The 5 Steps to Take When Your Marketing Budget is Less than $15,000

When you have a marketing budget that is less than $15,000, you need to be precise with every dollar spent.

If you haven't read our 17 free lead generation marketing tactics that increase revenue, go there to churn up some ideas!

Whether you know the marketing tactics you want to take or not, you still need a cohesive strategy and an action plan to make sure you're getting the results you need. Follow these five steps to set yourself up for short-term and long-term growth.

Warning: this blog gets a little long so here are the main steps:

1. Set your marketing goals and plans

2. Build your lead generation system

3. Create your content marketing machine

4. Develop your feedback loop

5. Revisit and revise regularly

Okay, now you're ready to dive into the details!

Step 1: Set your marketing goals and plan your actions

Before anything else, you need to know where you're going and how you're going to get there. Apologies for my non-metric-loving friends, I'm going to make you put down some measurable goals.

We're going to use SMART goal setting to establish what constitutes success for us and what goals are most important to prioritize.

"SMART" stands for:

• S - Specific

• M - Measurable

• A - Achievable

• R- Relevant

• T - Timely

For each of these, write down answers that have numbers, clear timelines, and you can realistically do with your budget and existing team.

Don't worry about this being perfect either. Anything down on paper is better than not having it written down. Then, continue to refine it until you know exactly what you're doing, how you're doing it, when it's getting done, who else is helping, and what results it should be delivering if it's successful.

💡Tip: Block out at least 2-3 hours for your SMART goals. Take your time with them. If you have team members, get their buy-in as appropriate.

After we create our goals, we're going to create our marketing action plan.

Obviously, your goals will be unique to you. But I've seen enough businesses to know they're going to include a few similarities, usually the top of the list is "lead generation," which is why you're going to pair your SMART Goals with a Strategic Marketing Action Plan to identify exactly what steps you're going to take to accomplish everything you just put down.

What's a marketing action plan?

I call it an "action" plan because I've seen too many marketing strategies that don't include clear tactics and next steps. And I've seen too many plans that deal with the "weeds" but never draw the line back to the larger, long-term goal.

Build yourself a marketing strategy that looks at how marketing supports both your long-term and short-term business goals.

Strategic Marketing Action Plans should include a healthy mix of most of the following:

• Market research

• Customer research

• Competitive research

• SEO/AI Search strategies

• Social Media strategies

• Content Marketing strategies

• Ad strategies

• Lead Generation or Customer Journey strategies

And they should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS be paired with regular reporting to keep your team accountable, your goals met, and your campaigns flexible.

Check out Blue Spec Marketing's Mighty Marketing Service to see what this can look like.

Step 2: Build your lead generation system

While working at Tevera, the founder always said, "no money, no mission." Even the most bleeding heart, do-good businesses need to be able to reach their target audience and convert them into paying customers. Or, if you're a nonprofit, donors.

gif of Parks and Recreation "money please" scene with no actual money being exchanged

Nothing is more stressful than not having a predictable cash flow. To make it predictable, you need to have a system that you can regularly analyze to make sure that your lead generation tactics are working and you can count on customers now and in the future.

Because good leads are the hardest to get, they're the most valuable.

In trying to find a way to get a stable flow of vetted leads, you'll likely run across a million and one sales/marketing experts who will tell you that they have a secret sauce that will make your customers start drooling.

Again, don't fall for it.

There are legit lead generation companies out there. But to make sure you're choosing an agency or freelancer who can deliver the goods, you need to understand your own sales/marketing funnel inside and out.

Do not, I repeat, DO NOT relinquish control over the most important part of your business until you know it well enough to know if someone's doing a good job with it.

That doesn't mean you can't lean on experts while you learn.

And to do that, you gotta learn some marketing.

The thing to always remember is that marketing is the application of communication tactics to psychology to accomplish a goal. Meaning: you need to know 1. how to reach people and 2. how to get them to pay attention.

Fortunately, we know a lot about how to grab human attention spans, even in the Digital Age.

First - reaching people.

You have to be where your people are. If you sell video games to eighteen-year-olds, should you be on LinkedIn? No. You should not be.

gif of Steve Buscemi saying, "how do you do, fellow kids?"

Start with identifying where your target audience hangs out.

Note both digital and physical spaces. Which social media channels, groups within those. The Reddit threads, the networking events. Associations, affiliate groups, email lists. One great way is to talk with businesses in adjacent but not competitive industries. So, a coffee shop and a book store collaborate on a series of "Jane Austen teas." You get the idea.

Second - getting people to pay attention

Two words: visual communication.

This is coming from a data-crunching writer. Visual communication is better than anything else, especially if you're on social media.

gif of illustrated finders "running" on a treadmill that has a floor of social media posts

This doesn't mean you have to look perfect. By any means.

1. First - be consistent. I'm doing this. For me, a text-only LinkedIn post is better than none.

   
   

2. Second - add in a thing. For me, this has been adding images to those LinkedIn posts above. Sometimes I do it, sometimes I don't.

   
   

3. Third - add in the branding. Once you have the muscle memory built up and are over the initial "just do it" hurdle, you can start spending time on making sure your logo is professional, your images tell the same story, and your graphic design is on point.

I do believe in progress over perfection, so don't use this as an excuse to remake your website for the fourth time instead of sending that cold email.

And one more thing - now you have to get them to take an action.

There's this principle in marketing called the "7 touch rule." You can take this somewhat literally, but the gist is that people don't immediately make a purchase decision. They need to research, feel your brand out, and then, make their decision. This applies to every industry from SaaS to candy bars at the cash register.

Longer sales cycles will require more in-depth content and more impulsive products (like the candy bar) will rely more on social media, ads, and visual merchandising.

The bottom line is you want to be the last thing in people's minds when they're making a decision.

Here's where a customer journey map or sales funnel comes in handy because you can actually start to map out each of these "touches."

Let's break it down by the most common customer journey stages:

A Typical Marketing Customer Journey Funnel

Unaware

At the top of the funnel, you have your unaware people. These are potential customers who haven't heard of you yet.

There are usually three strategies to get in front of these people for the first time:

1. Organic SEO/Search AI

2. Paid Ads

3. Organic Social Media

All of these take time and money to implement. So when you're tight on both, you have to embrace cold outreach and networking.

The most POWERFUL channels to get new eyeballs on your business are:

• Networking

• Referrals

• Cold emails

  
  

If a marketing consultant told you this yet, let me hold your hand when I say:

Every single startup and small business owner has to do some cold emailing and networking.

And for us introverts, this can be overwhelming. Don't worry, we've got a plan for that too!

We all get to a point where we realize we have to do cold calls and attend networking events. And it can suck. That's why we're going to explore how to find events that don't suck and embrace 1:1 networking conversations for those of us who find large events overwhelming.

Aware

Once someone's seen a post of yours, met you, or seen an ad once, they're now aware of your brand and now, you need to make sure they don't forget you.

This stage includes a little of everything but the most common marketing tactics here are:

1. Organic Social Media Posts

2. Community Engagement

3. More Ads

4. Organic Search

5. Nurture Email Campaigns

Education

Once you've made someone aware of your presence, you want to keep them interested. This stage can overlap a lot with "awareness" in the channels you're publishing on but the topics should start to be less "hey we're here!" and more of "here's what you should know about this topic."

Think of this as content that meets the research stage.

Add in blogs, YouTube videos, and helpful tools to really beef this stage up. Don't be afraid to be generous with your knowledge here.

Decision

Potential customers in the "decision" phase are doing just that: deciding whether or not to give you their money. They're probably weighing the pros and cons of going with you versus another option, so content at this stage should focus on what makes you different.

It also helps to have "what to expect" content like pricing guides, process timelines, and anything else that answers common objections your client base has.

Purchase

Yay! Someone's ready to give you money!

And yes, there should still be some content around this. It might be a simple "thank you" email but it's still important. Listen to your grandma and write that thank you note (but automate it in your email system!).

Additionally, any information you can give them about what to expect during the next steps, especially if you have an onboarding process (looking at you SaaS companies), the more clear communication, the better.

But even if you're selling candy bars, add moments of delight at the point of purchase like a cute note inside the wrapper. Making people smile makes your brand memorable.

Step 3: Create your content marketing machine

There is no getting around it: marketing relies on content.

Social media, blogs, and emails are a constant hungry monster that demands to be fed. And we are at its mercy.

However, that doesn't mean you have to become a publishing company too.

Instead, you're going to get real clear about these questions to set yourself up with a sustainable system:

1. What content are you creating?

2. Where is this content being distributed?

3. When is this content being made?

4. Who's creating the content?

5. Who's in charge of the results?

Then you're going to follow this plan, hold everyone accountable, and get to creating!

If writing blogs, email campaigns, and social media is overwhelming you, it's time to delegate. Check out our blog: How to Build Your Marketing Dream Team for a guide on how to responsibly grow your marketing team to support your business goals.

Step 4: Develop your feedback loop

Did you think you were done?

No no.

Successful content marketing requires a consistent feedback system. From setting clear expectations for your content creators and making sure they're hitting their targets to ensuring that your campaigns are delivering the desired results, you need to have a feedback loop in place.

Step 5: Revisit your strategy, regularly

And even outside of the feedback loop, you're going to want to regularly revisit your marketing strategy and assumptions about your customers. What worked three years ago, may not work today.

At least annually, be sure you're revising and resetting your marketing strategy based on your performance, your updated business goals, and the changing industry landscape.

The bottom line of any successful marketing strategy is to understand your customers. These steps will put in place a flexible system that powers itself, and you, forward.

To get help with creating a strategic framework and action plan that works for you, check out our Mighty Marketing Service!