As marketers progress through their career, there’s a tendency for the budgets that they manage to increase in line with their experience. It makes sense - larger budgets tend to correlate with larger brands and you’re only given responsibility for those budgets if you have the skills to match.
While this is true, it only tells half the story. As strange as it sounds, larger budgets don’t always equate to more difficult accounts. Sure, larger accounts tend to have more campaigns to keep track of, but many marketers find the actual work of managing them is far less complex than what they faced when they were running accounts with a fraction of the spend.
In a previous post, we looked at the challenges that marketers face at different account spend levels. With Q4 fast approaching and businesses getting their accounts ready for Black Friday & Christmas, now is a good time to revisit the challenges faced at lower spend levels & give a shoutout to our marketing friends doing the hard work on smaller accounts.
1) Choosing Your Priorities
On a small budget account, you simply can’t do everything. One of the first challenges marketers have to deal with is deciding what is and isn’t possible within the available spend.
When building out the account structure, this means making tough decisions about what products or business categories get promoted. Often, there’s simply not enough spend to give everything the budget it needs so prioritising one or two focus areas is likely to drive better results than spreading budget thinly across three or more.
At the campaign level, this can mean that more experimental tactics need to be put on hold in order to spend the majority of the budget on tried and true approaches. While best practice is best practice for a reason, digital marketing moves quickly and new ideas can often lead to incremental gains that wouldn’t have been possible with a more traditional approach. This puts marketers in a tough position where they have to experiment to get the edge on competition but if those experiments don’t work it could tank the whole account.
There’s no easy answer to this problem. However, as always, doing your research and making decisions backed by data is likely to lead to the best results. When deciding on categories to promote or experiments to try, look at past data and case studies to get an idea of potential performance & the challenges to be aware of.
2) Beating The Competition
By definition, there can only be a handful of top players in any industry. Unfortunately for marketers, if your account has a very small budget it’s unlikely that you’re one of them and it’s up to you to work out how to compete and win in the auction space.
Directly competing against online giants like Amazon is a very effective way to eat up your entire marketing budget with little to show for it at the end. Rather than going head to head on competitive keywords, smart marketers will instead look for gaps where competition is lower or try cheaper campaign types to stretch their budgets further.
Another competitive option that’s been forgotten in the era of automated ads and character limits is the idea of storytelling through marketing. When every other ad on the results page is shouting about the range of products available and the discounts on offer, smaller budget accounts can cut through the noise by using their ad copy to tell a story about their brand and how it fits into their ideal customer’s life.
Instead of simply increasing spend to mitigate competition, taking a measured approach is likely to lead to better results. Gap analysis and well written ad copy is a time investment that will pay a far better ROI than an additional budget investment.
3) Knowledge Gaps
As account budgets increase, a marketer’s point of contact tends to change. On a high budget global account you’ll tend to talk directly to a marketing manager within the business who has experience of digital marketing and can have high level conversations about strategy and tactics. On smaller accounts, particularly when freelancing, you’ll often be working directly with the business owner who may have a very different level of experience and understanding.
This knowledge gap can be be challenging as ideas need to be communicated in a way that gets the overall point across while avoiding complex or high level details that will cause confusion. It can also be an opportunity to build a stronger, more productive working relationship as the business owner develops their own digital marketing knowledge and is able to share business insights and context to drive strategy forward.
The key here is patience and a willingness to ask and answer questions. Recognising that all parties in the conversation are on the same team and are working towards the same business goal is a useful approach and, over time, increasing knowledge and trust will mean that marketers are given more autonomy to run activity in the way that they would like.
Small budget marketing isn’t easy and there are considerations to be made that aren’t relevant at higher spend levels. Managing larger spends doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a better marketer and there are some outstanding talents who choose to focus on the challenge of getting the best out of a restricted budget. Whatever spend you have throughout Q4, taking a well thought out & measured approach will give the best odds of success.
For expert digital marketing advice & management, whatever your budget, get in touch.