Turning Costs into Investments: The Fundamentals of Marketing Spend (Episode 1 of 5)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Tullio Siragusa** (0:17)
Hey, everyone. This is Tullio Siragusa with The Bliss Business Podcast. I am very excited to introduce a series of podcasts that are going to really help marketers or want to be marketers, understand the fundamentals of what it takes to turn your marketing spend into an investment that produces a return on the dollars you're spending, and not looking at it as a cost. Often a lot of organizations do that. So part of our mission to fuse more empathy into the marketplace is to understand that not everybody understands these fundamentals. So we're going to cover five different series. We're going to have a series of five different conversations, all focused on the same topic. I want to introduce the guest that I have here with Zero Company, Josh Prizer. Josh, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do at Zero Company.

**Josh Prizer** (1:16)
Yeah. So I'm the VP of Digital Marketing. So my role here, I've been with Zero Company for more than 20 years now and been in the digital marketing space for that long as well. And my role here really is to oversee the other account executives and make sure that each campaign is fulfilling its potential. And so that's– I would say the joy that I get, the fun part of my day is watching businesses grow and seeing how oftentimes, especially for small businesses, how that can really change people's lives, you know, and help people reach the goals that they want to, whether that's putting their kids through college, getting that second vacation home, retiring early, etc. That's really the joy for me is helping businesses go from here up to there.

**Tullio Siragusa** (2:09)
Awesome. Well, that aligns very well the theme of our podcast. What does Bliss stand for? Build Love Into Scalable Systems. It sounds like we're in really good hands. Here's the topics we're going to cover over five different conversation. On episode one, which is this one, we're going to cover the basics of marketing investment. The topic is Turning Costs into Investments, the fundamentals of marketing spend. In episode two, we're going to talk about how to set goals and expectations around your marketing investment. The title will be Setting the Stage Goals and Expectations for Maximizing ROIs. There's a term that might be new to some people. You might have been expecting ROI. We're going to talk about ROIs and what that is. Then in episode three, we're going to talk about Measuring Your Marketing Investment Performance. The title is going to be Crunching the Numbers, Measuring Marketing Performance for Better ROIs. There's that word again. Then in episode four, we're going to talk about Analyzing and Optimizing Your Marketing Spend. The title of that show will be From Data to Decisions, Analyzing and Optimizing for Peak Performance. It's going to be a really interesting conversation there. Finally, episode five will be about Future Proofing Your Marketing Investment Strategy. The title of that show will be Beyond the Horizon, Future Proofing Your Marketing Investment.
That's what you have to look forward to. Let's get started with episode one, Turning Costs into Investment. Now, I've been a marketer for a long time and often have struggled either as a CMO or in some other capacity, convincing the executives or the CEO, the owner that marketing isn't a cost.
It is really an investment in the business. But to make that an investment in the business, you do have to understand how to measure it in such a way that produces results that amplify the business not take away from its profits. Let's dive right in. In your opinion, what distinguishes a marketing cost from a marketing investment? Let's clarify that.

**Josh Prizer** (4:33)
Yeah. No, it's a good question.
Really, I think before diving into that, I think we need to talk a little bit about the sales funnel and the different areas we want to target in the sales funnel, whether that's top of funnel, mid funnel, or bottom of funnel. Because I think too often we see companies who want to start with a top of funnel marketing campaign, and that's definitely a little bit more of a cost, not an investment, or at the very least, a long-term investment. You know, with a top of funnel campaign, you know, we're promoting brand awareness, we're establishing trust, et cetera. The customer's in the awareness stage. They're just, you know, maybe just figuring out what they need or even that they need. Whereas with a mid funnel campaign, we're hitting the customer when they're in that consideration stage. And with a bottom of funnel campaign, we're targeting the customer when they're in the purchase stage. So what your business does, the price point of your product or service, and the length of your sales funnel will help determine how much effort should go into each stage of that sales funnel to help us. And let me even dive into an example that might make that a little clearer. Let's say you own a pest extermination business. So you buy a billboard in your area, it promotes John's Pest Patrol. Now that's a perfect example of top of funnel marketing. Do the people driving by own a house? Do they have pest problems? Are they actively looking for your services?