Marketing Budgets – those two words together can sometimes make a company founder or CEO cringe. Some companies don’t believe they have a marketing budget while others have a great grasp as to what their budget is. Back in the late 90’s and early 2000s many companies with investors and high marketing budgets blew through their budget with crazy advertising promotions and marketing stunts.
While we at J and R spend very little on outbound marketing I thought it would be interesting to discuss some creative ways how NOT to spend a marketing budget, eight ways to be specific. All ideas I’ve considered and decided against for so many reasons. Let’s make it interesting and say our marketing budget is 5 million dollars for 2018.
1: Spend all of it on Direct Mailing
There are over 25 million small businesses in the United States. With a budget of 5 million, we can only reach about 25% of that list by working with a Direct Mailing company. In order for this to make sense, we would need to convert a whole lot of businesses into customers.
2: Place 25 Million Cold Calls
While telemarketing certainly doesn’t have the highest conversion rate we COULD use our entire budget on a telemarketing campaign. With a 5 million dollar budget, we could hire a telemarketing company and come close to calling every business in the United States once, but how many of them would we simply annoy, or ruin the dinners of?
3: Buy 500 Million pop up ads
If we assume we can receive $10 CPM for pop-up ads we can purchase 500 million of them. J&R Marketing logos and advertisings everywhere! We can dominate and most likely annoy a lot of web users for a period of time. Hopefully, we convert more than the standard average!
4: Create a mascot and make him famous
While we think J&R Marketing is growing in popularity, it’s not yet a household name. With our 5 million dollar marketing budget, we could create a mascot, we could make him famous just like the Aflac duck and then watch the business come in. It sounds easy enough but mascots are hit or miss marketing choices. What if our personal Aflac duck is a flop and your whole budget has gone to creating and promoting them?
5: Buy 2 Blimps
A blimp costs roughly $2 million, so we can purchase two of them and still have 1 million left for gas, pilots and custom t-shirts to drop from the blimp. If this doesn’t get us recognized I don’t know what will! Maybe we could drop five million bucks of flyers from the blimps too!
6: Hire a Celebrity Spokesperson
With 5 million dollars I’m sure we can hire a good enough spokesperson to make a difference. Who should we hire? Well, we’ll need to make sure they are within our budget and that they fit our demographic. I wonder if Vanilla Ice would be interested?
7: Send 100 Billion Spam Emails
That’s right, 5 million dollars with get you 100 Billion Emails. 100 Billion emails should go along way, right? If we send them at once who knows what will happen, maybe the internet will crash! Sure, a lot of them will most likely end up in Spam filters but some would get through. If we can convert 000.1 of them we should be in pretty good shape!
8: 5,000 hours of Infomercials
Have you ever been wide-awake late at night changing channels and watching different infomercials? Car wax, knife sharpener, cleaning products, the Snuggie? Maybe you fear insomnia not only because it will cost you sleep but also cost you money from buying different products from infomercials. With 5 million dollars we can approximately purchase about 5,000 hours of infomercials and we’ll stop missing out on this quickly shrinking late-night audience!
