How to Set Up a Small Business Marketing Budget

Organic Content is First

First things first: you need organic content. Foundationally, content is going to be what sets the stage for all the other tiers to work. Organic content is the cheapest form of marketing that you can have.

Content is the most affordable option but that’s not its only benefit. It also promotes both tangible and intangible aspects of your brand. All those intangibles include:

• Brand awareness
• Credibility
• Authority
• Being professional
• Looking alive online
• People knowing who you are
• Having somewhere to point people to that’s valuable

These intangible benefits exist across your socials, website, app, and any other places you can send people to. Organic content ensures that your brand image is fresh, alive, and being updated on a daily or weekly basis. Content is absolutely foundational to actually marketing yourself or your brand.

Email and Text Marketing

This tactic still falls under organic content, but it operates as a separate entity. Email and text marketing operates as your direct marketing – your inbound marketing strategy.

This is another very cheap and affordable marketing strategy. You build out your email list or your text list. Then you have that direct contact with your audience. You’re not just popping up in their feed, you’re directly in their personal inbox.

This is where content goes back to needing to be the foundation of your marketing strategy. You’ll need both content and a place to actually send them. Without that content foundation, you won’t have a place to push people to.

Your Website Is Also Key

Outside of your content is your website. Now this is the place that is all about your brand. You can showcase your content, blogs, and case studies as well as directly link your audience to the next steps in their buyer journey.

Your website should be just as good, if not better, than your content. Your website is the virtual representation of your business. Therefore, it should reflect your brand, show off your abilities, and convince potential clients to choose you.

Do not–and we repeat–do not disregard your website. It is more important than you may realize.

Video Storytelling

A key piece of your website and your content should be powerful video content. With high-quality video storytelling, you can emotionally connect your audience to your brand.

With a video that has a focus on storytelling, whether that story is about your business, past clients, or something else, you can better reach people. Imagine having a video on your website that explains all the important aspects of your business through visuals and emotional wording. You can also post it on YouTube or any other social media platform. That video would show people just how serious you are about helping them.

Video storytelling is a powerful tool that helps establish your business and connect you with potential customers.

Now, Consider Investing in Paid Content

Once you’ve laid a solid foundation of organic content, direct marketing, website efficiency, and video storytelling you can go up a tier. Now, you can invest in paid content. These paid initiatives are a little bit more one-to-one and are likely to give you a more direct correlation between your investment and your results.

Paid content includes initiatives like pay-per-click (PPC), social ads, and Google ads. You’ll actually see the money you spend translate specifically to a certain amount of output. Paid content allows you to extend your reach, target specific audiences, and generate more immediate results. It’s the best next step after organic content because it’ll help you scale your efforts as your business grows.

However, to implement paid content, you’ll need to be at a certain place financially to invest in it. Organic content can be done entirely by yourself if it needs to be – at no charge. But with paid marketing, you obviously have to invest money into it for it to work. While you’ll likely see more ROI with paid content, you first have to have a financial and organic content foundation to use it.

A Step Further: Saturation

The next tier is made up of tactics that you’ll want to use if your budget allows or possibly down the road when you’ve built a strong marketing foundation. These tactics can work for both product and service-based businesses, but B2C product businesses are likely to see the quickest ROI with these strategies. What are we actually talking about here?

We’re talking about “billboard-style” marketing tactics – aka saturation marketing. Saturation marketing is about broad, widespread exposure such as billboards, podcast ads, TV commercials, and other forms of large media exposure. This style of marketing is not a one-to-one, click-to-click lead generation. They are intended for saturation, not necessarily immediate ROI. While these tactics can boost brand visibility, they’re not as directly measurable as PPC campaigns. Saturation marketing is more about long-term brand awareness and can take a while to show a return on investment.

Now, as we said, if you’re budget is already tight, these sorts of tactics shouldn’t be as prioritized. But, if you fall into any of these categories, these could be valuable to go ahead and jump into:

• You already have a solid marketing foundation and breathing room in your budget.
• You have a B2C offering.
• You’re a product-based business.
• You’re a product-based business, mainly serving a B2C demographic

If you have the funds and foundation, saturation tactics can be an excellent additional tool in your marketing belt.

Another Great Option, Affiliate Marketing

Another growing tactic and an extremely effective one is affiliate marketing. This includes setting up an affiliate program where affiliates can get people to sign up for your service or buy your products. In doing so, that affiliate earns a percentage of the profit.

This is a unique form of marketing because you don’t technically owe anyone anything unless they get you a new customer. It’s excellent for lead generation because you can reach different audiences through your affiliates.

Affiliates are people who already enjoy your products or services and want to share that love with others. Plus, it helps that they have an incentive to push your brand because they’ll get something out of it.

Affiliate marketing is pretty much the modern version of word of mouth but with an extra benefit and it costs very little to set up and execute.