Effective Marketing on a Budget

Is a limited budget causing your marketing strategy to be spread too thin?

I see a lot of businesses take a “shotgun” style approach to marketing, or as I call it: the spray and pray method.

And while many marketing voices insist that your business must be present anywhere and everywhere your potential customers are, this ideation may actually hurt your business growth if you are working on a limited budget.

At a high level, the logic makes sense:

If your potential customer starts the day off reading the news, buy ad space. If your prospects are on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter, post content multiple times per day hoping they see it. If they commute to work, buy radio ads during rush-hour times and billboards on principal traffic routes, etc.

While this rationale could work with reasonable success if you have gobs of money to invest, for the vast majority of businesses, running an effective marketing strategy across more than a few platforms is cost prohibitive.

This all comes down to the psychology of the mind. Each night, our electrical memory resets with sleep. Your mind takes all the things it perceives as important from your day, and transitions those thoughts into your chemical, long-term memory. This means that for the 95% of people who are not currently looking for what your business offers (and thus would not perceive your ads to be pertinent), your marketing efforts are essentially being erased each night.

When working with a budget, it is far better to reach some of your potential customers and influencers with frequent, consistent, and impactful messaging on a singular platform than to attempt to reach all of your potential customers across more platforms but without enough frequency to be effective.

We often use the term “spread too thin” to refer to people who have more priorities than they can effectively manage. These people typically cannot give the best they have to offer in any area of their lives. The same applies to marketing. Don’t spread your marketing efforts out too thinly to be effective.

Instead, find one way to effectively make contact with that 5% of prospects who are currently in need of what you offer (sales activation), and find one way to reach the other 95% who may someday be in your market (brand building).

And remember, your message and brand image are far more important than the channel you use.

This is especially true with smaller companies that have fewer employees and smaller budgets. It is better to do a few things really well, than a lot of things with mediocrity. Water with intentionality the seeds that are most vital to your business, rather than spraying the whole yard and praying that something grows.

If you are looking for more education on creating an effective marketing campaign, I highly recommend reading The Wizard of Ads trilogy by Roy Williams.

Too busy running your company to read? Book a discovery call with me, and we can discuss where to start with your marketing strategy to create massive long-term growth!