presented by Constant Contact partner Bluevine
Knowing where to allocate your marketing budget is important at every stage, from side hustle to small business and beyond. Small business owners often feel constrained by their finances, but these constraints can guide you toward establishing a financial foundation for smooth scaling.
To maximize revenue on a small business marketing budget, you should invest not only in sales, but in making your products valuable to customers, establishing a distinctive brand, and learning about your audience so you can reach them where they are.
Budget basics for small business marketing
While scaling doesn’t have to mean spending more, a stable financial foundation is essential for funding the campaigns that drive customer acquisition. Follow these best practices to ensure you can finance your marketing efforts at each stage:
- Separate your personal and business finances. Use a business checking account to make business purchases and pay yourself a salary. Also consider getting a business credit card and issue additional physical and virtual cards to team members, so you can track marketing expenses and other operational expenses separately.
- Keep your records accurate and up to date. Use automated software to track your revenue streams and expenses. Consult a certified accountant or bookkeeper when it’s time to file your taxes or make major budgetary changes.
- Maintain a six-month cash reserve. Some cash flow variability is inevitable, so aim to keep six months of cash on-hand to cushion the impact of unexpected events.
- Quantify and track measurable business goals. KPIs are an invaluable analytic tool when used appropriately—focus on a few, set realistic targets, and don’t substitute KPIs for big-picture strategy.
What is value in marketing?
To customers, the value of your products is more than price—deeper, often unmeasurable factors like trust, perceived value, and customer experience will determine your success at scale. Understanding this is key if you want to make spending decisions that create long-term revenue.
When making these decisions, your goal should not be just to make sales, but to make customers. For example, storytelling campaigns, strong customer service, and community investments make customers trust and identify with your brand. Trust and identity are hard to measure or forecast, but strengthening them increases revenue, reduces customer churn, and lowers customer acquisition costs.
5 ways to invest in sustainable growth
In addition to customer value, your spending decisions need to factor in the most important driver for success at scale: your business’s ability to adapt to and grow from unexpected risk. Risk is unavoidable, so instead of trying to control it, start building your company’s financial flexibility by considering these five tips.
- Tap into a business line of credit for budget flexibility
Whether it’s to keep up with cultural trends, fund marketing experiments, or weather economic turbulence, your marketing budget needs to be flexible—you can’t always budget for the unpredictable.
In addition to maintaining a cash cushion, one easy way to increase your budget flexibility is to apply for a business line of credit, a consistent pool of funds to draw from when you need it. You can also apply for a term loan if you need a lump sum up front, or see if you qualify for Small Business Administration (SBA) loans or minority-owned business grants. Repaying loans on-time is the easiest way to improve your business credit profile, which will earn you more favorable terms on future loans. Having the ability to tap into a line of credit can be a powerful resource that will enable you to quickly jump on a new growth opportunity.
- Build distinctive branding assets
Professional and cohesive logos, design assets, web pages, marketing materials, and other branded content are the first signal to customers that your brand is worth their money. Focusing your brand image and aesthetic early on reduces your need for a costly rebrand later, and helps your target segments find you.
This early branding includes your initial ad campaigns. Story- or mission-driven campaigns provide a foundation for future marketing, and communicate to customers that you have a stake in your business beyond revenue.
- Learn from your customers with feedback loops
Invest in tools like survey applications and customer relationship management (CRM) software that collect and aggregate feedback from different parts of your business ecosystem. This will guide you to improve your marketing, products, and customer service based on how customers feel about you and your industry. Input from customers can also reveal opportunities to innovate.
To maintain a consistent stream of customer feedback, invest in compounding customer acquisition initiatives like feedback rewards, loyalty programs, referral programs, and social media engagement. Act publicly on the feedback you receive to show customers that their opinions matter to you.
- Explore multi-channel marketing to optimize reach and frequency
Diversifying your marketing channels ensures that no single channel must reach all your customers, allowing you to deploy a mix of mass-audience campaigns and targeted ads. For example, you could allocate your mass marketing spend to social media, email, and local advertising initiatives, and reserve personalized ads for lower-traffic channels like in-person events and text messaging.
As you gather data on which channels drive customer engagement, tinker with your strategies and budget accordingly, scaling up primary channels and optimizing secondary ones. Also, consider how your channels interact—for example, an out-of-home ad may direct customers to your social media accounts. Reaching your customers in multiple places can work wonders for brand recognition as you scale.
- Turn constraints into strengths
As a small business, you can leverage your flexibility and creative constraints to earn outsized revenue with these cost-effective strategies:
- Local advertising. Out-of-home advertising, in-person events, local business partnerships, and guerilla marketing are low-cost and unique, plus they foster community and trust among local customers. Organic word-of-mouth and online buzz often follow a well-executed local campaign.
- Upcycling. Unused assets are easy to repurpose, but you can also save money by designing repeatable and remixable campaign assets. This considerably lowers production costs and maintains consistent messaging, all while your campaigns scale alongside your company.
- Recontextualization. Certain pain points in your budget can be resolved with clever branding. For example, if your packaging is low-cost but environmentally friendly, an “eco-friendly packaging” label will increase your value in the eyes of eco-conscious customers while saving you money on premium materials.
How to maximize productivity on a small business marketing budget
The last key to success at scale is having the right tools to track and optimize your marketing performance as you grow. Find accounting software and an accounts payable platform that offer automation features and sync with each other. This will free up your team to focus on strategy while your software streamlines budgeting and growth, and reduces human error.
One excellent option for scaling your marketing spend is Bluevine Business Checking, which offers a comprehensive accounts payable platform designed to grow with your business. These tools integrate with the business checking account in one dashboard or mobile app, so you can access your finances anywhere, anytime.
Plus, Bluevine lets you earn interest on your main checking account and sub-accounts, syncs with tools like QuickBooks Online and Xero, and offers secure multi-user access, all with no hidden fees or minimum balance requirements. Apply online in minutes.
