How to Spend a Small Business Marketing Budget in Wales

Advice on marketing budgets usually starts with a percentage of turnover, which is useless if your turnover is uneven and your budget is whatever is left after the van is paid. The more useful question is simply: if I had £300 a month, what would I spend it on, and in what order?

This is the order we would use for a local service business, with the reasoning rather than just the list.

First: the things that are free and nobody does

Before any money changes hands, there are two jobs worth more than most paid advertising, and both cost nothing but time.

• Your Google Business Profile, filled in properly: correct categories, real service areas, six good photos and a post every week or two.
• Reviews, asked for every single time you finish a job, with a link that opens straight on the review box.

If you do nothing else this month, do those. They are the two biggest levers in local search and they are sitting there unused on most profiles. Our local SEO guide walks through both.

Second: a website that works, because everything else points at it

There is no point paying for clicks that land on a page nobody can use. Every pound you spend on advertising, leaflets, a van wrap or networking eventually sends somebody to your website, and if that page is slow, unclear or has no visible phone number, you have paid to lose them.

This is the one fixed cost we would always cover before anything variable. Our plans start at £74 a month including hosting, security, support and monthly changes, which for most small firms is the cheapest reliable line in the budget.

Third: content, if you can be consistent

Writing about the work you do is slow, cheap and compounds. A page about a type of job, written properly, can bring in enquiries for years. The catch is consistency: three posts then silence does nothing, and most small firms stop after three.

If you know you will not keep it up, either pay someone to do it or skip it rather than half doing it. Our Professional plan at £249 a month includes one to two posts a month written for you, which exists precisely because so many clients started a blog and abandoned it.

Fourth: paid ads, but only once the first three are done

Google Ads can work well for urgent local services, where someone needs a locksmith or an emergency plumber now. It is also the easiest way to spend money quickly with nothing to show for it, and clicks in competitive trades are not cheap.

Treat it as the accelerator rather than the engine. If your profile, reviews and website are all in order, ads amplify something that already converts. If they are not, ads are a way of paying to find out.

A worked example at £300 a month

Measure calls, not impressions

The commonest way small firms waste money is measuring the wrong thing. Impressions, likes and clicks are not outcomes. Enquiries and jobs are.

• Ask every new customer how they found you and write it down. A notebook beats any dashboard here.
• Count enquiries per month, not visits per month.
• Give any new channel at least three months before judging it, and a hard stop if it has not produced.
• Work out roughly what a job is worth to you, so you know what you can afford to pay for one.

What not to bother with yet

Printed brochures nobody asked for, a second social media account you will not post on, a rebrand before the website works, and anybody who rings you promising first page on Google for a monthly fee with no explanation of what they will actually do.

If you cannot say what a channel is supposed to produce, you are not buying marketing, you are buying reassurance.

If budget is the real constraint rather than the order, our quick, low cost website page is the cheapest sensible way to get the foundation in place, and this comparison sets out both ways of paying for it.

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