How to start marketing with a small budget

When you’re working with a small budget, it is important to get off to the right start and put your money behind the platforms which are tried and tested for your goals; now is not the time to be experimenting with new and outlandish ideas. It is also vital to take into consideration how you are going to measure success. If you want awareness from a campaign, are you going to be looking at reach, CPMs or time-on-page? Ensuring you have the capabilities to track the stats you need will ensure that you are in a position at the end of the campaign to assess the results properly.

Talk To The Experts

Speaking with an agency or a representative of a company can give you an idea of base budgeting requirements. For example, Facebook advertising has a minimum spend of £1 per day, with Snapchat sitting at £5 and TikTok £20 a day. While these figures can be found with a quick Google search, an ad agency will most likely have prior experience with another business in your industry to provide you with invaluable insight into what has worked for them and where they recommend you putting the budget.

Consider Your Options

There is more to digital marketing than just Google and Facebook, and a lot can be brought to the table from more niche platforms you may have never thought about before. Looking beyond the demographic of your target audience and thinking, ‘what types of questions are they asking?’, ‘what else are they looking at on the internet?’, delving deeper can help provide insight into where to place yourself as a brand. For example, the knowledge that you have a younger audience doesn’t necessarily mean TikTok will be the best place for advertising. If you know your audience is asking certain questions that your product or service might answer, Quora can be a great place to prove your knowledge of your industry and put yourself at the forefront of the minds of potential customers.

Equally, while it can be tempting to try out the newest platforms and get on board with the latest trends, you’re never going to see the full potential of a platform or a campaign if you are being overly restrictive.

Time For Some Maths

The majority of marketing platforms come with them a new form of campaign estimation, each with varying levels of accuracy. Sometimes this may require getting a quote, speaking to a representative, or finding out from the advertising dashboard.

In this example, we’ll use Google ads as Google Keyword Planner provides a good place to start when it comes to looking for keywords and how much they’re going to cost you.

Setting a budget of £500 a month on Google advertising may sound realistic and sizeable, but once you start to break down the numbers, it soon becomes clear how far that budget will go. Let’s say you want to bid on the keyword “marketing agency”, Keyword Planner shows us the average Cost Per Click (CPC) is £4, meaning you could see 125 clicks per month from your budget. Using your average conversion rate, in this instance, let’s say 5% – that would result in 6 conversions at a Cost Per Aquistion (CPA) of £83.

Depending on your business, these stats may be in line with your targets or could be completely out. However, these are the types of equations that need to be considered when calculating where to put your budget.

The main difference between having a large or a small marketing budget is that it is vital to focus on what is already working to achieve your goal. Whether this is through the expertise of an agency, previous successful campaigns, or building on organic results, having a small marketing budget doesn’t mean you can’t see great success.

Want to know more about how we can help with your marketing strategy? Get in touch, and one of our advertising experts will get back to you as soon as they can.