How to use a small marketing budget to create a large impact

Each year excitement builds up around the festive period for the release of the big brands advertising campaigns. They’re a year in the making and have millions of pounds behind them and whilst impressive, just because you don’t have the same budget, it doesn’t mean you can’t create an impact with your marketing.

One of the most exciting and creative parts of marketing is being able to come up with a little piece of magic that snowballs, and you don’t necessarily need a huge budget to achieve this. A real-life example and famed marketing case study is the Dollar Shave Club. With very little budget and up against some big players in the market, the Dollar Shave Club made a low-cost YouTube ad that went viral because it did something its competitors weren’t doing; it dared to be brave and stand out.

Obviously, it takes more than one good piece of advertising to really succeed but there are lots of different ways that you can make your marketing budget stretch further and work harder, delivering results and creating an impact.

Here’s my non-exhaustive list to help get you started:

PLAN, PLAN, PLAN

Your strategy, your channels, your resources, your objectives, and your KPIs.

Without a clear plan of the above, you’re not going to be able to understand where best to utilise the budget that you have and what channels will help you achieve the objectives you’re being asked to deliver on.

The best place to start is your corporate strategy so that you can understand what the business's main objectives are. Use this to help you understand your marketing strategy and this in turn will help you to understand how you can achieve the very best results with your resources.

Know your brand and believe in it

A brand with a strong, clear brand purpose that runs through the veins of everything it does is a brand that is likely to succeed.

In today’s world, consumers want to trust and align themselves with a brand that represents who they are and what they believe in. If you can build this authentically and ensure that you are consistent with your brand’s story this can be a very powerful tool in enabling you to find your audience, build up a relationship with them and ultimately, build loyalty.

Patagonia is another loved marketing case study and rightly so. It’s built its reputation on its brand purpose and customers will keep going back to them over their competitors because they’re buying the brand’s promise, not just their products.

Use the free tools available to you

There are free tools available across the internet to help you, from planning to design and reporting tools, whatever you are looking to do, these tools can be a great way to save money at the same time as helping you achieve your goals. Here are a few to begin with:

Canva

WordPress

Google Alerts

Hootsuite

Mailchimp

Guerilla style

Guerilla marketing is a really smart way of making your budget stretch and work hard. Using innovative ideas to surprise your audience can be an effective way of driving publicity and brand awareness.

The idea behind guerilla marketing is that it can be cheaper than paying for an official ad placement or activity, and with the surprise

appeal, a good idea can gain a lot of publicity.

There are different channels you can use to create a guerilla campaign but whichever you use, promoting your brand in an unconventional way when your audience isn't expecting it, leads to the shock and surprise appeal. Some ideas to get the creative juices flowing are temporary street art, viral social media content, and pop-up experiential marketing campaigns.

Give and take a little

By offering your services, knowledge/expertise, or products in return for something from your customer, you are putting yourself right in the hands of your audience and making yourselves hard to miss.

There are lots of different and creative ways to increase awareness and take-up of products and services, whether that is a price offer, product sample, giving away free content, or running competitions, this can be a great way to engage and convert your target audience.

In return, not only do you increase awareness and reach but it can be a great opportunity to ask for something from your customers. This is normally some basic information from your customer that will allow you to connect and contact them in your preferred way, helping to build loyalty.

This list is by no means a complete guide to helping you spend your marketing budget wisely but hopefully, it’ll help kick-start your thinking about what’s out there to help you achieve those all-important end-of-year results.