For start-ups and SMEs marketing budgets can be a real challenge. Make yours go further with these top tips.

2.) Invest in decent creative

Small brands often skimp on creative as they want to put the money into execution (adverts and media space). There is little point spending money on execution if how it looks doesn’t grab people and make them want to buy your brand.

Do not underestimate the power of effective creative in making your money go further (or of poor creative to destroy your brand). Intelligent, high impact, creative that effectively translates your strategy can allow a small spend campaign to punch well above its weight in impact, recall and effectiveness. 



Who Gives A Crap's low budget ads also had a huge impact due to a clever and impactful creative idea that perfectly told their story and reason for consumers to buy.  Here is a case study about how their iconic zero budget launch ad enabled them to launch and rapidly grow the business. It has now had over 250,000 views.

New Agencies are out of reach for many small brands but there are fantastic freelancers out there who have worked for high-end agencies so can deliver that quality for much lower cost but still be prepared to make a reasonable investment. You usually get what you pay for so decent creatives are not ‘cheap’ but can transform your brand and comms so don’t skimp on this bit.

3.) Partnerships and contra deals

Finding the right collaborative partnerships is a great way to get high quality, credible awareness, understanding and meaning for small brands at low financial cost.

This can take the form of supplying your product or services to events or venues free or discounted in exchange for media (digital or real world) or access to customer databases. We previously worked in radio stations and offered advertising on the station or use of our presenters to events, venues and sports clubs in return for sponsorship. We secured over £1m worth of sponsorship and advertising on a contra basis – the cost to activate it was less than £5k. Working in food manufacturers we have also offered to provide all the food or drinks  to events or venues in return for media and promotion at the event.

It could also be about forming alliances with like-minded, complimentary brands targeting the same audience as you.  Sharing each other’s social content, promoting each other via your websites, databases, social activity or packaging. Having joint events, competitions or even doing joint advertising to share the cost. In the past we worked with a sausage and bacon brand and we carried out joint advertising and marketing with a bread brand showing sausage/bacon sarnies. We split the cost of the photography, ad creation and cost of the ads and by going in together we got greater efficiency/more for our money in terms of the ad spend. 



4.) Trigger point placement

Being in the right place at the right time is undoubtedly the best way to drive short term return and bang for buck on comms.

If you see an ad on TV it has to be pretty special and/or be shown often enough over a long enough period of time for the brand to be preferred, sought out and top of mind by the time at time of purchase. These sorts of channels are about long term brand building, equity and power.

However, you can be clever with low budget tactical marketing to make yourself top of mind as someone wants/needs a product like yours or as they are about to purchase it. While this may not drive long term brand value it can influence that specific purchase decision. 

If you are an FMCG brand, think about what you can do with your packaging or shelf ready packaging (trays the product sits in) to make yourself stand out when the final purchase decision is being made. If you had to pay a retailer for a shelf talker in 100 stores for 4 weeks it would probably cost you around £30,000 so cleverly using your own packaging (which is in all stores, all year) could give you £500k plus worth of media impact to draw/tempt people to try you at the point of purchase.

For all brands but particularly online brands, search engine optimisation and marketing is another great way to ‘be there’ as consumers as consumers are triggered to need a product like yours. Think about what someone who needs a product like yours might be searching for online and then how you can optimise content and website or use google words/paid to appear as they are searching for that.  

IKEA did this super clever campaign where the renamed their products after relevant search terms – so when someone searched for ‘my husband snores’ the Ikea day bed/pull out sofa came up. The campaign had over 100,000 shares and a reach of 175m reach. It showed their products as solutions to the need at the point it was being felt.  Watch the IKEA Retail Therapy case study below.

Also think about how can you physically be there at the point of need. For example, if you are a refreshing soft drink being available to try or purchase at hot weather events means not only are people going to try you but it will help them remember and associate you with that situation in future. Can you have your own stand, branded vending machine selling/sampling your product in relevant places?

Robinsons have a long standing partnership and association with Wimbledon making them physically and mentally available at a point of need.



5.) Corporate / business to business application

If you are not already a B2B brand, thinking about how you can do some business to business marketing can also be a cost effective way to reach a lot of people. Is your service or product relevant to businesses or a particular type of business? If you can target and sell through 2-3 businesses you can often reach 100s or thousands of consumers doing that. You can approach or build relationships with relevant businesses through networking or Linked In often more cost effectively than it would be to reach all the consumers within that business via consumer media. A great example is a brand like Graze – by developing partnerships with businesses they could supply and reach large offices full of people through a few contacts.

They are our top five tips for making small marketing budgets go further.  If you need help developing your marketing strategy or creating and managing cost-effective campaigns we now offer an 'outsourced marketing team' service in addition to our usual strategic consultancy.   This allows small brands who don't currently have a marketing team to hire ours ad-hoc ,as needed.  Please get in touch for more information about this.