Hello! Marketing is like Vegemite. If you spread it too thinly, it tastes rubbish.

I’m Jon, I’m from Small Fish Business Coaching. I’m clearly enjoying this one. I have a coaching program called the ‘Tradies Toolbox’ Coaching Program. It’s for tradies who want to grow and scale their businesses and part of that, is doing marketing properly and not wasting your money.

So what am I talking about?  Why is marketing like Vegemite?

I’ve drawn this helpful diagram here to help me explain. I hope you like it. Here’s a piece of toast with exactly the right amount of Vegemite on it. You’ll have to trust me on that. I’m always very careful to get exactly the right amount of Vegemite on it and it’s very tasty.

And here are six pieces of toast with the same amount of Vegemite, spread across them all and as you can see, there’s not very much on each piece. They don’t taste very good because you can’t taste the Vegemite at all and that’s rubbish.

I hope you get that. It’s a nice analogy. I enjoyed drawing the toast.

Marketing of course is the same. You’ve only got so much money to spend. You can have so much marketing budget and if you spread it around too far, it will be too thin and it would be ineffective. That’s my point.

And you can think of it in two ways.

1. You can think of it in terms of geography.
2. You can think of it in terms of the channels that you spread your marketing across.

And here is my next slide. Say you live in Sydney, you can spread your marketing over the entire city then you can advertise on Google AdWords and anyone in Sydney will see it. Or you can advertise for 4 or 5 or 10 suburbs within a 20k radius of where your office is and if you do that your ad will be seen more in those suburbs than if you spread it across the whole city.

I don’t want to dig too deep into the analogy because we’ll get lost, but if you spread it across too far your money gets spread too thin and nobody will see your ad. Just like if you put an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald for $10,000 you get an ad about this big and if you put an ad in the Manly Daily for $10,000, you can have four or five pages and everybody will notice you. It’s a bit similar.

It’s also true in regards to the channels you use. You spend your money if you have a website, and then you have a Facebook page and you have newspaper ads, you have TV ads, you have radio ads, you have SEO, you have AdWords, you have Facebook ads, you’re in Yellow Pages, you’re in hiPages. I could go on.

You won’t get many radio ads or newspaper ads, or Facebook ads out there, say you’ve got a budget of $2,000 a month, are you going to spread it very thin if you try and do everything? So you can’t and you mustn’t and you’re going to have to make some choices about where you spend your money.

Like Vegemite, if you spread it too thin it’s a bit shit and you won’t get the leads you want or the ones you do get will be rubbish. So my point is, you need to make choices and you need to restrict the areas of where you spend to only a few suburbs, particularly for a trades business. People aren’t going far to get a trade. And you need to restrict the number of channels to maybe 2 or 3 or 4 so you’ve got some focus for your marketing.

If we’re coaching, of course we do this right. We’re going to decide together where you should spend your money and I’m going to help you.

Don’t be surprised. I have some reasonably strong opinions about where you should be spending your money.

If you want to know what they are, place a comment in the question box below or give me a call or something and I’ll let you know.

I do have very clear opinions on where a trades business should be spending their money.

See you later.