Is your marketing penny wise but pound foolish?

Budgets are real, and cash is king.  I get it, and as a business owner I live it daily.

But sometimes you have to spend money to make money.  Sometimes the cost of something is a fraction of the opportunity cost of not investing.

Let’s say the bank has a sale on dollar bills.  For the rest of the day today, you can buy a dollar bill for 90 cents.  What’s your budget now? Wrong question!

If you’re fixated on the cost of something, it can cloud your ability to evaluate, calculate and understand the benefit of having it, using it, profiting from it.

That software you’re considering isn’t just $49/month.  It’s going to save you three hours a week.  What’s your time worth?  What’s the opportunity cost of spending that time on something more important?

Of course you don’t need to buy that prospect list.  You can have your reps find their own contacts!  But how much does that really cost you?  Likely far more than the cost of handing them the right list and not only saving them time, but increasing the amount of time they are actively selling for you.

And if you constantly run fire-drill marketing campaigns without investing in long-term market development, content and target market relationship-building, you’ll never realize the cost savings, scalability and margin potential of avoiding the premium and “tax” of needing everything right now.

This doesn’t make the decision to invest wisely right now any easier.  It still costs cash money, and there’s an opportunity cost to using that cash too.

But in business as in marketing and life, there typically is a tomorrow.  Do you want it to be as hard as today?