How To Market Your Business For Only $1,000 A Month

$1000 a month isn't much when you're trying to grow a business. You know you need marketing, but with so many options competing for your attention, it's easy to spend your budget without seeing much in return. Every dollar matters when you're working with a lean budget and trying to make a real impact.

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  Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners. Bitcoin services provided by Block Incorporated brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app/legal/podcast. Small business owners, listen up. You started your business, but you can't do it alone. And that means you have to hire people to help. That's where Justworks comes in. Justworks is the payroll, benefits, and global hiring platform to unburden your brain from all the complicated small business stuff. They handle the things you can't afford to get wrong, so you don't have to worry. So you can focus on the parts of running a business that you enjoy, knowing everything else is running smoothly. You don't have to worry when it just works.

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  If I handed you $1,000 a month to market your business, would you know how to spend it? Listen, you could do a lot with a marketing budget of $1,000 a month that will actually drive sales to your business if you know what you're doing. If you don't know what you're doing, you're going to be lighting your money on fire. So before you spend another dollar on marketing, listen up to today's episode, because I'm going to show you how exactly to spend $1,000, only $1,000 a month to market your business, to get customers, and allow every dollar to work for you.

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  Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.

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  I want to start with what not to do with your marketing dollars, right? The fastest way to waste your money and waste your budget is to market to cold audiences first. What is a cold audience? Well, people basically that don't know who you are. Warm audiences are the opposite. People that have heard of you before, have been on your website, have seen your brand. When you have a small marketing budget of $1,000, there's no point in spending your budget on channels or on audiences that just don't convert because they just don't know who you are yet. I'm talking about billboards, I'm talking about magazine ads, I'm talking about anything you can't track. And I'm also talking about the audience you're pitching to. So even if you're doing digital ads, if you're doing ads on TikTok,

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  if you're actually just targeting these ads to people that have never seen you or never heard of you, you're really wasting your money. Later on, when you have the money to spend to build a brand and build awareness, that's fine, but in the beginning, when you only have a budget of $1,000, you need to make sure every dollar counts. What we want to do here is establish a system so that when you spend $1,000 each month, every month compounds after the other, meaning that you're going to get more and more customers for every month you spend $1,000. And today's goal is to show you how to make your money back in the first month, and then some, because we want to be profitable. We want to make money here and not just break even. So how are we going to spend $1,000? Well, we're going to start with step one, and we're going to start with not spending any money.

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  We're going to start with free first, and that's the people that already know you that are on your email list. People on your email list that are getting your newsletters or getting your updates, they're the warmest audience you have. This is warmer than anybody that is following you on Instagram or any social media platform. Why are they warm? Because they've visited your website, they signed up to your email list, they got your onboarding sequence, they've gotten your newsletter, they know who you are. So before you spend any money on ads, you can make an offer to your existing list. Too many people do not email their email list and their subscribers with something that they can sell them, right? Listen, they know that you have a business. It's not a secret that you sell products and services.

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  Sometimes you're shooting yourself in the foot by not making your subscribers aware of what you have to offer, of what you can sell them, what you can actually help them with. This is why I say you should email your list at least once a month with something that they can buy, join, or even book, like a call. Don't let your list sit dormant without these offers. And listen, you don't have to be a hard seller. You don't have to like hit them over the head with it. But it could literally just be a small paragraph in your newsletter of like, "Hey, by the way, did you know that we're opening enrollment to our program?" Or, "Would you like to get on a quick call with me so that you could see if my consulting service is good for you? Just click this link." It literally could be two lines, but you need to make them aware that you can help them beyond the newsletter.

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  You can help them beyond just being on the email list. Like they say, you don't get what you don't ask for, so you got to ask for the sale. So a lot of people say, "I don't know what to write in these emails. I don't know how to make these offers." Well, you could just use a simple formula that's known in copywriting called PAS, which is P-A-S. P stands for pain. You need to illustrate what the pain is. What pain are they going through? Like, are you struggling with X? Then A, in that acronym, is aggravate the pain. So if you don't solve this problem, this is what's going to happen. This is the pain you're going to go through. And you've been kind of going through this already for X amount of years. So you're aggravating it a little bit. And then S stands for a solution. Well, I have a solution to that problem, right? That pain. I created XYZ that addresses these things that we just talked about. It's very simple, it's very rudimentary, but it's easy for people to follow, right?

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  When you describe somebody's pain and you aggravate the pain or you describe the pain, people automatically feel like you have the solution because you understand them so well. One of the things I recommend is whenever you make an offer is to show your customers the two options they have. Option number one is do nothing and continue to get the results or the outcomes you're currently getting. So if you're currently in pain, you're currently having problems, you're currently keeping up at night with this issue in your head, you're going to continue to have those sleepless nights. Or B, buy your product or service, try something different, get a different result. It's important for you to make this clear to people because a lot of people don't know what the choices are. They think that just delaying something or not doing something has no cost. You got to show them the cost of not taking action.

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  And the best part of all this is that you're not spending a single dollar or just emailing your existing subscribers that signed up to hear from you, okay? So don't be shy. It's okay, once a month is very conservative. You don't have to hit them with an offer every day. I've been on email lists that do, actually do that. They give me an offer every single day to buy one of their products or services. You don't have to do that. You could just do it once a month, and it could be just a part of the newsletter, part of the email you're already sending. Today's episode is supported by Rosetta Stone. I absolutely love Rosetta Stone because it's helping me learn Italian faster than I can ever imagine. Why do I want to learn Italian? Well, who doesn't love Italy? But of course, Nicole's family is Italian, and I love to have some quick Italian conversations with her mom.

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  She was incredibly impressed I was able to answer in Italian. How could you put a price tag on a happy mother-in-law? If you want to take your language skills to the next level, don't wait to try Rosetta Stone Sapphire. The $100 MBA Show listeners can get 20% off the Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when they sign up today. This gets you access to Rosetta Stone Sapphire in 25 languages. Support for today's episode comes from Square. You probably know Square is the thing you tap your card on at your favorite coffee shop, restaurant, salon, or local store. But for the person running that business, Square is a whole lot more than a way to get paid. Square brings the tools you need to run and grow your business together in one system. From payments on appointments, to staff, inventory, sales, and customer relationships.

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• 9:23Speaker 00

  All right, we still have our $1,000 intact, but we're going to start spending some money. Step two, we're going to spend $500 on meta-retargeting ads. Don't worry, I'm going to tell you what that means and how to do it. It's very simple, but meta-retargeting ads is the easiest way for you to capitalize on warm audiences, people that know who you are. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is not the most popular guy in the world and not loved by everybody, but he did create an incredibly powerful platform that people are visiting every single day. We're talking about literally billions of people visiting, whether it's Instagram or Facebook or whatever it might be. This is why I'm telling you to spend half your budget on the ads that you're going to be running. There are specific types of ads called retargeting. So what's retargeting mean?

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Well, it means that you're only going to show your ads on Facebook, on Instagram, to people that have been on your website. Or you can even get really specific and really ninja and only have been on a certain page on your website. And this page could be like your offer page. It could be a checkout page, right? The point here is that you're only showing the ad to people that look like buyers, people that have already engaged on your website, have already been on a sales page or a page that is showing them your product or service. They're there, they're reading, they're consuming, but they didn't buy yet. So you want to get them over the fence with your ad. The reason why these ads are so powerful is because it only focuses on high-intent visitors.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Now, listen, Meta is so powerful that they've run so many ads over the years. They understand who converts and who doesn't. So you can optimize the ad to be optimized for conversions. What does that mean? That means that they know what type of behavior, what type of people on Facebook, on Instagram actually buy products and who doesn't. So they'll show the ads to the people that are actually buyers, that have actually converted over time, year after year, with other ads from people that sell similar things to you. Now, I know this sounds absolutely crazy and it sounds really complicated, but it's actually quite simple. Really, what you've got to do is you've got to just install a line of code.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  It's usually one line of code on whatever page or on your website that you want to retarget. I mean, if they hit that page, you want to show an ad. Now, if you think this is overcomplicated, this is hard, this is too technical, you're in luck because you can get AI to do it for you, literally. You could just install Claude on your computer and use Claude Co-Work. And what it will do, it will actually open up your browser and it will do everything you needed to do. It will create the ad for you, it will create the copy, it will, you know, set up the ads in the Facebook Ad Manager, it will install the pixel on your website. It will do everything you need to do. Just tell it what you need to do, just say, "Hey, I was on this, listened to this podcast, I want to create retargeting ads, this is my product, this is what I want to advertise, help me out."

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  It's going to give you a step-by-step guide and it's going to ask you to log into your account, it's going to tell you what to do, and you're going to prove each step of the way. You're not going to lift a finger, you're not going to write a single word, you're not going to create a single image, you're not going to even have to know how to navigate around the Facebook Ad Manager. It's going to do it all for you. The reason why I'm saying this is because you have no excuse. You have no excuse, you could do this literally today. Now, what's crazy about Meta is that it's so powerful that it will test different combos of your copy, your images, your calls to action, and it will come up with all these different scenarios and test every single one to see which ad converts the best. And it will automatically choose the one that is working and it will just spend the money on that ad, instead of you blowing all your money on ads that don't work.

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  Your goal here is to try to get at least 5,000 impressions or 5,000 people view your ad. Why? This will give you enough volume to judge if the ads are working or not. Ultimately, what you want to do is you want to move people off Facebook, off Instagram, and onto your email list. And this is the key here, that you want your ads to convert. So don't convert them straight to the actual product or service or to the thing you're trying to sell. You could just say, "Hey, do you want a discount on this product? Or do you want a bonus when you buy the next time you buy from my product or service? Sign up to my email list." Again, AI can help you with this. And you basically capture their name and email address,

• 13:42Speaker 00

  and you could do this inside of Facebook, it's called a lead ad, which is crazy. And they will give you the name and email address of the person that's signed up. Now that they are on your email list, you can nurture them, you can help them out, you can give them more offers, you can make sure that they understand the value that you actually present in your products or services. So the reason why I'm telling you to get them on your email list instead of sell them directly is that you don't want to spend too much money on ads. It's a higher lift to get somebody to buy something and spend money off an ad than for them to get something for free, like a discount or a bonus. So if you just get them to get on your email list, then you can spend more time and you can then talk to them and you can go back and forth with them easily. When they're on Facebook, they're gone, you can't contact them again, or on Instagram, whatever it might be.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  That's why you've got to move them over to your platform, which is your email list. Yes, we're spending half our budget on this because it's so powerful and it's always what I find to be the highest converting act you can do in marketing. It's low-hanging fruit, basically. You're offering something that people want to people that already know you. The only thing I would recommend is make sure your ad is congruent with what they were looking at on the page that you have retargeted them off. So if they were looking at an offer page, just say, "Hey, I see that you're interested in this, would you like a $10 discount? Would you like a 15% off coupon? Would you like a free bonus, an extra module to the program that I'm offering? Or a free one-on-one call, whatever it might be, if you sign up? Just give your name and email address and I'll give you that offer."

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  So you've got to make sure it's congruent so that they can see that, oh, it's not jarring, they understand what you're talking about. We were running retargeting ads with our software company, Webinar Ninja, because it was making money hand over fist. It was just, it seemed unfair because our average customer was making about, or was spending about $100 a month on average. That was a recurring revenue and the cost to convert a customer was something like $15. So it's like, I not only made my money back in the first month, I made, you know, $85 and then after that, it's all gravy. So even if my cost per acquisition to acquire a customer doubled and it was $30, or even tripled, I'm still making money. So I know this from experience and it still works till today.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  And it actually has nothing to do with Meta. Like, a lot of people are like, "Well, maybe it's played out because no one's on Facebook or Instagram." It just has a lot to do with the fact that you're just targeting focused, intentional customers, people that have the intention to buy. By the way, I mentioned Webinar Ninja, my software company. We have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. If you are thinking about starting a software company, we have an episode all about the five secrets to success in a software company. How do you become successful and compete with other brands, other software, especially in a crowded market with AI these days? We're working on this episode right now, so hit subscribe so you don't miss it when it comes out. All right, we have $500 left. We're going to spend the rest of the money.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Well, let's spend the next $300 on step three, which is partnerships and collabs. We want to make sure that we are leveraging other people's audiences. What does this mean? Well, there are people that are running businesses, that are creating content, that have YouTube channels, that have podcasts, have newsletters, that are serving people you want to get in front of. Maybe they're not competitors, but they're in the same space. And a lot of these vloggers, bloggers, content creators, creatives, they're not really approached. And you have a chance to sponsor their work and get in front of that audience and get them to come on your email list so that you can make them offers. In the last 10 years, I've run this play over and over again. Now, you don't have to go after the big players, the people that are famous.

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  You can go to the people that are kind of somewhere in the middle. You know, they're maybe famous online or maybe they're famous on social media. Maybe they have an email list of 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 people, but they don't have an email list of 500,000 people or a million people, okay? Those people are going to be really expensive. But the people that are kind of up and coming, they're not really approached by sponsors or by companies. And you could just literally DM them, this is what I did. I just DM them on X or Twitter back in the day and said, "Hey, I love what you're doing. I'd love to sponsor your newsletter. Can I sponsor your next newsletter or your next four newsletters for $300?" And guess what? They're like, "Yes, no one's ever, you know, offered me money to be a sponsor." So this is a great chance for you to do this.

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  So this is why it's so important to network and to get to know people and to just be online and figure out, "Hey, who's doing something interesting? Who's serving my audience or an adjacent audience that I maybe want to expand to?" For example, we sponsored a newsletter and a podcast of a personal finance expert. This person is not huge in the market, but they have a decent audience and they were happy to take our money and, you know, share what we do and get people to know our products and services. Well, one of the things that we did is just, we offered them a free course, a free program, just to get them on our email list. So then later on, we can offer our other products and services, our software at the time. And this is just a mutual beneficial arrangement. And it's only $300 a month.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  You could try different creators, you could try different people, different brands, and see what works. Sometimes you find somebody that does really well and actually gets you really good audience members and good potential customers and you just sponsor them month after month. I have found this many times. Sometimes you could do like a combo deal where you could say, "Hey, I'd like to sponsor your newsletter, your podcast, and your YouTube. Can I do that? You know, how much would that cost? $300, $200, whatever it might be." A lot of people, they're just happy that they have a sponsor. They feel credible when they have a sponsor read on their podcast. The fact that you're monetizing their show or monetizing their content, it makes them feel proud and they're going to give you a really good read and give you a good shout out to their audience. Now, I've got to say, this does take a little legwork.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  You're going to have to, you know, cold email, cold DM some people, but those are the type of DMs people answer, okay? They're like, "Hey, you want to give me money? Awesome." And you can just jump on a quick call and, you know, draft a quick contract and you can get AI to help you with that. And if you have a lawyer or somebody that can help you out, awesome. But the point here is that it's going to be very, very inexpensive for you to get started. Another hidden benefit is that you're supporting other business owners, other creators. This makes you sort of like a patron in your space and people will introduce you to other people as well. All right, step four, you have $200 left. What are we going to spend it on? And this one might surprise you and it's branded swag. Yep, you're going to buy a few t-shirts, a hoodie, a hat.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  And I'm telling you, you might think this is silly, but this works. All I wore for the first five to six, maybe even like seven years of me building Webinar Ninja, was Webinar Ninja swag. That's all I did. If you look at all my videos, even look at my vacation photos that I've put up on Instagram, I'm wearing a Webinar Ninja t-shirt. Why? Because I'm traveling, I'm working, I'm getting on stage, I'm at the airport. It strikes conversation. People are like, hey, what is this about? What is this product? What's Webinar Ninja? That sounds cool. And you get word of mouth marketing that way. And it's really a low spend for a high return. It also gets you to be a little bit proud of what you do and what you built.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  And it allows you to actually work on your elevator pitch and describe what your product actually helps people with. Now, I don't do this now, but in the beginning, it helped a lot. And you can use all the help you can get when you're getting started to get traction. And I gotta say, honestly, I just told myself, like, why am I wearing other brands? Why am I wearing Nike? Why am I wearing Under Armour or Adidas? When I can just wear my own brand and people can, you know, learn about what I do. Listen, you're not selling merch. You are just advertising your own business by wearing it. So you don't really need to, you know, create a lot of t-shirts or a lot of hoodies. I used to, I think I had like five t-shirts and two hoodies and a hat. And, you know, that would be enough for me to put it through the laundry once a week and it was all good.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  Now, I highly recommend when you buy this merch is maybe you get less merch, but high quality. You know, make sure you're using a really high quality t-shirt or sweater, whatever it might be. Because you want to make sure it looks good on you, that the cut is nice and that you want to wear it. You also want to make sure it lasts so that you don't have to buy a new t-shirt every single month. But this doesn't work if you buy the swag and you don't wear it. So you gotta wear it at conferences, at events, when you travel, at airports, at the gym. Actually, I do wear swag at the gym today. I had a hat today that had our brand on it, the Hunter MBA and the Own Your Job program. So the point here is that you have to actually put this stuff on and walk out the door. Walk your dog, go to the grocery store. Even if people don't ask you questions,

• 22:23Speaker 00

  you're getting brand awareness for free. To wrap up today's episode, you don't need to spend a lot of money to market your business effectively. Spend $500 and obviously you can play with these numbers a little bit, but I recommend $500 on meta ads, meta retargeting ads specifically. You want to then make sure that you are spending around $300 on sponsoring other creators, other businesses, other brands that are up and coming that you can get in front of their audience and get them to come on your email list. And then lastly, spend 200 bucks on some swag that you're proud to wear. All right. And by the way, you don't have to spend $200 every single month on the swag. You can then take that budget and put it into retargeting or spend a little bit more money on sponsoring other content creators.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  And of course, don't forget to email your list. That is free. You don't have to spend any money to do that, to give them a regular offer or a recurring offer or something every month, at least once a month. It could just be part of your newsletter if you'd like. Listen, if you want to keep on learning, you don't have to stop here. We have a recent episode I don't want you to just forget about because it actually made a lot of impact and we had a ton of comments on this episode. And it's called "The 10 Low Cost Purchases That I've Made That Are Under $200 Each That Have Changed My Business." So you could just scroll up to find that or you could search on YouTube or on Apple or on Spotify, whatever it is. It's called "The 10 Low Cost Purchases Under $200 That Changed My Business."

• 23:47Speaker 00

  These are small, little things that made a huge difference in our bottom line.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help start, grow and scale your business, subscribe to the podcast. All you gotta do is hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically. It's absolutely free and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. I'll check you in the next episode.

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