Making the most of your marketing budget: tips for small businesses

Before you start engaging in any marketing activity, make sure that you have a very clear understanding of your brand and brand identity. This will enable you to understand your company better, your mission, your vision and your values, who your customers/competitors are and how you position your company in the market.

This will help create an impactful, compelling and consistent marketing message. It will clearly communicate to your customers why they should choose you over anyone else, and what the value is when they buy from you. This message can be reflected across all your customer touch points and marketing channels, from your website, social media, print/broadcast advertising, or email marketing.

Having a clearly defined plan in place will help save money and maximise your marketing efforts to provide the best return on investment.  

Create an editorial calendar to help you to map out a winning content strategy and any supporting promotional activities. Doing this will help you to stay organised and feel more in control and help avoid scrabbling around for content ideas at the last minute.

To be more efficient with time and resources, your plan should enable you to repurpose your content as much as possible. This will allow you to cut down on the amount of fresh content that you need to create, and allow you to simply repurpose it for other use on platforms and mediums. 

For example, if you’ve spent time creating a blog post, chop that up into smaller snippets that can then be shared on social media. If you’ve created a video, transcribe it and turn it into a blog post. If you have collected a lot of customer testimonials, compile them into a case study. Repurposing your content helps you to market your business and reach new customers, without always having to create something new. 

When you are creating content, make sure that you focus on quality and not just quantity. People’s inboxes and social media feeds are flooded with low-quality content vying for their attention. You need to stand out, grab and retain people’s attention to be successful. The way to do this is by providing content that delivers real value, that is engaging and that is sharable. 

Whether you’re creating content for your website, your email marketing or your social media marketing, think about your audience’s problems and deliver content that helps them to overcome them. Invest in storytelling to build genuine connections and trust with your audience. Create on-brand and recognisable visuals and promote user-generated content as social proof of your business. 

Focus on quality to create content that resonates to help you attract a loyal following. This saves money long-term by reducing the need for a lot of - or too much - content.

Don’t spend any money on marketing or advertising until you know what your objectives are and how to measure your progress. Decide what the goal of your marketing campaign is first. Is it brand awareness, lead generation, customer acquisition, or sales, for example?

Next,  who are you targeting? What are the most effective channels to reach them on? Merely chasing numbers is not a winning strategy. Having millions of followers won’t guarantee results. Reach, engagement, and even clicks, don’t pay the bills.

Paying to reach a new audience with Facebook Ads work if you have done the foundational work first. Nicki Chacksfield is an e-Commerce Growth Partner at D’Artisan Digital and she knows all too well the pitfalls of investing in Facebook ads before you are ready. She says: “Facebook ads can fuel your business towards success. Just like a rocket needs essential components for a launch, your business requires key elements to leverage ads effectively. Without them, your campaigns will crash and burn, wasting your hard-earned cash!”

Nicki continues: “Before diving into Facebook ads, assess the bigger picture. Is your product proven? Does your website convert well? Have you implemented email marketing? Can you handle increased demand? Are you prepared for higher engagement? Do you have Meta's technical requirements in place? By harmonizing these components first, you will unlock the full potential of your campaigns and propel your investment towards fruitful results.”

As a small business, you’re often wearing all the hats. You’re the CEO, Finance Director, the PR department, the HR department, the Sales Director and the Marketing Director. But we all have strengths, and can’t excel at everything. 

You feel you’re the best person to market your business, as nobody understands it like you do. But if marketing isn’t your strong point, consider outsourcing to professionals who can help you to articulate and communicate your value and help to position you in the market. 

Content marketing offers one of the best returns on investment of all outbound marketing activities. The costs are also much cheaper than traditional marketing, yet it generates three times more leads compared to traditional methods. (Source).

If content marketing is part of your wider digital marketing strategy, perhaps we can help. We Make Media is a Devon-based web design and publishing company and we’ve been helping small businesses grow in the West Country since 2010. If you need content marketing support for your business, we would be happy to discuss what you’re looking for and how we can help. Book your free discovery call.