Hey, it’s Bob Negen. And in this episode of Real Retail TV, we’re going to explore what’s the best budget? How much should you spend on marketing or advertising for your independent retail store?

So in about forty five minutes, I’m jumping on a, live, a Facebook live with my friend and colleague, Nick McHenry from OneShop Retail. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to talk marketing. We’re going to answer questions. You know, it’s going to be a marketing free for all.

And I’m really looking forward to it, of course. And we asked for questions ahead of time. And one of the questions that was asked was this idea of what should the marketing be?

And it’s a great question. I get it asked often. It’s a great question, but it’s not the right question.

The right question is, what can I do that has a trackable positive return? So let me ask you a question. If you were to give me a dollar and I was going to give you a dollar and a quarter or two dollars or ten dollars or twenty dollars back, how many dollars would you give me? And I hope that you say I will give you as many dollars as I possibly can, Bob, because for every dollar you put in, you’re going to get more than a dollar back. And if you look at your marketing as a percentage of sales, you are automatically constraining the upside.

So you get a winner, you get an idea, you start to run an ad that has a positive return or you run a promotion that just is crushing it. If you’re constrained by your budget, you’re never going to get the maximum value. So what you’re looking to do is you’re looking to only do marketing and advertising where you can track the result. Not always. There’s some things that you can’t track, but that’s your real focus. Your real focus is what can I do and how can I measure return?

So spending money on advertising is one of the ways that you do that. But the way that I look at marketing, I see spending money on advertising as the bottom of the list of the things that you should do.

I see if you’re a independent brick and mortar retail store. There are so many more high value, high return marketing efforts that you can engage in. And that’s where you should put your energy. Let me just give you an example.

What we’re looking for is no to low cost, high return marketing. Let’s talk about a couple of examples. The first is a loyalty program. A loyalty program is a marketing effort, and it will bring you more doggone money because loyalty programs are what get people on your list.

So if you want, you can go to whizbangtraining dot com and search for the world’s best loyalty program.

And I will share the famous now famous six box program with you there. If you’re using the six box loyalty program now, I’d love it if you’d put some reactions in the comments below. But when you have a loyalty program, you are investing in more transactions. You’re investing in your current customers and getting them in more often.

Now, that’s the first thing, because when you have a good loyalty program, what’s going to happen? They’re going to give you their contact information and you’re going to build that customer database and you’re going to be able to build the relationship, which leads to the next thing, which is email marketing. Email marketing is still the very best marketing that an independent brick and mortar retailer can engage in. And of course, you want to have a social media presence.

And I strongly encourage every independent retailer to go live regularly to build those relationships with your customers. But you also want to have a robust promotions calendar. One of our Platinum Mastermind group members, one of our best clients has an in store promotion every single week. And her rule is that for every dollar she spends on the promotion, she wants to get twenty back in sales. And I’m just looking at you and saying it is hard to get a twenty times return on your advertising. So just really think about it that way. So rather than saying, how can I spend my money?

You ask yourself, how can I become a better marketer? And as I develop skills, some of the skills I just talked about real briefly here, you know, having a great loyalty program, sending an email out every week, going live, having a regularly robust promotions calendar. All of that is going to give you a tremendous, tremendous return. So when you think about your marketing, don’t think how much should I spend?

Think how much am I going to get back?

Low cost, no cost, high return as independent brick and mortar retailers. This is a place where you get to shine. Now I am going to share with you that something fun is going to be happening this week. So keep an eye on your inbox. And if you’re watching this on YouTube, first of all, I’d love it if you were to subscribe. Thank you for doing that.

And also go to whizbangtraining.com. Subscribe to the Retail Buzz. And then you’re going to find out what we’re going to talk about later on this week, too. All right, everybody. It is Bob. We will see you next week.