So you have no money for marketing?
There’s an upside to not having a marketing budget
--
One of the upsides to marketing without a budget is that it forces you to get creative.
When you have a budget, it can be a crutch. You can just throw money at your marketing and hope something sticks (You should be much more calculated than this when you have a budget, by the way).
But when you have nothing to work with, you have to do something different, something to stand out, or grind away to produce results.
A budget allows us to become complacent if we choose to. We can get our ads set up, tested, and running the way we’d like. They might be producing enough to hit revenue goals.
But, sometimes there’s a lot more opportunity out there for someone to grab and it probably won’t be going to the organization that’s just putting in X number of dollars and happily bringing in Y.
The big wins are likely going to come to the innovators and the people trying new things — some of them will be doing this because it’s the only choice they have. For others, it will because they never forgot what it’s like to have nothing to spend on marketing.
Having nothing to spend helps jumpstart idea generation
Some of my favorite marketing ideas have come at times when I had very little budget to work with, or when I’ve maintained this mindset even when I had budget to spend.
When you have no other way to drive marketing impressions, you start thinking, “Ok, what’s going to get us some free exposure? What can we do to bump our conversion rates up by a couple of percentage points? How can we get more organic search traffic?”
Pro tip: You should be thinking about these things all the time. Don’t let having a budget and some ads that work kill your creativity.
Where can you get more ideas for no budget marketing?
Every week, I publish a newsletter called No Budget Marketing, where I give tips on how to market when you have little or no budget.
I’ve worked in marketing for over two decades, and that’s included some time at…
