Everyone knows that marketing can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right strategies, you can get a lot of mileage out of even a small budget. In this blog post, we’ll look at some of the best tips and tricks for effectively marketing your B2B business on a tight budget. Keep reading to find out how you can get the most bang for your buck!

2023 is the tear of the budget cut, and CMO’s everywhere, from the smallest B2B services to the biggest multinational companies are wrestling with budgets which have been eroded by inflation and further reduced by business uncertainty and the loom threats of recession.

However there are practical ways to make your budgets work as hard as possible, even in these most challenging of times.

Maximising Your Budget

To make your budget work harder for you, start by setting a sensible spending limit that allows you to cover your basic needs while also building in some wiggle room for unexpected expenses. When it comes to digital media budgets, you can achieve more then you may think with comparatively small budgets but you also need to make sure you’re spending enough to drive learnings, insights and optimisations. Once you have a budget in place, think about better ways to allocate your resources. Consider investing in better ad creative to better engage your market or exploring more cost-effective methods of production. Taking a few extra steps to dig deep and find better ways to manage finances will ensure that you are getting maximum value from every dollar spent. Ultimately, if you’re serving less ads (ie spending less money) then those ads you do serve need to really resonate, and have the best chance of driving actions from your target market. This is undoubtedly where the power of great creative kicks in, and why this is one area that we would not recommend making cuts in. 

Managed service media can make costs more forecastable and enable you to dedicate more of your investment to media vs in-house execution 

Growing your brand on a budget doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive – with a few simple strategies and tactics, you can create a powerful presence without breaking the bank. By utilising managed service providers, you can make your budget work harder to increase your brand’s visibility. Managed service providers can help align your company’s goals with market opportunities, whilst leveraging internal expertise and thus allowing for effective cost management and utilisation of resources. Furthermore, managed services can provide insights into how to effectively target customers and potential resources that may have gone unnoticed or the insights can be derived across a greater pool of media execution compared to what you can achieve directly. As such, utilising managed services can help you maximise the potential of your budget and create an effective digital marketing plan to further your brand visibility without breaking the bank.

Managed service went out of vogue for a number of years, when the market had a huge focus on in-housing expertise. In reality, few clients have the consistent spend thresholds needed to really drive the economies of scale that in-house promised, and they’re instead left executing media buying in their own echo chamber, losing the insights that wider agency input can bring

At the start of any project, it’s important to take stock of your current resources – both tangible and intangible – and think about how they can contribute to building your brand. Making your budget work harder is an essential part of the process. To do so, you should identify the most cost-effective ways to achieve your objectives and seek out opportunities to achieve more with less. 

From leveraging existing relationships to finding free or low-cost design and marketing tools, there are lots of ways to make your budget work harder for you when it comes to brand-building. It is important to consider the 2023 recession. While preparing for a downturn can feel daunting, there are many proactive steps businesses can take now to ensure they remain resilient during the 2023 recession. Now is the time to plan and develop targeted strategies that allow businesses to not only survive but thrive in the years ahead.

Ensure that the right attention goes into your landing pages, so that they work s hard as possible at converting the traffic which you drive into them 

Making our budget work harder starts with understanding what resources are available to us. Knowing every detail of our budget is key to leveraging these resources to their fullest potential. We can do this by better optimising our landing pages to better target potential customers, which will result in better return on investment. Additionally, better resource allocation allows us to better allocate funds towards better quality assets and those that directly contribute to increased revenue. 

Ultimately, we can get away with slightly poorer performing landing pages when we can afford to send more traffic to them. A lower conversion rate can yield the same absolute number of leads, but in these times of tighter budgets, if we’re going to hit our goals, we will need to have very high performing landing pages.

Doing this can help us make smarter decisions on how to best use our funds, such as investing in new technologies, hiring additional staff, or making changes to certain processes to improve efficiency. All of these tactics can help us optimise the funds we already have and make our budget work harder for us Thus, if we plan ahead and plan wisely for 2023, we can make our budget work harder for us. 

Reaching Customers on a Shoestring Budget

In order to reach customers on a shoestring budget, it’s essential to focus on leveraging digital marketing strategies such as organic social media, email campaigns, search engine optimisation and targeted, highly specific paid media tactics, which yield the biggest ‘bang for the buck’ like ABM. Additionally, conversion rate optimisation is an effective way to make the most out of your budget. By improving conversion rates, you will be able to get more out of every dollar spent on marketing activities. This entails creating appealing content, running A/B testing, and making sure website design and layout are super-engaging and highly intuitive. Moreover, conversion rate optimisation can focus on improving conversion rates at each step of the customer journey. Doing so ensures that no conversion opportunities are overlooked, thus allowing you to make your budget work harder for you.

Stretching Advertising Dollars – make paid media sweat harder

When it comes to stretching advertising dollars, it’s important to focus on targeting the right audience. This means researching potential customers and understanding their needs and wants so that you can tailor your ads accordingly. Additionally, conversion rate optimisation can help ensure that your budget works harder. By analysing website traffic, conversion paths and user behaviour, you can identify user trends to help optimise conversion rates. This means more effective conversion opportunities and a better return on investment.

Another way to make your advertising dollars go further is by taking advantage of digital and social media platforms, which are often less expensive than traditional methods such as television and radio. When advertising on these platforms, its critical to combine highly specific and precise targeting with brilliant creative, ensuring you can target their lowest hanging fruit. 

Finally, tracking your return on investment (ROI) is essential for optimising your marketing spend. Keep a close eye on how many leads or conversions you’re getting from each of your campaigns so that you can adjust as necessary and ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck Furthermore, it’s paramount that you closely monitor your ROI when attempting to make your budget work harder. By tracking how many leads or conversions you receive from each of your campaigns, you can make adjustments accordingly and ensure that you are getting the greatest value for your dollar.

Top Tip; never rely on the media buying platform to provide the conversion data – they are biassed and use attribution techniques designed to ensure they come out looking great. Platforms like Journey provide cookieless attribution, long sales cycle management, multi-touch attribution and other such tools needed to understand how the marketing mix combines to drive value

To Conclude

In conclusion, there are many different strategies you can use to successfully market your B2B business on a tight budget. From leveraging the power of social media, to creating effective copywriting content and utilising managed service solutions from best-in-class vendors, there are many ways to spread the word about your business without breaking the bank. With a bit of research, creativity and hard work, you can create a successful marketing strategy that will drive leads and sales for your business.