted in its growth because you can’t think further than next week or next month.

Brandon Welch: 42:39
Yes, that is dangerous people you can get, because at any given category we’ll just go through the round doctors, lawyers, hvac, plumbers all the people that we’re talking to right now there’s 300 or 400 that might be buying or shopping today. If you’re in a medium-sized market, yeah, and you’re going to just run out of those people and the rest of them aren’t going to pay attention. If all you’re talking about is buy today. There’s not.

Brandon Welch: 43:08
There’s no reason they would. I don’t need a refrigerator, so I’m not going to buy a refrigerator. My marriage is great, so I’m not looking for a divorce attorney. Or all my family members are healthy, so I don’t need a doctor, or I’m good looking, so I don’t need a plastic surgeon, right?

Caleb Agee: 43:31
But more and more every day come into that market and you’re winning them over before the finish line. So Google search is really powerful but expensive. Meta like Facebook and Instagram have lead generation built into them. Now that is where, without leaving the platform, they can click on one of your ads, fill out a form. That has been powerful. We’ve generated tens of thousands of leads for our clients with that platform. Actually, this year. Very, very powerful. Targeted mail, direct mail. Help me out on that one.

Brandon Welch: 43:58
Okay, for today, customers, people are going direct mail Don’t? Most people throw mail away? Yes, even the USPS says that 60% of mail gets thrown away the second it hits. However, that remaining 40% could be very valuable.

Brandon Welch: 44:10
And there are companies that are very, very smart in knowing how to produce a list of addresses that are probably about to buy what you’re selling. They’re probably about to buy their next car, or their insurance is about to renew and they are going to check rates, or they had a family member die so they might need your legal services. They’re really good at doing that, so it’s probably, in most categories, a tough thing to do repeatedly, but I do it several times a year for the right categories like spring, summer, fall.

Brandon Welch: 44:47
You’re kind of waiting for this intent to build up and then you’re being the one that sends the really good piece of direct mail. That makes it a no-brainer. Very expensive to reach 1,000 people. It’s about $1 per mailbox, so if you did that it’d be $1,000 CPM. Yeah, like $1,000 to reach 1,000 people right, that’s a lot, that’s a lot $1,000 to reach 1,000 people.

Brandon Welch: 45:07
Right, that’s a lot. That’s a lot. However, the recall factor because of its tangibility and because it can kind of stick around there on the counter and it’s just a different mode of action for a lot of people, it can still work well. Yep. So today, marketing, we talked about Google search, meta, lead generation, targeted direct mail, and then, believe it or not, we put TV back in here for certain products for certain times of the year, even though TV, or radio for that matter, or we’ll just call broadcast, is not targeted in any way.

Brandon Welch: 45:41
I can’t go, only deliver my broadcast message to people who are about to buy a boat. However, in March or in April or May, there are enough people who are about to buy a boat, who watch TV every day, that it could still check all the boxes to be reaching the most amount of people buying now. Yes, now that goes way down in December, or even by June or July sometimes. But certain splashes, you can put TV in the today category and you can do a really like think of an infomercial type thing, like we’ve got 89 new boats and they’ve got to go by next Saturday, so come by and get the best deal of the year. That sort of stuff can work. I put down here also tax preparation right before April 15th Concerts or events in town or some new fancy product. We have a really well-branded client right now that’s going to spend a bunch of money on a really infomercially type product because it’s a new, surprising and different thing.

Brandon Welch: 46:44
It’s something people have never heard of, so you’re taking that remaining 30%, 40% of, yeah, so, um, you’re taking that remaining 30 40 percent your budget. You’re putting into today things. The thing that is probably the most consistent uh is google search.

Brandon Welch: 46:55
Google search yeah, that’s usually a starting spot that’s the thing you kind of always want to be there. Yep, um, you’re breaking that down to. What does it cost you to earn one customer? And the good thing within google search is it’s pretty easy to see that. It’s pretty easy to see what it costs you for that certain keyword and then roughly how many times that turned into a phone call and then kind of you can go from there as to how many times you think those turn into a customer for you yeah, yep.

Brandon Welch: 47:21
But it can get over. It can get over expensive. I have some roofers right now that that we’re paying. We’re paying in the middle of the summer, $300 or $400 per one phone call or email and that gets tough to make money off that. So just pay attention to that cost per lead and cost per customer. So I would probably always have Google and Meta in the mix because they’re the most consistent and I would save maybe 10% to 20% of my today budget. So 10% to 20% of my 30% for those targeted mail campaigns, maybe some splash extra TV, maybe some trade show type stuff, maybe some really targeted events where there’s like a lot of people coming out to buy my product, yep. The principle remains the same though.

Brandon Welch: 48:02
We’re going to reach the most amount of people buying today.

Caleb Agee: 48:06
And the last category, just to kind of break down some of these medias for yesterday. We’re trying to continually communicate with our past customers. Question, you would say, is just where are they and what kind of contact do I have with them? So that could be. Are they following you on social media? Organic social media can be a very common way Email lists if you’ve captured their email and gotten permission, you can send them emails as many times as you want. Um text messaging you can do follow-up calls. That’s always powerful. Hey, I know we installed that thing for you two months ago. I just want to see how everything was going. Do you know how much power that would be if you just wasted? I’m putting that in air quotes, if you’re, if you’re listening that power that would be if you just wasted.

Brandon Welch: 48:48
I’m going to put that in air quotes Quote unquote, wasted If you’re listening.

Caleb Agee: 48:51
that’s in air quotes. If you just wasted your time calling customers that you’d already sold, yeah. Those are yesterday customers and they have a sphere of influence and that will be only elevated. Hopefully you did a great job with that install and they only have good things to say, but it should just be elevated from there that you really do care because you spent the time to do that. Yes. Newsletters and greeting cards Handwritten notes. Handwritten notes are really powerful. Send a Christmas card, send a second of March card for no good reason.

Brandon Welch: 49:26
Yeah, it could be anything. Yeah, yep, I don’t really care. Yeah, it could be anything, yeah, yep, I don’t really care.

Brandon Welch: 49:30
Spring off that couch and come see us. Yep, so you’re always doing yesterday marketing. It’s the cheapest of any of the things. Probably the most consistent is email and text messaging, followed by maybe you know social media Just always have something in that category going.

Brandon Welch: 49:45
That’s right, Cool. So we’ve done a lot of theoretical things. Let’s bring it back to Steve and Sarah. We remember we went through their strategy. We talked about the things that made them put on this earth to do the thing they’re doing, the things they’re hell-bent on, the story that’s inside their heart that needs to get out to connect other customers to them. We did that with the strategy component of our planning Yep.

Brandon Welch: 50:08
Then we went through turning that into messaging and we wrote some good ads. More importantly, we leveled out the main value propositions, the main things we were going to call people to us around. Now it’s time to put their media budget together, breakdown, remind us what they’re spending and how we’re allocating.

Caleb Agee: 50:27
Yeah, so if you remember, um this was two weeks ago we talked about eight to 12 being um on the aggressive you know 12 being very aggressive side of your overall marketing budget. Steve has been spending closer to 12. He wants to grow and um he spent. Um he was at 2.9 million top line last year year and he had spent 312,000 on marketing. He at first said I want to go to four, yes, and we talked about what 12% of four or how many customers we’d have to you know how much we’d have to spend on those customers to get them.

Brandon Welch: 51:05
It was like well over 400,000 in advertising. It was a lot and he said ooh, let’s make it three 50.

Caleb Agee: 51:09
I’ve, I’ve got a budget for that. I think I feel cashflow into that. Yeah, that’s an X. So we’re going to take the three 50 and we’re going to start with um doing that 60, 40 split. Uh, we’re going to do it. I’m going to talk about the nuance of this later here in just a second, but just focus on Steve and Sarah for a second. We’re going to go with 60% and we’ll start with the tomorrow, the tomorrow marketing component because, that is where, really where we should set our focus.

Caleb Agee: 51:39
We recommended that Steve spend 16, 16, five a month for 12 months out of the year. Do we quit in December? Nate the camera guy? No way, no. Uh. Even when nobody’s buying windows in January, heck, no, no way. So, um, he’s been in 16, five a month. Yes. Uh, on TV and then, uh, production is another cost. That’s honestly. If you’re spending $16,000 a month, you should invest in really good messaging, because you don’t want just some crappy ad that somebody whipped together.

Brandon Welch: 52:14
That’s $15,000 to $20,000 a year, so that’s another grand or two a month if you were to annualize it out, but you want really good commercials. Steve and Sarah have great commercials.

Caleb Agee: 52:23
That actually lines up to almost just right at 60% of his $350,000 budget. You want to speak to the Today medias?

Brandon Welch: 52:33
Yeah, so did we go? Did we talk about the? We did all of his on TV, right? We did all of his on broadcast on the. Tomorrow Marketing.

Caleb Agee: 52:44
Yes.

Brandon Welch: 52:46
Let me just say this At this level, once you’ve got a good momentum. Now they Steve and Sarah, or the people that were actually the real people behind Steve and Sarah have such amazing response from these campaigns. It’d be hard for them to go. Let’s stop doing that and go over here. But I would be okay knocking that down to 14 grand a month and spending a couple few on some billboards.

Caleb Agee: 53:09
Yes, I didn’t say that at the beginning, before we jumped into this. The big question when you’re talking about media is also what did I do last year? We talked about that in the strategy phase, but we’re not looking to crumple up last year’s marketing plan and just throw it in the trash, can?

Brandon Welch: 53:24
Because it’s still those same people.

Caleb Agee: 53:25
It’s the same people If we were like ah, that didn’t work as well, we need to switch stations, or we’re going to switch from TV to radio, we’re going to switch from radio to billboards. You are wasting the momentum you had. So we’re trying to make small, slow adjustments. Maybe something does need to be adjusted, but we’re not looking to throw the whole thing out and start over when we make next year’s marketing plan. The whole thing out and start over when we make next year’s marketing plan. If you have a marketing plan from last year, we’re making an adjustment from that marketing and maybe not.

Brandon Welch: 53:52
There’s a lot of them that we don’t change the programming at all. Actually, most of the time we don’t change programs. Now we do renegotiate rates Absolutely, and that’s where an agency and a Megan or a Frank and Maven or any local agency is going to be worth their weight in gold and getting you the best deal on that Cause it makes it go so much farther. Um but uh. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We’re almost always adding to budget because they’re like yeah, I grew, and like I want to grow more money, yeah.

Brandon Welch: 54:21
So when I’m looking at that additional budget I’m going, do I buy another TV program or another TV station or another radio station, or would it be pretty cool to take these magnetic characters that I’ve built in these TV ads and put them on the biggest corner in town or on the route of one of the wealthier neighborhoods, on their way to the work or the work, their work or the supermarket? Yeah, so that every day they saw them in the morning, they saw them in the evening and then in between they’re like, oh, there’s those guys, there’s those people that I love. So there could be like I’m a really big fan of.

Brandon Welch: 54:54
Before I like double my TV budget, I might add some billboards and and or some other fun stuff that I can do consistently, such as um, like, um, like, maybe a print local print magazine, like we add a lot of that lifestyle type stuff in, yeah, but your core stays the same. Okay, that we spent a lot of time on tomorrow again, so this is today. Today, junior Good today.

Brandon Welch: 55:18
So the inverse 40% of their budget give or take is being spent on Google ads and Facebook lead generation. So that adds up to 10 grand a month. And then the rest of that we’re spending $3,000 per quarter roughly on a direct mail thing. There’s some coupon things we’ll try throwing in a special offer in, and these are just. I do these at times where I know there’s a lot of people naturally surging and shopping and so I try to be the offer that’s the most attractive and you pair that with the brand and the people and these magnetic characters and this persona we built around the brand that they already trust. And even if there’s 10 other goobers on this list of coupons or in their inbox, our clients are the ones that pop out, because they already know, like and trust them.

Brandon Welch: 56:05
So on average, if you spread that out. Oh and, by the way, I threw in a couple trade shows.

Caleb Agee: 56:09
That’s in the Today Marketing Budget because that’s where Local HBA or something like that.

Brandon Welch: 56:14
Yeah, HBA, or your home shows, your home and garden shows. Per year People come out and they’re or your farm shows or your fairs or your festivals if you’re not in the home improvement business.

Brandon Welch: 56:26
That’s where a lot of people come to like shop and sort of stick their head out of the sand and say I’m considering buying and if you have a good offer and a good presence in those things you can really clean house to what I did there. So that’s today and tomorrow. Marketing guys. That’s remarkably simple. It’s largely broadcast plus Google and Facebook.

Caleb Agee: 56:46
Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 56:47
Yeah, now behind the scenes at Frank and Maven, because we’re running these campaigns a lot of nuances to how we’re doing Google and Facebook Lots of episodes you can go back and look at and learn our formulas for. But that’s a really simple media plan. I’m not on 20 different you know places because I want large groups of people committing to me before they ever realize they need me. That’s right. I want really targeted and clean um presence when they’re in that mode to take the next step. And then I want to remind my past customers with email and, by the way, with these guys we do handwritten notes and email. That’s our largest spend on that. That’s right.

Brandon Welch: 57:27
And and once a year we do a customer appreciation event our largest spend on that. That’s right. And once a year we do a customer appreciation event which works like gold. It’s magic when you rent a tent for three grand and hire some band for a couple grand and you hire a barbecue company to come out. It’s amazing when people are sitting there that go. You know, I’ve been meaning to have you out and I’ve been meaning to tell my grandma about you.

Brandon Welch: 57:45
And it just you end up with conversations and it’s just fun and it’s fun and it’s a good thing to do.

Caleb Agee: 57:51
Yeah, Tell me about. So. Going back to their TV budget, it’s $16.5 a month. Yes. How many programs do you think that buys them? They’re kind of a mid. You know they’re I can’t remember four, three or four or five years old at this point four, three or four or five years old at this point.

Brandon Welch: 58:09
So if I took their TV budget there’s, uh, if I took that um 16.5 a month that’s going to come out to about 200 grand a year. Okay, Um, the programs I’m buying in there would be uh, we, for this particular client, we do a lot of midday news. So, like new news, like 4 pm news, when there’s semi-retired people with money sitting around their house.

Caleb Agee: 58:31
In their forever home In their forever home.

Brandon Welch: 58:33
That’s that person. So it works. That might be $200 a spot to be in. It’s a pretty efficient spot and I’m reaching 20,000 to 30,000 people a time when I’m doing that. But that $200 times five spots a week would be $1,000 a week to be in. That one program times 52 weeks, that’s roughly $50,000 a year. Right, $52,000 a year. That was easy math.

Brandon Welch: 58:58
So that’s one of my programs and I’ve got a couple others that are similar to that and so I’m in four, maybe five programs for that budget. I also have them in evening news, so that actually pulls them out to, because the evening news, so that actually pulls that, actually pulls them at to, because the evening news is more expensive.

Caleb Agee: 59:13
More expensive.

Brandon Welch: 59:13
It’s more about 70 to 80,000 a year per program. So I think I have two midday-ish programs and then 70 to 80,000 in that evening program and that’s their budget. Okay, really, really simple, really simple. Now, told another episode, go episode. Go back to the. Do this before you buy TV and radio episode. It’s going to pop up on the screen right now. That’s your core budget. Okay, now you’re a big player with that kind of money in most markets. You’re going to go to the TV station and say, well, I’m only going to give it to you if you have the best added value deal. And what kind of bells and whistles are you going to put on this? You’re going to get the TV stations and the radio stations throwing in a lot of either extra spots or fun things where you get to come on their lifestyle news programs or sponsor their weather apps Weather sponsorships.

Brandon Welch: 59:58
Or be a logo in their newscast somehow, and you’re going to get more on top of that money, but that’s your core schedule, so you may have heard that all that budget $350,000 a year and you may be saying, wow, I am nowhere close to being able to spend that.

Caleb Agee: 1:00:17
What we would tell you is they weren’t either. Yeah Well, first of all, this was aggressive and tight for them. They kept the tension strong.

Brandon Welch: 1:00:26
Well let me just be clear. The Steve and Sarah we’re actually talking about white-knuckled their first year of spending $50,000. Yeah, and that was a life or death spend for them.

Caleb Agee: 1:00:38
Yeah, the 60-40 or 70-30 ratio we’re talking about from these. That really depends on the maturity and the life cycle of your business. If you are in your very, very first year, you are probably going to trend maybe the inverse, where you have more today marketing. You have to get leads, you have to do jobs to pay the bills and pay your people and all of that, and you are getting scrappy and you’re doing what you got to do and you are getting scrappy and you’re doing what you got to do. So don’t hear that, um, just because you don’t have, you know, 200 grand to spend on tomorrow, marketing today that you’re not maybe capable of it, but so you will. You will need to start with some day today marketing. But set some aside, start making a budget, start making um, a fund that you say we say you should have about six months worth of your tomorrow marketing. That you would say. Or like a budget of tomorrow marketing, you say you know what If I didn’t see that 30 grand or that 50 grand or 100?

Brandon Welch: 1:01:42
grand For the next six to 12 months, I’d be okay, yeah, and you’re going to invest in it and it’s going to break for most categories.

Brandon Welch: 1:01:48
Unless you’re a restaurant or unless you’re something that where people buy it every day, it’s going to take 6, 12, 18 months for you to start seeing like the real. Like, okay, this is $1 and $2 out. Leading up to that it’ll be slightly negative cash flow. To break even for a while to really good month, to zero month, to like oh gosh, what’s going on here? Stay the course, stay the course, stay the course. Um and Steve and Sarah man, I talked to them every other day for a year or two while they were doing this. I’m like are you sure? Are you sure? I’m like this is what happens every time we do this. It works out.

Caleb Agee: 1:02:26
We’ll tell you that study had not come out. This is old data. By the way, this is old Steve and Sarah’s example that we’re talking about is from a couple few years ago. That study wasn’t out yet and we didn’t know we were doing this, but we literally had them at a 60-40 ratio and we went back and looked at the numbers and this is exactly what was proven to to be the right way, the right ratio to have indeed and so it’s very, very cool to to see that yes, okay, we have surely talked way too long about this topic for one episode we love it, though we do love it.

Brandon Welch: 1:03:03
Media can be simplified by taking 60 to 70 percent of your budget, or as much as you can up to 60 to 70% and saying where can I reach the largest group of people daily?

Brandon Welch: 1:03:16
Taking the remainder, putting it into things like Google and targeted Facebook ads to generate today opportunities Today customers yep, and then always, no matter what, because it’s virtually free talking to your past customers with email, text message, handwritten notes, phone calls and customer appreciation events. Yeah, that’s the split. We gave you the principles in between. Make sure if you’re buying TV, you’re buying one program at a time. Make sure if you’re buying radio before you add others. Make sure if you’re buying radio, you’re doing 40 spots a week, 6 am to 7 pm. You’re doing 40 spots a week 6, 8, or 7 pm Billboards. Pick them in the same corner and leave them there for a while until you’re ready to add another one.

Brandon Welch: 1:03:53
That’s right. Keep it in that same corner. Youtube and social media like paid social media. Choose the reach campaign goals and put them in tight radiuses and make sure you’re getting five to six frequency per month with the audience. Those are your big ones. The other stuff if you want to do it and you got the money to try it and you just it feels right, do it yeah.

Caleb Agee: 1:04:17
Set your expectation as far as which customer you’re hoping to reach with that thing. Yes, I think that’s important. If you say, ooh, I tried that tomorrow marketing for two months and it didn’t work, well, the answer is right there, in the middle of it Of course it didn’t work. Yeah, of course it didn’t work. If you try a today marketing thing and you don’t feel anything from that right away, now there’s still a strategy and a message to deal with.

Brandon Welch: 1:04:42
Those could be wrong, but you need to make sure, providing you got a good strategy, a good message. It should be yielding short-term results. Keep those seeds going in the ground. So, guys, that was our last uh line of strategy message and media making your marketing plan for 2025. If you’re at this and you’re going, wow, it’s a lot. I wish I had some more handholding on this. We have a perfect thing for you. It’s a lot. I wish I had some more handholding on this. We have a perfect thing for you.

Brandon Welch: 1:05:12
The Maven Marketing Audit is now live at mavenmarketingauditcom which you look at there and that will take you through a series of guided questions. It takes five to 10 minutes and it will print out where your biggest opportunities for growth are.

Caleb Agee: 1:05:27
Yeah, this tool is so cool.

Brandon Welch: 1:05:29
So cool. We’ve worked like literally years on this, yeah, and it’s going to print out a free marketing report for you and then you’re going to get a chance to meet with Megan or Leslie or one of our senior strategists here it might even be Caleb or I, oh my, and we’re going to look at your plan and say, hey, if we were you, this is what we would do next.

Brandon Welch: 1:05:49
And at that point, if you need a little bit more help, there’s two ways that Frank and Maven can help you next year. One is another new thing that we’re extremely excited about.

Brandon Welch: 1:06:02
It’s called the Maven Marketing Mastermind and we’re going to put you in a group with other like-minded business owners and two times per month, you’re going to bring your stuff, you’re going to bring your ads, you’re going to bring your media questions, you’re going to bring maybe even your employee recruiting questions. You’re going to bring anything in your business that has to do with growth or just wanting some extra wisdom, experience inside on, and we’re going to workshop it with you. You’re going to get that chance to do it and you’re going to have other business owners in the room. And marketers.

Brandon Welch: 1:06:33
Yeah, and marketers going hey, I did that one time. Here’s what I learned and that’s the idea of a mastermind is you get smarter by other people’s experience, not just your own, right? Yeah, so we’re going to launch that. It’s going to be very, very affordable, especially if you’re listening to the podcast right now, because we have a few slots left. We’re going to give that to you for half price forever if you jump in. And just so you know, we’re talking about a $300 a month entry-level price for everybody else in the world. That will probably go up over the years, but you will get that locked in at $150 a month and come on, yeah, come on Right so now, and that’s with the people you know on the other side of this glass that are right now working on millions of dollars with advertising.

Brandon Welch: 1:07:21
They’ve got experience in every corner of the country. They’ve got hundreds and thousands of campaigns under their belt. That’s Caleb and I who are who have the pleasure and the honor and the blessing of working with some of the sharpest minds and small business, and you’re going to get to come hang out with that. I’m not saying we’re the coolest ever, but I’m saying wouldn’t that be cool if we got to work together in that way.

Brandon Welch: 1:07:45
The second way and this is frankly something we open the door up a few times a year is to become a partner client at Frank and Maven. We are building some new teams within Frank and Maven so that we can serve more businesses one-on-one and 20, or maybe even a little under that, and you’re digging these principles and you’re going yeah, I’m spending that kind of multiple six figures on marketing. It definitely makes sense for you to have an outside expert and it probably makes sense to employ a team like Frank and Maven. That’s where we really start doing way more with that money than you would probably have the time, attention or maybe resources internally to do. Have the time, attention or maybe resources internally to do. And so if you want to be part of that mastermind, you’re going to email, put me in the mastermind to mavenmonday at frankandmavencom and we’ll send details very shortly.

Brandon Welch: 1:08:39
It’s going to launch in January and then, if you are looking for some extra help and we’ve never, I’ve never said this on the podcast, ever but just send us an email that says I’d like to take a deeper look at what Frank and Maven might be able to do for me. In January we’re going to set aside some time to do some interviews with prospective new partner clients where we could maybe help you one-on-one.

Caleb Agee: 1:09:01
Yeah.

Brandon Welch: 1:09:03
Put this stuff to work for you. So, it’s been such a blessing and such an honor to serve you in this way and to help make your business better. That is why we do this. It is not to grow our agency or anything like that. It is because there’s a burning desire for us to wake up and help small business owners just like you, and small business marketers just like you, get a little more out of a little less. That’s right, and have fun doing it.

Brandon Welch: 1:09:28
So, we have one more episode for you coming up next week and that is going to be 25 tips to start your 2025 year in marketing and top secret. Top secret, don’t tell anybody, but it’s just a recap of what we’ve gone through this past year. We’re taking our best stuff from the past 52 episodes.

Caleb Agee: 1:09:46
The hits, only the hits, no deep tracks yes.

Brandon Welch: 1:09:50
Yeah, yeah, only the hits. So thank you so much for being here. We will be back here every Monday, every Monday, every Monday, it’s been true, for going on two years. We’re going to have our two year anniversary before we know Answering your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why Nate the Camera Guy? Are just a fancy lie. Have a great day, have a great week.