[00:00:00] Are you tired of empty promises and stolen ideas? Me too. Got. Marketing is a podcast for marketers and small brands who want real talk and clever strategies without the bs. Running an online business is hard, but everything gets easier when your marketing starts performing. I am Mia FileMan, your straight shooting campaign loving friend here to talk marketing, running a business, pop culture, and everything in between.
Let's dive in.
Hello friend. Welcome to Got Marketing. In today's episode, we're gonna answer the question, how much marketing is enough marketing? And I'm gonna give you a marketer's favorite answer, which is, it depends. The level of marketing that you require for your business is dependent on quite a few factors.
The biggest one is your business [00:01:00] model, what kind of business you are running. So I'm an online business and I sell memberships courses, digital products. That requires, and this is a technical term, and absolute ton of marketing, like constant marketing, however. If you are a website strategist and designer, like one of my customers, Janine, who has the capacity for three to five projects a month, do you need to be doing daily social media posting and weekly edms and weekly podcasts?
Absolutely not. You do not need that, which is why I take such a big issue. With the one size fits all advice, which actually is one size fits nobody. Your industry and your business model is a huge determining factor into the quantity of marketing that you require, and that really comes down to how hard a sell is it.
The harder something is to sell, the more [00:02:00] marketing you need. When we are talking about one-on-one services. Like website design and website strategy, or marketing strategy or consulting or copywriting. It's a pretty easy sell, right? Somebody needs a copywriter or a strategist or a designer, and they get to work directly with you one-on-one.
They get to have this service delivered, and it is a known quantity. We have worked this way for decades and people are very familiar and expecting to pay what they're paying. To engage a service provider. So it's a pretty easy sell. Online products and digital courses, it's a much harder sell because it's one to many.
Am I going to get the same level of support? Am I going to get value out of this investment? Am I going to get accountability? All of these things become unknowns, and as a result it becomes a harder sell. So we need a lot more marketing. A few weeks ago, I had Lex Stanley on the [00:03:00] podcast to talk about trade and home improvement businesses, and you should go back and listen to that episode.
And Lex laid out the kind of marketing that trade and home improvement businesses need, which is quite different to the kind of marketing that other business types and industries need. So really what I'm saying here is that it is horses for courses, but every company, no matter the size, needs marketing.
There is no company that does not need marketing. And if you don't believe me. Then you need to answer the question, why does Bunnings market their business so aggressively? And I'm talking millions of dollars a year. Why is Bunnings investing so much in their marketing? But you don't need to invest in any marketing because Bunnings operates in a monopoly and.
We all need to go there whether we want to or not. So why are [00:04:00] they marketing so heavily? And it's because there are other business objectives other than growth. Bunnings market their business to keep competitors out. They have a monopoly and they can continue to maintain a monopoly if they make the barriers to entry quite high, which they are doing by outspending their competitors a hundred, a thousand, a million to one.
And so if you are thinking about starting a competitive home improvement warehouse, you are going to find yourself competing with Bunnings. And I don't want those OTs do you? This is a huge reason why Bunnings continue to market, even though on the surface they don't. The other reason is recruitment.
Many of you who say that you don't want any more customers, you don't want any more revenue, and therefore you don't need any more marketing. You need [00:05:00] staff. And actually recruiting the best talent requires marketing. And some of my favorite campaigns that I've worked on are recruitment campaigns. I'm currently filming at this podcast at the global headquarters offices in Winne, and actually the way that we started working together eight years ago now was that we were working on a worker attraction campaign for the Northern Territory government.
It's really hard to get people who are living in Melbourne and Sydney and Brisbane to uproot their entire lives and move to the Northern Territory where it is 36 degrees in the shade. And take up a position with the Northern Territory government. It's a hard sell, and so we worked on a $200,000 campaign that was all about recruitment.
So we need to stop being so narrow minded with our marketing that more marketing equals more sales. [00:06:00] No, it can mean recruitment. It can mean retention. It can mean blocking competitors. It can mean. Lots of different things other than sales. Well, the other reason why Bunnings market so aggressively is about average weight of purchase or aop.
You go into Bunnings to buy one screw. You walk out with $90 worth of stuff that you didn't know you needed later, like. Plants and just bits and bobs. And a lot of that comes down to Bunnings marketing, letting you know that there's all this other random cool shit that you can also buy while you're there.
Yeah. Uh, think about average weight of purchase as well. So how much people are buying each time they shop from. Not just how much they're buying. Once off.
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So the point I wanna make today is that not every brand needs to have a lot of marketing. Okay. It really depends on how competitive your industry is and also what you are selling, and whether that is a hard or easy sell, don't just look at people like me who spend 70% of my week on marketing that [00:08:00] doesn't need to be you.
If we go back to the Janine example, Janine is booked out until the end of the year with her website design and strategy business. So we were talking about this within the advanced group just this week about what Janine should do now, considering she doesn't have any capacity for additional clients this year.
And what we advised her to do was to keep her always on marketing still humming for Janine. This is. SEO and blogs, that real evergreen content where you write it once and that it continues to sustain your brand for months, if not years. So making sure that she still has a consistent presence. But does Janine need to go and run a campaign?
Probably not. So really think about how aggressive your goals are and then work with someone like me to tell you, this is how much marketing you need in order to meet those goals. And it might not be that much. It's about doing fewer, bigger, better [00:09:00] things.
Segment: Strong opinions are sexy.
Why is so many people's marketing not working?
People keep telling me that they're doing all the things, but it's just not working, and the answer is so harsh but true, and it's that it's just not good enough. I'm really, really sorry to say, okay, I hear this all the time. Done is better than perfect. Right, Mia? Or, oh, I, I just needed to get it out there.
Or, oh, I soft launched it. All of those are code for saying. I'm sorry to say this, that you kind of half-assed it, right? Like that's really what you're saying and I just don't feel like in 2025 and beyond, we can get away with half-assing it anymore. Especially in the online digital space. It's so competitive.
So what's happening is that we are doing too much. We're doing all the socials, all the [00:10:00] emails, all the always on. We're doing it all. It's all rushed, it's unoriginal because we haven't had time to sit with an idea and improve it and iterate upon it and ideate and really tease it out and make it really good because we are just trying to get it out there.
We're constantly feeding this invisible, algorithmic beast with content, right? And we're like, oh, I just need to get it out there. Who said that? You just need to get it out there on what timeline do you just need to get it out there? Why not pause? Take your time. Create something you are immensely proud of, that you busted your gut off, and then put it out into the world and then say, I gave it my absolute best shot.
And so no matter what happens, I'm proud that is how we should be going about our marketing. So don't misunderstand me though. I'm not saying that your marketing can't be scrappy. Of course it can be scrappy. Of course, you can use iPhone footage and [00:11:00] Canva and AI tools. It's not about scrappy or high production versus low production.
It is about planned versus thrown together at the last minute. It is about considered thought out, sat with. Rather than flinging it up on Instagram and saying, done, I've ticked a box or rushing your work, pulling together an email in two minutes and then moving on with the rest of your day. So let me outline this with a little bit of an example.
Now I understand that I set a pretty high bar when it comes to campaigns, but we should all be aiming for high bars in small business because we are. Drastically at a disadvantage compared to big businesses who have so many more resources than we do. More people, more money, more everything. And so, yes, we need to work harder than they do, and we need [00:12:00] to work smarter than they do.
And so this idea that we can just haphazardly throw something together and hope for the best. Well, I mean, there's a Bunnings around the corner spending a million dollars on TV this week. That is gonna blow us out of the water
segment: making waves
So I launched my latest campaign called In Good Company, and I wanna take you through just a little bit behind the scenes of the planning process of that campaign.
Okay, so last year I mapped out my marketing calendar for this year, right? So I can't remember exactly what it was, but generally around August or September of last year. I was still overseas at the time. I would've planned everything that was happening for 2026, and that is when I set the date for this campaign, which launched today.
So a year later, I booked the shoot for the campaign in January. And I've, I've got an email me reaching out to Steph Hanson who produced the campaign and saying, Hey [00:13:00] Steph, how are you looking in May around these dates? And we booked the shoot to happen in Lennox Head in May. I completed the first script for the campaign in March.
The final script, the props, the talent. All of it was completely locked two weeks before the shoot. That was all done. And actually that was a little bit rushed for me because I had a last minute change of heart and I completely rewrote the script, but it still happened two weeks before. The shoot and Steph Hansen had storyboarded the campaign 10 days before the shoot so that when we actually got to the shoot, we knew exactly who was saying what, exactly what scenes we needed to film.
Exactly what shots, all of it. Was done. We just got busy doing it. So then we shot the campaign in May, and I launched it on August 15th. That that was the time that we had between shooting the content and then actually launching the content for me to edit, [00:14:00] figure out exactly what assets we need, how many teasers, how many 32nd cut downs.
Look at all the professional imagery that Steph Hansen created on the day. Planning out the actual content for the campaign, we're going to be posting twice a day for the next two weeks. So we need a lot of content for this campaign and we are reusing a lot of the content from our last campaign. So I've got a little bit of a head start because I can draw on posts and survey results and things that we used last campaign.
So really if we're talking about it seriously, I have kind of been planning for 12 months for this campaign and then six months of hands-on planning for this campaign right now. If you are thinking about, Ooh, I should launch a campaign mid-September and we are now mid August. You are too late, babe. You just are.
Campaigns have lots of moving parts, and yes, you can afford to [00:15:00] let a few things drop, but if too many things are dropped, the whole thing falls apart, right? Like said a million times. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And so what we're trying to build with campaigns is this really incredible story, and we do need to think about all the different elements of that story.
You know, you should be on stories during your campaigns, so make time to be on stories. You know, you should be flipping your website so that it reflects what you're doing with your campaign. So do that. You know, you should be rallying your community to support you during your campaign, so do that. Make yourself proud, not just.
Oh, I wish I could have done this or I should have done this, or, but I didn't get to this. I honestly think that that is the difference between small business owners who succeed and those who don't. It's not about intellect. It's not about [00:16:00] wealthy or not wealthy. It is literally about the people. Who will keep the promises they make to themselves.
And I'm not asking you to do this 12 months of the year, I'm telling you to do this during your campaigns. So if you are choosing to run a campaign, go all in for that period and give it your best shot. And then I don't care what you do in between, do nothing. I don't care. Right? But when it's go time, it's go time.
Let's show up as the best version of our brand. And not let too many things fall by the wayside because the entire building will then collapse. Okay, so that is a wrap for today. I shared some strong opinions as I usually do, so please feel free to reach out with some comments or questions. I would absolutely love to hear from you.
And I'll catch you next week.
Outro
I've started a substack as the ideal companion to the podcast. It's packed with extra insights, visuals, and nuggets that [00:17:00] didn't make it into the episodes. Plus, you can revisit past editions anytime. If you want more or just prefer to read, you'll love it. Plus, it's a place for us to connect. Want the backstage pass to gut marketing. Subscribe [email protected]. Thank you. You listened right up until the end, so why not hit that subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs and they're also the best way to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia FileMan on Instagram or LinkedIn, and feel free to send me a message.
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