The constant fear of wasting money on marketing is a bad consultant. As I said in the article Is Your Marketing Budget Unrealistic before Nobody wants to spend more money on marketing than necessary.
The shocking overlooked insight indeed is: are you wasting your money by spending TOO LITTLE?
Language school owners that constantly seek low-cost advertising and employing volunteers are missing out on this verifiable fact.
Imagine you need to get a language school room painted and have the offer of a painter that charges you $10 per hour versus another painter that charges you $50 per hour.
It is obvious which offer saves you money, no? Actually, it is not. It is very likely that the cheap offer for $10 will either use low quality paint, so you have to re-paint the wall much sooner than planned. And, it might be very likely that the $10 painter is not that effective and will take double or three time the hours you have to pay in the end. So if the $10 will take 50 hours to get the work done versus the talented painter that gets the work done in 10 hours instead.
Calculating that $50 x 10 = $500 versus $10 x 50 = $500
seems to be the same price, but consider this: if you hire the cheaper painter your classroom can’t be used for a much longer time. And if you do not have to repaint the room for the next 3 years instead of the need to repaint it every year it saves you $1000 right there.
While the painting example might be obvious, most Internet marketing activities appear to many business owners as being “equally the same”.
Hiring someone “on a small budget” to build your website that has no deep knowledge of what Google and search engines demand from a high-performing website is wasted money.
Your website will not be found in top positions.
The same is for spending money on paid traffic. If you hire someone who is inexperienced (or even do it yourself!) without knowing “keywords” potential customers search for, you are wasting your money. Professional internet marketing requires in-depth research in the background.
If you hire a writer from low-budget sites like Textbroker (they pay their so-called “writers” 1 cent per word which is a disgrace!), do not expect that search engines will list your articles and blog content. Search engines in fact rate quality on content – and that can’t be faked by cutting costs for writers.
In the end, you will always lose money if you are paying too little.
And of course: making a buying decision for Internet marketing on price alone is not a smart move either.
There are many shady websites that ask with outrageous fees for results that can’t be guaranteed like “Become number one on Google” kind of offers.
Your decision to buy high-quality marketing for your language school should be based on you understanding what is actually possible and achievable in a realistic manner.
The remedy for marketing worries is to know your numbers and what the ROI, the return of investment of your marketing does bring back to your language school business.
Replacing hope with clear formulated expectations and predictable marketing results that can be tracked is the way to go.
