What percent to allocate to marketing?

[markm]

I have noticed lately that a lot of folks hereabouts seem to think marketing / publicity is extremely important;

I have also noticed that many pie-charts of token-distribution allocate some slice to marketing / publicity.

Thus I am interested in how much percent the typical investor who thinks marketing deserves a budget typically allocates to marketing.

Presumably a person who thinks "marketing is everything" will be putting the vast majority of their investments into marketing-engines, advertising, publicity-systems and the like, figuring that the more powerful their publicity ability the more profit they can earn on maybe in many cases basically anything at all that they choose to promote.

Either by "affiliate advertising" or simply allocating some tiny portion of their budget toward purchasing things to advertise, ultimately the majority of their earnings will come not really so much from the things they promote as from having the ability to promote them.

In fact it seems to my naive thinking that at an extreme this kind of thinking might lead them to not even bother "investing" in any "inventory" such as coins or tokens or shares or whatever to advertise, leaning instead toward the affiliate approach or just directly being or investing into advertising agencies and such, either way basically promoting things they do not even own.

Probably because I hail from a free open source and community-based background, it has always seemed to me that each player or participant or investor or whatever one chooses to call them ought to be able to make their own decision as to how much of their capital to spend on "inventory" aka "investments" versus how much of it to spend on promoting such things; thus that individuals or Corps or groups or demographics or whatever who believe marketing is important would allocate more toward promoting the things they invest in than would folk who are of an opinion that if the thing is worthwhile it won't need such expenses: the "build a better mousetrap" idea versus the "if you aren't going to pay them to come they won't be coming" idea...


-MarkM-

[okox991]

I believe that, in practice, the marketing budget allocation depends a lot on the nature of the product and the target market. Many investors with a pragmatic approach prefer to balance investments in the product with well-targeted promotion.

[Accardo]

Marketing is kind of something with a big stomach that never gets filled up like the human desires. Investors who wish to garner income through affiliate marketing could go further with whatever they feel like to lose in the process, since most of the time the income doesn't come immediately. And no amount of money allocated to marketing would ensure the flow of prospects or leads. Advertisers do their best but still no sales. The losses are there to bear, yet with the right boards or target, marketing pays off real good, especially affiliate, and this ensures making money while boating.

[BattleDog]

If you're looking for a magic percentage of "budget goes to marketing" number, there isn't one. The good news is that the projects that survive don't pick a number first, they work backwards from reality: margin, customer lifetime value, and how hard it is to get anyone to even notice they exist.

Coming from the same FOSS / "build a better mousetrap" world, I used to think like you: put almost everything into the thing itself, and if it's good people will show up. In practice, especially in crypto, attention is the scarce resource, not code. I've watched technically brilliant projects die with 0 marketing, and absolutely mid ones do just fine because they were in everyone's face 24/7.

Rough ballpark from stuff I've been involved with: early stage / launch phase tends to be very marketing-heavy - 20-40% of spend (not token supply charts, actual cash/OPEX) can go into community, content, listings, partnerships, etc.

Once you have a base of users and some organic pull, that can drop closer to 10-15% and you let word of mouth and product quality do more of the lifting. If you're in a super niche B2B type space, you can get away with even less because five good relationships beat ten thousand banner impressions.