I think a few people are confusing marketing and advertising which are 2 totally different things.
I have a marketing person part time who spends all his time carrying out free or nearly free to implement marketing tasks ,, email , phone calls, visits to potential/existing customers, listing/updating blogs, SEO , getting us onto directories, networking, PR etc . My advertising spend is very little , but my marketing spend is £120/week plus 15% of work brought in , plus about £30 in diesel for him .
It is early days but the annual return will be about 10-1 , which is not very high , but we are aiming for a 6 figure turnover in our first year.