When you’re working with a small marketing budget, every pound matters. You want to make sure your investments drive real commercial impact, but how do you ensure you’re spending where it counts? Here’s a few tips, plus a useful tool, to help you make the most of your budget.
Striking the right balance:
Where to best prioritise your budget? Marketing experts Binet and Field advocate for the 60/40 rule: 60% of your ad spend should go towards brand building, while 40% should be allocated to performance marketing. But in ‘low-trust’ sectors like financial services, this ratio actually shifts to something closer to 70/30 for optimal results.
Why is brand building important? A strong brand ‘warms up’ your audience, making them more responsive to your performance marketing efforts like sales campaigns.
However, brand building requires both budget and time – luxuries that not all of us have. You might be thinking, “That’s impossible with my budget,” but it’s still worth considering the principle. Focus on the areas with the biggest impact, even if you can’t follow the rule exactly. The key is to plan thoughtfully and invest where it matters most.
Before we get to the numbers…
Before diving into the metrics, it’s crucial to get your fundamentals right including a clear value proposition that genuinely connects with and differentiates you from your audience. This step prevents you from wasting your budget on the wrong messages or audiences.
We have a free tool on our website to help you assess your brand foundations. You can use this tool to run a quick health check and ensure your core messaging is in top shape. Check it out here: Moreish Marketing Health Check.
Next, knowing your funnel
Understanding your marketing funnel is crucial to knowing where best to prioritise your budget. Your goal as marketers is to deliver warm opportunities (sales qualified leads) for your sales team to convert into customers. But to do this, you need visibility into where your customers are in their journey—whether they’re just becoming aware of your brand, engaging with your content, considering a purchase, or are loyal advocates. Knowing this will help you learn where your marketing investments will have the most impact.
So you need to know the numbers for your current activities. Many marketers lack visibility into their funnel metrics, often due to time or budget constraints for tracking tools. This creates a catch-22: without this data, you can’t determine your ROI or justify asking for increased budgets.
To help with this, we’ve created an easy interactive spreadsheet. Filling this in and adapting it to your business model will help you and your stakeholders focus on commercial metrics, areas for improvement, and where to invest your marketing spend.
(You can download it here: Moreish Marketing with Purpose – KPI matrix)
This data-driven approach makes future budget conversations easier. For example, you can say, “We can increase our website traffic by X% if we invest Y amount in this area of the funnel, which will then convert to Z.”
Without visibility into your numbers, you’re shooting in the dark. Be pragmatic – hone in on those high-impact areas that provide the greatest return and truly align with your commercial goals.
Making your budget work harder in the areas you’ve identified
- Get the fundamentals right: As we said earlier, ensure you have a clear value proposition from the get-go. Create compelling messaging that connects with your audience’s needs and pain points. If your messaging isn’t clear and compelling and your organisation aren’t aligned on your communication strategy our blog on messaging matrices can help guide this process.
- Be targeted and creative: With a smaller budget, you can’t afford to be dull (which comes with its own financial cost). For more on the cost of bland creative, check out our ‘Ban the Bland’ blog.
- Invest in the right channels: Make sure your owned channels are working as hard as they can and consider low-cost or free channels like email and SEO.
- Track and adjust: Keep an eye on your numbers each quarter. Market conditions change, and you may need to adjust budget levels across the funnel. Also, watch out for internal costs like scope creep.
Final thoughts
To make the most of a small marketing budget, you need to focus on the right areas of the sales and marketing journey. Know your numbers, track performance before and after campaigns, and measure your impact.
At Moreish, we’ve won several awards not just for our work in financial services marketing, but for using marketing effectively on a budget. We understand what it takes to make every pound count. Want to know how we can help you do the same? Get in touch!