The Beauty Of No Budget: Marketing Campaigns

This post originally appeared on the @RepKnight Blog (www.blog.repknight.com). RepKnight is a reputation management solution monitoring the web and social networks 24/7.

Limitations in marketing are good. They force teams to be more creative, lean and resourceful.

When you’re faced with limitations-a shrinking budget, a tight deadline-you can’t just reach for the phone and place an ad with the local newspaper. You’ve got to think twice as hard about questions you normally answer on auto-pilot: How do I give my clients the best ROI for their social media campaign? How do we get people talking about this product?

Limitations are beautiful. They force creativity. When I charge clients for projects, I tend to charge less than my competitors. This is because I know we can do more with less.

It’s easy to think you need alot of money to market your service or product. Unless you’re determined to run glossy magazine ads and TV commercials, you don’t. Not having a big budget means you have twice the brain power to devote to the project because you have to think twice as hard about how to make it work.

There’s a company called 37 Signals. They make web apps like Basecamp (project management) and Highrise (CRM). And they embrace constraints. They pride themselves on the simplicity and basic functionality of their products. They realize that there are so many features you just don’t need so they keep hacking away fat from their products.

Same goes for marketing campaigns. If we all did alot with little, we’d be better marketers.