Staggeringly low media spend, particularly on Google, which is the channel most likely to help drive sales within a suitable return on advertising spend threshold.
How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
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Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#12What about rent?
Good one. Buffer is a fully remote/distributed team with no office.
That being said, expenses like Internet go to the admin budget and not marketing.
Thanks for the question. (I work at Buffer and wrote the budget article) :)
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#13What about rent?
> Office expense (a.k.a. “swag”)
Kind of ironic to have an office expense category when we don’t have an office, right?
They're 100% remote
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#14So to summarize, they have "10-Person Marketing Team" spending 93k/month total, with 2 major breakouts,
1. Teammate Expenses (73,225 + 9,402 + 367) = ~83K
2. Everything Else (or Actual Marketing) = ~10k
Why do they need 10 person team for $10k budget (actual money spent to bring customers in)? unless these guys are literally going door to door.
P.S. I'm not marketing professional.
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#15Amazing to me that their media budget is only $3,000. That is absolutely tiny! I'm curious why they don't do any programmatic (like display), and how they only spend $500 on search ads (I'd imagine brand-only terms would be over $500/mo).
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#16So to summarize, they have "10-Person Marketing Team" spending 93k/month total, with 2 major breakouts, 1. Teammate Expenses (73,225 + 9,402 + 367) = ~83K 2. Everything Else (or Actual Marketing) = ~10k Why do they need 10 person team for $10k budget (actual money spent to bring customers in)? unless these guys are literally going door to door. P.S. I'm not marketing professional.
Advertising is only a small portion of marketing. Probably 1/3rd of 1 persons job is spending that $3k media spend.
The rest of the team works on things like branding, identifying markets/customers, picking price points, running tables at events, writing content, working on the website, researching potential new products, understanding how current users use the products, analyzing web site traffic for insights, etc. At some places things like ui/ux fall under marketing - like making it easier for a user to purchase a product, writing manuals/user guides, etc.
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#17So to summarize, they have "10-Person Marketing Team" spending 93k/month total, with 2 major breakouts, 1. Teammate Expenses (73,225 + 9,402 + 367) = ~83K 2. Everything Else (or Actual Marketing) = ~10k Why do they need 10 person team for $10k budget (actual money spent to bring customers in)? unless these guys are literally going door to door. P.S. I'm not marketing professional.
Based on the software they pay for, I guess a lot of time is spent on writing promo emails, reaching out to journalists with press releases or similar, and other hands-on outreach versus just buying ads.
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#18Not marketing professional here, but I'm surprised at how almost all of the budget went to payroll related expenses. I would have imagined higher percentage spent on advertising spot, online and offline.
Yeah, it's cool to see a budget. But then it's puzzling because I don't know what a marketing team does besides advertise.
Pasting from another comment. Advertising is a section of marketing (You could get a degree in either one).
The rest of the team works on things like branding, identifying markets/customers, picking price points, running tables at events, writing content, working on the website, researching potential new products, understanding how current users use the products, analyzing web site traffic for insights, etc. At some places things like ui/ux fall under marketing - like making it easier for a user to purchase a product, writing manuals/user guides, etc.
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#19While lots of folks may think the salary-to-advertising ratio here is way too high, I think it probably makes sense. I have to imagine that most of the Buffer marketing team is either creating marketing materials or promoting them in highly targeted ways. (I.e., they must be doing things that don't scale.) Moving that entire salary expense into ads would probably yield far less value to Buffer. What's more useful: an article from a well-read tech site talking about Buffer's cool features that came about from direct outreach, or some more easy-to-ignore Google ads?
Re: How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month
#20Is it just me who finds odd they put advertising production and media buying all mixed into "adversiting", yet break it down by media channel? It's usually: production + media I read their advertising breakdown as media purchased, unless production is diluted in the value (which I doubt because you can use ads across social media channels for example, despite having different specs). Or they just don't want to disclo…
Its possible they do everything in-house and use free stock images. For facebook you don't necessarily need a designer, someone can easily write search ads, and they don't do any banner/video/etc advertising.
Not how I would run it, but I don't know much about them.