Where is a Limited Marketing Budget Best Spent?

In times like these, adequate financial and resource management is crucial. Business owners – particularly those running startups – will know that they can ill afford to ignore their marketing strategy and activities, but are often hindered by budget restrictions.

Marketers are regularly tasked with making smart top-level decisions about marketing spend, often ensuring that time and budget are spent on tools, services and solutions that will likely yield a positive return on investment.

With many organisations tightening their budgets, this is becoming increasingly hard to do, with limited resources severely lessening the positive impact of marketing efforts. Furthermore, emerging trends in customer behaviour and technology are only adding fuel to the proverbial fire.

So, what can you realistically do when you have limited finances to market your business in a crowded and highly-competitive space? Let’s take a look at potential avenues that won’t break the bank, but that could yield positive results for your company.

Marketing Spend – an investment, not an expense

Firstly it’s important to establish that marketing efforts should be seen as an investment and not an unwanted cost. Ultimately, your marketing strategy must help your business reach its goals and fuel its growth, whether that is improving customer retention, brand visibility, acquiring new buyers, or another similar objective.

A company’s marketing strategy can take many forms, and quite often it can be difficult for business owners to know exactly where to start. It is often debated whether it’s more prudent to spend your allocated marketing budget on multiple avenues simultaneously, or focus most or all of your funds on one specific type of digital marketing.

For instance, you may be wondering whether you might yield better visibility by dedicating 50% of your budget to social media engagement and advertising campaigns, and the other 50% to paid Google Ads. If one of your business objectives is to grow brand visibility, this may be more worthwhile. However, if you want to increase, for example, website conversions, you may decide that investing in professional SEO services to improve your Google rankings and drive organic traffic to your site is more prudent.

Where you spend your marketing budget is largely dependent on the sectors you operate in, your services or products, your consumers, and, most of all, your objectives. However, it’s important to note that you aren’t restricted on what you can and cannot put your efforts into, and there is nothing to suggest that any type of marketing activity should be avoided if you operate in a certain industry.

Most importantly don’t be dissuaded from giving your ideas a go. For example, an independent mortgage broker may be wondering whether improving their Google rankings in a competitive finance sector is going to be worthwhile, but with time, and the right support behind you, it can be. Similarly, if you wonder whether your local landscaping company is going to generate the right types of enquiries through PPC or social media advertising, there is nothing to suggest that it wouldn’t work out. It’s primarily down to proper strategising and consistency in execution.

However, consumer spending behaviour is constantly changing due to economic uncertainty and fears of a recession, making it difficult for marketers to decide where a budget should be spent. If you are short on budget, you need to be even more strategic with your marketing decisions and activities. So, here are some strategies to consider..

Marketing Strategies – with a limited budget

Visual identity

To ensure that any additional marketing expenditure is put to good use, you should assess whether your existing brand and visual identity are cohesive and authentic enough.

This means you should objectively assess the professionalism of your logo, strapline, branding, and other visual elements, including your messaging, core values, and USPs (unique selling points).

88% of consumers say that authenticity is key when deciding which brands to support. So, if there are any noticeable gaps in quality and honesty, it might make more sense to focus on perfecting these before you decide to embark on other marketing avenues. Crafting and fine-tuning your brand messaging and identity will ensure that you are marketing towards a more defined target audience.

Building a solid referral network

Many local businesses get off the ground by building a trusted network of reliable referral partners. Word of mouth is incredibly valuable, with many business owners trusting recommendations given to them by their close networks. As reported by Signpost, 92% of consumers trust referrals from people they know, and referrals can generate roughly 65% of new business opportunities. In this same research, it was reported that 82% of the surveyed small businesses cited referrals as their primary source of new business.

If you have a solid foundation of repeat business coming from customers that have been recommended to you by your professional connections, it might be worthwhile putting more investment into securing more referrals and recommendations from other local businesses.

Think about how you can encourage and benefit your existing clients to spread the word about you.

Website optimisation

A business website is often the first deliverable that prospective clients or customers will look at when assessing your suitability and reliability for their needs. Additionally, it’s surprising how often many startups pursue marketing efforts without optimising their website first.

A website should not be hastily built as a means to an end; it needs to be an accurate, up-to-date, professional representation of what your business does and how you add value. One of the most effective ways to do that in 2023 is through user experience (UX), which we know Google has made a priority with the introduction of Core Web Vitals.

But looking beyond that, UX is crucial; Small Biz Genius highlighted that 88% of online shoppers say they would avoid returning to a website if their user experience was poor. It is therefore important to pay close attention to site design, as well as speed, responsiveness, content, calls-to-action (CTAs) and domain authority.

By perfecting these website features and elements in line with your target audience, and establishing your points of difference from your competitors, you stand a greater chance of targeting more of the right types of customers in need of your services.

Local SEO

An activity that complements website optimisation is trying to increase your online visibility in a local area or region.

Local SEO is not exactly the same as investing in traditional SEO at a national level, but rather a digital marketing technique to attract local customers. If your company can show up as a recommended local business, with a brand, product or service that people are actively looking for, you can generate a steady stream of high-quality enquiries and conversions.

By optimising your website to accurately reflect your local presence, as well as your Google Business Profile, your budget will be put to good use.

Link building

Another activity that goes hand-in-hand with local SEO and website optimisation is securing high-quality backlinks from other sites. This process, known as link building, essentially helps prove to Google that your pages are high quality because many other sites link to them. Ahrefs states that the number of backlinks a website has directly correlates to the amount of organic traffic it receives.

Building links should be treated with caution, though. There are thousands of dodgy and dubious sites on the internet, and links from them may ultimately hinder your progress and visibility if you’re not careful.

However, with a proper link-building strategy in place, your credibility, authoritativeness and reputation can be strengthened, thereby improving your traffic, SEO domain authority, leads, and sales.

Content writing

Google is a hungry beast and loves sites that are constantly being updated with fresh, reputable and well-written content. One of the most effective ways to improve your online presence is by regularly writing content, usually on your website blog or articles section.

However, it’s always wise to proceed with a ‘quality over quantity’ mentality with copywriting or content writing. Interestingly, less than 30% of the content on a landing page is read by readers, according to Nielsen.

Your website pages, blogs, and any other material you post online needs to be targeted to your audience so that they can actually engage and resonate with the words that are written. Ideally, any written content needs to address customer pain points while presenting your business as a credible answer to similar problems that readers may be having.

What’s more, reputable and targeted content that targets keywords and search terms that people in your sector may be searching for will also have to be considered in your strategy.

While content writing is generally difficult to execute if you’re new to writing text at length, it doesn’t have to cost the earth. If you don’t consider yourself much of a wordsmith, you can usually find a reliable and experienced copywriter with relative ease.

Move forward with focus

Regardless of your digital marketing budget, there are strategies that you can use to achieve a positive return. Those we have touched on here can all help increase your revenue and provide some much-needed relief from the financially testing times we find ourselves in today.

Your business may eventually surpass the need for local or regional marketing tactics, and instead spend more on targeted social media, SEO or PPC advertising methods. At this point a reassessment of spend will allow you to maintain the correct focus on these strategies, and continue your business growth journey.

Chloe Miller is a freelance writer and business graduate from Sussex, UK. She creates content that helps businesses improve their online presence by increasing conversion rates and building their reputation. Chloe has experience running her own freelance business, so she understands the industry from both a writing and business perspective. In her free time, Chloe enjoys travelling and renovating her home.