How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month | Hacker News Reader

How Our Marketing Team Spends Money Each Month

open.buffer.com

76 pointskawera30 comments

Most people are focussing on their advertising spend, but it looks like they've built their marketing team for inside sales rather than growth.

$3k/month on advertising means they're getting spending about $100/day. That's too low to properly target a SaaS audience for actual growth. My guess is that because they have 80k customers (according to their website), they focus most of their marketing plans around customer success and renewals rather than acquiring new leads. You can see they have a lot of budget tied to mailchimp...a sign that they spend a lot of time on lead/customer nurturing campaigns.

I don't think this blog post is meant to be useful for any company that doesn't already have mass traction.

Their advertising could be focusing on kickstarting their content marketing material. Spend big money creating good content, spend small (but smart) money promoting on niche targeted audiences, count on it to be further spread through word-of-mouth.

I see a lot of comments about people are amazed by $3k/mo advertisement spend and most goes towards salary.

I would say they have chosen wisely. HN is a forum for technical startups and people who work in the field. Yet here they are, without spending anything on advertising on the front page.

The blog post was written by the marketing director, and just by being here they are marketing buffer. This is lead gen.

Not 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.

So 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.

I would do more sales...

May not be necessary for their kind of product and market. Looking at their company page, there doesn't seem to any salespeople at the company.

Would suggest that you check out Patrick McKenzie's post about SaaS companies. Buffer fits the 'Low-touch SaaS' description pretty squarely - which would mean that they don't necessarily require a dedicates sales unit.

https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas

For low touch sales cycle company like Buffer, marketing is sales.

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.

While 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?

but doing things that don't scale is a temporary move until you figure things out. The results of those experiments must yield something.

they must be doing something that will eventually scale.

You are thinking about doing things that don't scale as a feature of your service/product.

The non-scaling feature of Buffer would be something like if a customer queued something to post to their Instagram feed, then a human actually posted it for them.

Sure it doesn't scale, but you can probably do that for a while until the tech stack is built out.

GOOD Advertising is always much more hands on.

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.

I'm always amazed at the amount of data Buffer makes transparent

It's as much part of their marketing as anything in the budget that they shared.

Definitely awesome, thanks for sharing.

Is 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 disclose it, which is completely fine :)

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.

Good point. We (Buffer) do everything in-house, so there's no additional advertising production cost.

I know it's not the main theme of the article, but I'm really interested in Buffer's laptop policies. How do you handle it if a laptop needs repair? or is stolen? What if the breakage is the employees fault, but they are not a repeat offender, so to speak? I'm curious how Buffer handles these things that I've seen problematic at other companies.

Good question. I lead the marketing team at Buffer, and we've had a couple cases where the computers have failed earlier than the renewal date (every 3 yrs). We reimburse a new laptop if it's needed. Otherwise, I really haven't experienced any "at-fault" scenarios or stolen laptops. My sample size is pretty small though (4 years, 10 marketing teammates).

Amazing 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).

Yeah...I'm thinking you guys need to start spending on some advertising.

What 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) :)

Not even a coworking type office for management or receiving mail/having an official company address?

> 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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com