We have a question from Em. We have a product and siya and bread and butter ng company namin for five years now. Plano naming mag expand. Magkano ba ang dapat na ilaan naming sa marketing? Ilang percent ba ng income ang ideal?

My answer to that Em, and since I run a digital marketing company and I do marketing and advertising myself, I don't really put in a percentage of the budget. That's not how I do things. So I cannot tell you na you have to put like 10% or 20%. I'm sure if you Google it, may mga sinasabing best practices out there. But if you asked me what I'm going to tell you is, if there is a campaign that you can run, that would give you good returns on the investment in that marketing or advertising campaign, go for that. Especially if you're five years palang in the market. Startup ka pa, nasa startup phase ka pa.

So the marketing budget, in my opinion, has to be invested in things that would bring returns. I know it sounds biased cause I own SEO Hacker, but really if you're going to look at the return on investment, SEO is the best return on investment. Because if you advertise on Facebook or Instagram, these are people who are browsing, kasi wala silang magawa. May oras sila, may oras tayo. Whenever we're on Facebook or Instagram, it's because we have time to kill. It's not because we have a mission or we’re trying to complete a task, it’s marami tayong oras and okay lang sa atin na mag sayang ng oras sa Facebook or Instagram.

So imagine if you run an ad there, however targeted it is, kahit sabihin mo ang target ko, male, age range is 30 to 40 or 30 to 50, and mahilig sa relos, but they're browsing just because they have time to kill. Compared to Google, people in Google are searching for something. They're laser focused. They have an intention to buy. They have an intention to spend. And so the difference in intent is huge when you're doing social media marketing, versus when you're doing SEO.

Now there's a question, Sean, why don't I run Google ads na lang kaysa sa mag SEO kami, kasi mas mahal ang SEO kaysa sa Google ads? You're right, but Google ads is like renting. The moment you start paying Google, your search listing disappears. SEO is like owning. Even if you stop paying the SEO company, your rankings will stick. Also with SEM, you know how it is, the millennial generation all the way to the younger ones, Gen Z, were ad blind. We're ad blind. We don't like clicking ads. We don't like ads being on our faces. So when we see that it's a Google ad, we don't click it. I don't know. Ikaw ba, do you click Google ads? I don't know about you, but I don't click on Google ads. I click the first organic result because I know I'm not going to be sold something when I click on the organic result. But when I click on the page results, I know that they're going to sell me something, cause they're running ads. They're going to want to make their money back. Right.

If we're talking ROI, SEO is definitely the best, if not, one of the best. That's where I'm going to put the money. So I'm not going to tell you to spend only 20% of your marketing budget or 30%. For me, invest in good SEO. If hindi niyo kayang mag invest ngayon ng ganoong klaseng money, then do it yourself. DIY niyo muna yung SEO niyo. There's so many resources out there for you to learn and do SEO yourself. Because you can do it yourself. I'm saying this and I own an SEO company. I started out doing it myself as a freelancer, and then I built processes and right now we're a 50 man team. We're handling around 50 plus clients and we're doing it because systematize na siya. And my playbook works, but that's not to say that it's the only playbook out there. You can make your own playbook. There's a lot of ways to do SEO. My suggestion is do it ethically or the white hat method, rather than the gray or black hat, which is unethical or a mix of ethical and unethical.