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Marketing your business on a shoestring

Written by Alan Campbell, Creative & Strategic Director, Flipside Group

Wednesday, 06 August 2008

How can businesses manage the unique challenges of marketing with limited funds?

This may be a slightly radical view but there are only two real challenges to marketers faced with limited funds – mental challenges and intellectual ones. If you’ve got a big budget you can afford to think big, if you haven’t, you need from necessity to think small.

Get your head around that and the hard work can begin. Necessity, as we all know, is the mother of invention and you’ll need to be creative with every penny you’ve got.

Marketers with big bucks can afford to take risks, make guesses about many aspects of their campaign, use mass media, and accept that some degree of wastage is inevitable. In complete contrast, successful marketing on a limited budget is all about getting ‘down and dirty’ with the detail.

The good news is that thinking small and building a campaign from the ‘bottom-up’ in an incremental and integrated fashion, is not only very much the way to go, but wholly possible using lower cost and much more accountable channels.

According to Kotler, the sole purpose of marketing is to ‘create a sale’. With that focus in mind the simple task of any marketer is to create an interface between the potential customer and the brand where a transaction can take place.

But there’s more good news as a marketer can now put that transacting ability right at the customer’s finger-tips – welcome to the digital world.

Actually of course, it’s not all ‘new news’ and some traditional brands have been thriving in the digital media environment for quite some time now.

What is changing is that like most areas of technology, the costs are coming down whilst both the penetration and effectiveness of the medium are going up.

You’ll need a web site of course, but the cost of entry is tumbling and you get more functionality for your money. Maintaining a site demands less resource than ever before and sites are more reliable. Customers are coming to trust the web at such an increasing rate it’s impossible to keep track of the statistics.

The other things you’ll need are a good web statistics package and a well structured database so that in the fullness of time you can build a CRM campaign to cuddle your customers in the way they most liked to be cuddled.

Going to market across the digital landscape is cheaper too. If the website has been well set up for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) you should get a regular footfall of customers simply from search engines.

While SEO has a natural time lag for technical reasons it’s extremely cost effective. In the meantime you can test the market by paying for key words or sponsored links.

If you already know your market demographic, many of the networking sites, with their wealth of personal data about their members can deliver banners, skyscrapers and mid-page ads online at an amazing level of detail down to age and location.

Online advertising is still cheap as a medium, and creative costs can be much lower than those of traditional campaigns.

Likewise, once you have your database, html emails cost less to create than printed mail pieces, are very much cheaper to deliver, can be much more accountable and drive instant business. Similarly SMS text messaging can deliver huge impact at minimal cost with little or no wastage.

Integrate all these things and by now you’ll be a huge success as a marketer and your FD will be thrusting every bigger wedges of cash at you. But, even if it’s time to turn your attention back to more traditional media, let’s not be imprudent or start guessing.

Your web presence will already have shown you how to check the effectiveness of every penny you spend, so keep on ‘thinking small’ and when you start advertising, stay lean. If you’ve got a full fat website with everything a buyer needs to know on it you may only need a thin ad campaign.

Think small press spaces, then double the size to see if you get double the response. Do the same with frequency – the web stats won’t lie. Always insist on relevant editorial or a good news page. Don’t be tempted to spend money in glossy magazines, on radio or on posters as these environments seldom drive web visits.

Don’t be afraid to test low cost TV channels and don’t be afraid of budget creative to start with, as consumers are generally a lot less discerning than you think. Talking heads still sell product.

Building a low-cost campaign by integrating all these media takes time and a lot of effort. Without doubt, it means a lot of hard work and while it may well boggle your mind to start with, it might just produce mind-boggling results. Rest assured it’s very good for the CV and, most importantly, Kotler would be proud of you.