How to Stretch Your Digital Marketing Budget Further

Marketing is one of the only reliable ways to grow a brand’s presence. And with an unlimited budget, you can get almost unlimited visibility. But if you have a strict budget, you’ll be much more limited in what you can do; some channels will be completely inaccessible, and others will have a ceiling for how much impact you can make.

Fortunately, some valuable strategies can help you get more out of even the smallest digital marketing budget.

Invest in Print Marketing as Well

Digital marketing is all the rage because it’s fast, inexpensive, efficient, and accessible. But because of the increased attention, many marketers have overlooked just how affordable and accessible print marketing has become. Placing an order for printed brochures online is quick, convenient, and inexpensive – especially when compared to a digital advertising strategy. And the numbers prove that print marketing is still an effective marketing medium, especially when used properly.

Focus on Long-Term Strategies

It’s tempting to pour your efforts into strategies with the potential to bring you immediate results, but overall, long-term strategies tend to be less expensive and more efficient. You’ll spend less money upfront and see better results over the course of years.

A perfect example is search engine optimization (SEO). It doesn’t take much time or money to start a campaign, but you probably won’t see results for the first few months of your efforts. Once your SEO strategy begins to gain momentum, you may see tremendous results for a relatively minimal input.

Make Use of Synergies

Some marketing strategies have a synergistic effect. More than stacking together additively, synergistic strategies play off each other and enhance each other.

Take, for example, content marketing. By itself, content marketing is a powerful strategy. It can help you attract more people to your website, achieve more conversions, and build your reputation. But it serves as effective fuel for other strategies, like your email marketing, SEO, and social media marketing campaigns; each of these channels can both promote your content and make use of your content to promote themselves. Managed effectively, each strategy can benefit from the others and feed the others simultaneously, allowing you to multiply your results without spending much extra money.

Do the Work on Your Own

It’s tempting to hire a professional marketing team or work with a marketing firm, but in many cases, it’s much more cost effective to do the work on your own. Many modern digital marketing strategies are easily learnable if you have a few hours; online resources are plentiful, and there’s a thriving community of digital marketers willing to help you on your journey.

Doing the work yourself can be challenging, and you’ll likely make mistakes along the way. But over time, you’ll learn the ropes and become a marketing expert in your own right.

Focus on a Small Niche Audience

Too many marketers try to win over the world by targeting the broadest, most generic audience possible. But if you’re working with a small budget, it’s much more effective to focus on a small, niche target audience.

This can help you stretch your marketing budget in three ways:

  • Eliminate (or reduce) competition. For starters, you’ll reduce the size of your competition, or possibly eliminate your competition entirely. You’re targeting an audience segment that they’re not interested in, so your keywords will be cheaper, it will be easier to rank, and you’ll spend less on targeted advertising.
  • Reduce the size of your audience. You’ll also have a smaller number of people to reach with your messaging. Rather than dumping money in a strategy meant to reach 100,000 people, you can focus your efforts on a small, concentrated audience of 1,000 people.
  • Increase relevance. Another added benefit of this approach is that your messaging becomes more relevant. You’ll be communicating with a small group that you know well, so each advertisement you place and piece of content you write will become more valuable.

The Importance of ROI

When planning your marketing campaign, your ultimate goal should be focused on your return on investment, or ROI – in other words, how much your revenue is increasing compared to how much you’re spending on marketing. Marketing success is comparative; while bigger-budget campaigns will almost always outperform small campaigns in terms of sheer numbers, small-budget campaigns have the potential to yield a higher ROI.

Capturing a positive ROI is also important because it provides you an opportunity to scale. With the extra money you generate in your initial marketing efforts, you can double down on even more marketing tactics. In this way, your marketing approach can become self-sustaining, ultimately leading you to higher budgets, greater visibility, and greater efficiency.