Small Budget, Big Impact

On this episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business, Samantha Scott, APR, is joined by Paige Johnson, Digital Operations Coordinator at Pushing the Envelope.

The two discuss how to make a big impact with a small marketing budget, providing valuable tips on setting realistic budgets, the importance of targeting the right audience, and leveraging low-cost strategies such as A/B testing, community engagement, and public relations.

Have a question or feedback to share? Visit www.getpushing.com or one of our many social media channels. We look forward to hearing from you.

#marketing #business #communication #strategy

Transcript

0:05

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business. I'm Samantha Scott, APR, and today I am delighted to be joined by Paige Johnson. Hi, I'm Paige. I'm PTE's Digital Operations Coordinator, and I'm delighted to be here. So we are so excited to talk about big impact on a small budget. This is probably one of my favorite topics. I mean, okay, testing, measuring, strategy. I've got a few of them, but this is one of my favorites because I am an all time like deal seeking person. I love getting, you know, things not full price. So I love the idea of being able to make a really, really big impact with not a huge budget. So today we're going to give you some really fantastic tips if that's something that you're into as well. So Paige, kick it off. Yeah, I will second that and say I also like a good deal. But also, I am a strong believer that it's very possible and I think it can be a little intimidating deciding where you're going to set your budget, especially if you're starting off advertising for the first time on Meta or other platforms. So it can be a little intimidating, so rest assured, you can start low and double down on what works, scratch what doesn't, and you can see great results with minimal budgets. I've seen it happen myself. Absolutely. And this goes to the point of having the right offer and the right audience, and then it doesn't require thousands of dollars to create the results that you're looking for. Now, I want to say this with a caveat, and we try to be really, really honest with our prospects, with our clients that, you know, if you come and say, oh, I've only got 50 bucks, you know, I want to be able to see X results. We're going to be realistic in this, right? So, when we say really good results, just marry that with expectations of what's right for your business, what's your budget, who's your target audience. Yeah, and ideally, if you start with a low budget, let's say if you're starting with$100 or$200 for a month, ideally, you'll be able to increase that because of being really strategic with the small budget up front and then you'll start seeing results in bigger numbers. Yeah, absolutely. It takes time to establish and build up and use these strategies that we're going to talk about. Yeah and we've got another episode coming up a few down the road that talks specifically about pay-per-click and budgets and we get into all the nitty gritty of making sure that you have separate campaigns and testing. So make sure you tune into that one as well. But let's start by picking like who are you trying to talk to, setting goals, setting budgets, let's dive into how our listeners and viewers can actually do this. Yeah, so I think the first step is being realistic with yourself and where you're able to start. Again, don't try to put a bunch of money into something because you, you still want the technologies and the efforts that you're putting in, you want to see conversions and look at what's working before you start dumping in. So I think the first thing's first is be realistic and like I said, double down with what works and scratch what doesn't. And to that point, I would add two things. One is, just because you see your competitor doing something, does not mean that you should necessarily be doing that. And also, don't take the approach of, okay, well I'm going to do Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram, and I'm going to do something on LinkedIn, and I'm going to do something on YouTube, and I'm going to do something on Google and pay-per-click. Just start slow. It's quality over quantity, because ultimately, the whole intent of this is to get conversions, to get people to buy your product, to sign up with you, to go to your restaurant, take an action where you're generating revenue. So, completely agree, great point. Yeah, and to that point, setting that budget and using it for an audience that's very niche, and thankfully a lot of these technologies allow you to do that, which is great for having a small budget. So I think that would be one of the first steps, is having personas and defining who you're marketing to from the start. On Facebook, specifically, you can target based on interests, demographics, locations, income, someone who has a birthday in a week. There's a million things that you can use to maximize your budget to the most high value audience members. And so you want your budget to go to those people. You don't want to spray and pray and just get the most impressions possible. Yeah, be really targeted, and make sure you really reflect on that, right? Because I always tell people when I did public speaking, I used to say this all the time. It's not the you show. It's not about you. It's not about what's going to resonate with you. It's what's going to resonate with your audience. What problem are you trying to solve for them? What solution do you have? What feeling do you want to evoke? What are you trying to get them to do as a result of this? It's focusing on that versus focusing on the particular product or service, et cetera, the widget that you have for sale. That doesn't necessarily matter. They want the end result. I want to be able to chop vegetables faster. I don't care how I do that. Okay, this is a tool that can do that, great. I don't need to know the details of it. So keep that in mind, and be very specific about your audience and what motivates them. And you might have a wide ranging audience, you know. I've used this example before. If you are a restaurant, sure, anyone technically could come to you and purchase your food and buy it and eat it. But that may not be everybody, right? You may not want everybody to come to your restaurant. If you're a fine dining establishment, for example, you want people who are prepared to pay a higher price point, want that kind of experience, so you're going to focus on those individuals. So Paige mentioned personas. Build those out. It's really easy to do. So you can create who that person might look like. Are they male, female, otherwise? What are their interests? Where do they live? How are they motivated? What problems are they trying to solve, or what feelings do they want to have, what kind of lifestyle do they have? And then you can start to work backwards and say, okay, a day in the life of. And right now we're talking about all different types of ways to reach individuals, online and offline, but do they drive a car? Do they ride public transit? Are they listening to the news? Do they do podcasts? You know, try to find ways to intersect in their day in their life and make it specific to those audiences. And if that means running a few campaigns, one maybe overarching theme, if you want them to come to your location, you have a campaign concept or something, but specific to the middle aged woman versus the 20 year old male versus, you know, somebody else, making sure that the calls to action, the messaging and the channels are appropriate for them. Yeah, absolutely. And that's, I think, especially when we're talking about working with a smaller budget, getting the most impact, that's especially important. Sometimes depending on the industry you're in and the size of your budget when you're starting out you have less of that total amount to spend on testing. And so definitely getting very granular and niche with each audience. And instead of, you know, it is good to try different ad creatives and see what's performing best, different ad copy, but because we're talking about working with something small initially, it's super important that from the start, because Meta specifically, and even LinkedIn offer really advanced targeting features, knowing who your audience is and reaching them where they are at is incredibly important. And to that point, Meta has a lot of tools, and if you're starting off, I think you should trust it. A lot of AI behind the Meta technologies that will help find your audience, the right placement, what creative is resonating best with them, and even distributing your budget to an ad or ad set that is performing best. And to that point, it can only do that if it has good input and direction. So first, you have to do the homework to say, who is my target audience? And if you have a few of them, which one do I have the greatest opportunity to increase that audience size? And or, which one is most valuable to me? So for example, if you are a restaurant, again, if you have a lunch service and a dinner service, which one has an average higher ticket value? And or, where do you have more capacity? Keep those things in mind, and then you can prioritize the audiences that you're trying to reach. You know, if you tend to get a bunch of college students and they're coming just for coffee, and that's part of your, you know, lunch brunch service versus your evening diners. Maybe you want more of the evening diners and you're going to be more specific about reaching them. You get more volume, you get more money. So being very specific out of the gate. But yeah, absolutely leveraging the tools that are available to you. Meta has great resources. Google has great resources. Lots of data available to you. Pair that with your own owned data as well. Who makes up your social media audience? Who's visiting your website? G4 or Google Analytics can tell you all of that. Meta Suite is fantastic with that as well. Making sure you're using that data to your advantage. But I'd also like to add on there's some other components that are offline that can be very low cost as well. Community engagement is one of them. Think about the causes or organizations that your audience is interested in. How can you get involved in that and support them and connect with them? Really powerful way. Another tool is public relations. So knowing the right media to contact, telling your story that way. Maybe you have a new product or service and you can put out a news release about it. Maybe your employees are volunteering or have a great cause you're supporting. There's a number of ways to create awareness among your target audiences using media relations. And that doesn't just stick with your traditional sources of like a newspaper or, you know, TV, things like that, but you could also think about podcasters as well often have guests on, where that might be able to get your message to your target audiences at a very low to no cost. Yeah, and to that point as well, there's those other outlets where you can generate brand awareness, coupling your organic social media content with your paid, what's working on organic and repurpose that kind of content. What organic social media formats are performing best, and what kind of topics are you talking about organically that people are responsive to. Repurpose that in your paid strategy when you're starting off with a low budget before you have the extra budget to kind of test things that might be a little bit riskier if you have a larger budget but would have a large return. You can do that down the line once you have more money in your budget to decipher your audience, where conversions are happening, and their behavior when they see ads. Yeah, I always like to say that your audience will tell you everything you need to know if you know where to look. And Paige here is our data queen. She does all of our data analysis, reporting, everything. So she totally gets it. But literally to her point, I mean, they'll tell you everything. How long should your YouTube videos be? Because if they're dropping out after 20 seconds when it's a minute long, cut it. Or what campaign is working, you know, tag your content and also look at the time of day, the day of the week. Is this a feel good? Is it related to employees? Is it related to your product, a new service? You know, think about the type of content, the type of day, the channel, and then look at what your audience is telling you in terms of what they're connecting with, sharing with, commenting on, etc. And then, to your point, use that in your paid as well. It works both ways. And it has to balance because if somebody sees a paid ad and it's about something way over here in right field and all the organic stuff in your website doesn't relate. That creates a disconnect. Even if it's subconscious, they're going to go, huh, I don't know. Yes, your audience is going to tell you a lot of what you need to hear in your analytics and it should be regularly monitored, monthly, quarterly, as often as you have the capacity to. They're going to speak to you, but you also need to be sure that you're speaking to them the correct way that you get the outcome that you want. So when setting up ads from the get go, you need to be really certain of your campaign goals. Do you want sales, or do you really just want to drive engagement on a specific post as like a boost? Or do you want people to go to your website and look at your offerings? Like, be 100 percent confident and sure in that conversion goal from the start so that you can speak to them properly. The algorithm is going to show to people who are most likely to take that action and some people just aren't engaged shoppers, so it's not going to resonate with them. So speaking to your audience through your objectives and being realistic with your business goals in setting up your paid ads from the start. I think that is just a tried and true best practice of marketing as a whole is what is your intent? What does success look like at the end of this particular campaign? What are we trying to accomplish? And you could even say that starts at the 30,000 foot view of your marketing strategy for your business. Are we trying to create awareness? And then we also want a 5 percent lift in revenues. And we also want to increase engagement or audience size. But it also goes into what we call kind of roadmaps by area of service too. So your paid and organic social, are we trying to nurture and engage and create more user generated content and connections that way? Are we just trying to drive people to a website or to make a phone call? You know, what are we trying to accomplish there? Yeah, really, really important to go in with your intent. Yeah. So you talked about paid and you talked about some other stuff in testing. What are some ways people can test? Cause I think sometimes that's a hangup for people. They're like, okay, well, I'm putting it out there and I'm seeing how it's working, but I don't know how to test that against something else. Maybe we can talk about A/B testing and some other ways. Yeah, definitely A/B testing is a good one if you want to test the efficacy of different headlines, types of creatives, captions in your ads. So in this case, you would be testing either the creative, or the call to action, or the link. So it's going to be the same exact campaign, call to action. So maybe I am a pet store and it's the same thing about a dog food sale, for example. But in option A, it's going to have a picture of this particular dog. And in option B, it's going to have a different dog. Or we could have the same exact image, but a different call to action. You don't want to run multiple A/B tests at the same time, because then you don't know which change is the one that performed well. But being able to do that helps you really get a sense of what imagery, what text, what call to action, et cetera, is going to motivate your audience. Yeah and I like the thought of an A/B test because you can really pinpoint what the exact change was. Another great indicator or test of which type of ad is going to perform better, maybe you change like a element of the targeting or some other element of the ad and you can use Meta's technology to disperse that budget to the ad that's performing better, and that'll tell you a lot about the people that are responding. Maybe one you target to men and women, similar to A/B testing, but this is the budget just going one way or another within one ad. Yeah, I think those are really helpful. Also using tagging is also really a powerful way to make sure that your budget is going to the maximum, making sure that you're keeping an eye on what elements of your marketing are performing best. So if I'm saying tagging, that means like if you're doing some digital content, making sure, you know, I'll use a retail example, if it's women's wear versus men's wear versus shoes or an event or something that you're tagging your content, so you can go back and look at how that's performing. But making sure, at the end of the day, you're reporting on the things that matter. You know, we're talking about small business and big impact. How can we create the biggest change with the least amount of money? That starts with the intention. Who are we trying to reach? What are we trying to accomplish? Then it goes into monitoring as we're going through this in real time, making adjustments and then making sure that we're looking at the correct data. So, how many conversions did we get? And that, in your world, could be bookings, appointments, signups, reservations, sales, etc. And then, ultimately, what drove that? So you should be able to track that. Was it an email? Was it the news release that was in the newspaper? Was it an event you hosted? What's driving these things? And then you can pull back from the stuff that may be underperforming and pour into the things that continue to perform. Yeah, I completely agree. And looking into the benchmarks of the industry that you're within, and if you're well below or well above that, what are you doing that's working or isn't? If you have trackable links and you're tagging things internally and you have all these systems in place, the data will tell a story of why you're above or below what other businesses in your industry are doing or how they're doing. So definitely important to look at competitors, but not duplicate what they're doing. Yes, absolutely. Benchmarking is great, but create your own thing. And tell your story, you know, going back to episode one with Kinfay, where we talked about telling your story and making sure that you're weaving that throughout is incredibly important. So we hope this has been helpful. If you want more tips on how to leverage marketing to grow your business in cost effective ways, we have lots of blogs, ebooks, other podcasts. All of them are free. We would love to help you, and always feel free to leave a comment or question below. Thank you for turning into another episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business, and thanks for joining me. Thank you.