Whether you’re a startup at seed stage or a small to mid-sized business with a small marketing team, running a small budget marketing campaign is really difficult. There are three main challenges:
In order to win, the marketer must be a master of tactics in acquiring users and customers as efficiently as possible. What does this actually look like?
Key takeaways:
Master of One
Small budget marketing campaigns may be limited by the amount of raw capital available for advertising. But this does not mean that growth goals ought to be small.
To punch above your weight, marketers need to get comfortable with testing rapidly, but eventually putting most of your resources into one or two user acquisition channels.
Here’s what Native Deodorant, a direct to consumer cosmetic product that grew in monthly revenue from US$50k to US$1M in just 11 months, did to grow that fast.
Moiz Ali, the founder, leveraged Facebook Ads during the years of 2016, when competition was low and as result received outsized returns. He quickly dominated the niche of natural, zinc-free deodorant on Facebook, a space that the big players were slow to move into.
In fact, Moiz publicly stated that before his company was acquired by P&G a year later at a $100M valuation, he had personally managed ad spend of “over $30M”.
The dominant legacy brands were slow to move, still splashing out millions of dollars per campaign on TV and print campaigns. Moiz didn’t.
Be Brave To Create
Let’s get back to the present day. Facebook ads still work, but it’s highly likely that any upper hand will be quickly competed away.
This brings us to the first challenge. Namely, there is insufficient capital to compete in advertising spend with established players.
What other areas are not as capital intensive then?
Creativity.
Impact matters most in this situation. While you can’t compete on the breadth of your competition’s distribution, creativity is a lever you can pull to your advantage.
Take a look at the launch of Dollar Shave Club. They spent a whopping US$4500 for their viral YouTube spot that catapulted their brand to a $1 billion dollar business. Gillette on the other hand, spent in 1998 a princely sum of $300 million dollars just to launch their Mach3 razor.
Crazily, Dollar Shave Club commanded 50% of all US online razor sales in just three years from that viral video. Just a decade earlier, Gillette commanded 70% of the US market.
Depth, not breadth, is how to win with a tight budget. Focus on the creativity of your content, and define your winning metric.
In this case, with a small capital investment but with outsized returns, look at your Cost Per View (CPV). Dollar Shave Club achieved a $0.0009 CPV compared to the usual YouTube CPV of $0.01. More than 11x cheaper than industry average, due to their creativity.
To conclude, a tight budget forces you to be extra efficient with your user acquisition channels. Choose one, and leverage your creativity to the maximum to get as much out of it. Choose depth and quality over large capital advertising distribution.
Chowder’s Advice For Startups
At Chowder, our general advice is this: Unless you’ve managed to find a growth hack that your competitors are not privy to, stick to the tried and true methods.
To acquire customers as effectively as possible, experiment with these four growth channels.
Try them fast, and test them against one another. In the long term, you need both an organic and paid engine. But if explosive growth in the short term is needed, be brave to put all your eggs in one basket.
Two to Tango
What happens if you only have a marketing team of one, yet are expected to power an omnichannel marketing strategy?
To do the work of a fully-fledged marketing team, of around 5-7 people, founders ought to look at leveraging AI and agencies.
But before spending a single dime on outside agency help, companies should know what their north star metric is, and should have already begun creating their own content.
Picture this. Most product launches, whether B2C or B2B, are launching into a crowded market with existing competition.
There are full-funnel challenges, where there is not enough awareness at the top. While at the same time, in the middle of the funnel, prospective customers are unsure about the differentiation of your product.
So as a leader of the marketing team, you are faced with an omnichannel challenge.
You most likely need the following to grow the company:
Content Overdrive
In order to do all the above with a small workforce, leaders have to embrace a marketing tactic I call “Content Overdrive.”
This means rapidly scaling content production by intelligently leveraging AI tools alongside strategic agency partnerships.
AI enables a single marketer to produce “good-enough” content at scale, while agencies can amplify reach, optimize campaigns, and execute on specialized tasks that require deeper expertise.
Take the case of Jasper, the AI-driven content platform. Despite operating in the crowded AI-writing market, Jasper leveraged an aggressive AI-assisted content marketing strategy to quickly scale from zero to over $45 million in annual recurring revenue in just two years.
According to TechCrunch, Jasper attracted 70,000 paying customers, largely by producing hyper-targeted blog posts, email drip sequences, and webinar content at a volume and pace impossible without AI assistance.
Hence for a solo marketer or small marketing team, content overdrive when powered by AI tools and targeted agency support can help you win growth marketing campaigns on a tight budget.
Smallness is THE Advantage
If there is one thing that must be understood, it is the fact that smallness is absolutely the advantage. The nimbleness of small teams often unlocks the most efficient path to initial success in our experience.
Thus, by experimenting quickly, pairing with AI to create content, leveraging agencies for specialized services, and pouring most resources into the winning growth channel, small growth marketing teams will win.
You got this.
