Marketing budgets never feel big enough. There’s always pressure to do more with less and deliver results while keeping costs in check.
Sometimes, the reaction is to turn marketing off during slow times for your business. But that can cost you a lot of brand awareness and customer connection—making the busy times a lot less busy.
What if there were tricks to stretch your budget without making those sacrifices?
That’s exactly the advice I’ve gathered from a group of marketing pros who know how to squeeze more leads from every dollar. From strategic channel selection to leveraging internal influencers, these tips will help you keep your marketing momentum throughout the year without busting your budget.
Contents
- Get discounted marketing tools
- Befriend your finance team
- Leverage your internal influencers
- Don’t overspend on a few seasonal campaigns
- Target second or third Google Ads positions
- Be ready to pivot
- Be strategic with your marketing channels
- Go organic
- Know your customer
9 tips to stretch your marketing budget
These expert tips will help you optimize even the smallest marketing budget.
1. Get discounted marketing tools
Have you ever saved money by visiting an online marketplace that offers discounts on popular things like computer hardware or name-brand fashions? Nikiya Griffith, director of content marketing at TeamOhana, pointed out similar options for marketing software.
“Keeping an eye on marketplaces like AppSumo that offer steep discounts on software can really help stretch a budget,” she said. “Especially if you’re a solopreneur or small business.”
This is #notanad for AppSumo, but I did take Nikiya’s advice and had a look through the AppSumo website. I started by using its AI personal shopper.
It gave me a handful of options, including an AI image generator, an AI brand marketing platform, and an AI-powered text-to-speech app—all at discounted prices.
Besides software, there are courses and PDFs listed on the site as well. And there’s a tab labeled “Shop Last Call,” which looks to be extra special last-minute deals.
Speaking of discounted tools…we have some free ones for you:
2. Befriend your finance team
The typical trope is that marketers and finance teams work against each other. One group is tasked with spending money to get customers, and the other is judged by how judiciously it protects a business’s bottom line. Kristin Blitch, director of marketing at RJE Interiors, believes there’s a better way to approach this relationship.
“This is going to sound silly, but befriend your finance team,” she said. “Our CFO is one of my closest allies, so I work with the team to see where I can cut expenses and make sensible savings.”
Kristin added that her partnership with finance makes it easier to try new strategies. “When I ask to spend money, trust has been built that it’s not just something on a whim,” she explained. “There’s intentionality and reason behind it. From there, I can make things work and bring new things to the table because we’ve usually got a plan in place.”
One constant challenge for marketers is proving the value of our actions to the rest of the team. Having an ally in finance who understands what you do and why you do it would be a big step in alleviating that challenge.
3. Leverage your internal influencers
Unless you’re producing big-budget, celebrity-filled commercials, your biggest marketing costs aren’t tied up in the creative—it’s paying for the distribution channels (like paid social media ads).
Kristin has a solution for that, too. “I work to have our internal team help us share our communications (especially the important ones) externally to improve reach in conjunction with any boosting or advertising,” she said.
For example, if you’re launching a new product or starting a new campaign, you could ask your team to post about it on LinkedIn.
Internal influencing can be as easy as asking your team to repost important company updates.
I’ve written about the power of internal influencers before (it was one of the top tips from expert marketers for 2025). They’re a fantastic way to expand the reach of your marketing messages without extra ad costs.
Kristin said they can also add a trust layer to your marketing. “Having authenticity and word of mouth from our team to their followers (directly) means more compared to just paying for the clicks.”
4. Don’t overspend on a few seasonal campaigns
As an experienced digital marketing consultant at LocaliQ, Miranda Kaywood gets a behind-the-scenes view of how businesses allocate their marketing budgets. She cautioned against spending most of your advertising dollars on a few seasonal campaigns.
“Instead of exhausting your budget all at once, I recommend pacing it out to maintain consistent visibility,” she said. “Consistency is crucial for building long-term brand recognition, as it requires multiple touchpoints with consumers to create meaningful connections.”
This is true even for seasonal businesses. Say you run a lawn care service. Many of your competitors will turn marketing on in March as the weather gets warm. If you’ve shared a steady stream of helpful content all winter, the people it helped will be more likely to choose you come spring.
And once you get a revenue bump from those successful gambits, compound it by putting some of it back into advertising. “Invest in these solutions, and once you see a positive ROI, reinvest the returns back into your marketing strategy through a budget increase or trying out different marketing avenues,” Miranda said.
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5. Target second or third Google Ads positions
The top spot on a Google search results page almost always gets the most clicks. But that real estate comes at a price. Adam Schwind, founder of Spark Digital Group, believes there’s gold in not fighting the big spenders for those extra clicks.
“Rather than competing for the number one spot in Google Ads, where costs can be significantly higher, businesses can maximize their budget by targeting the second or third position,” he said. “This approach reduces cost per click (CPC) while still maintaining strong visibility and competitive click-through rates (CTR), ensuring a better return on ad spend.”
I really like this bit of advice. I’ve watched the search ad costs we track yearly rise. Just in the last four years, the average cost-per-lead from our benchmark reports jumped by roughly 50%.
Adam’s suggestion is a great option for tempering those cost increases to keep your budget intact.
Free budget-saving resource: 6 Easy Ways to Save Money on Google Ads Now
6. Be ready to pivot
Experimentation is a constant part of great marketing. What’s important, Miranda said, is to make sure you’re not doubling down on the experiments that don’t pan out.
“It’s key to regularly check in and see what’s actually working so you can understand how your marketing dollars are being spent,” she explained. “You might discover that some platforms, ads, or audiences perform better than others—and you need to pivot to make sure you’re always effectively using your dollars.”
That’s true whether you manage your own marketing budgets or have outside help. “Your marketing partner (i.e., LocaliQ) can help with this, but it’s important for you to stay on top of it, too,” Miranda added.
A great place to start is while creating your yearly marketing strategy. Be precise about which metrics matter to you most in the coming year. Set a benchmark based on your industry and on your prior results. Then, establish a cadence for review and be prepared to shift your budget from what’s not working to what is.
7. Be strategic with your marketing channels
It can be tempting to jump into a marketing channel that gets a lot of buzz from other businesses. Adam said that can lead to a leaky marketing budget if it’s not the right channel for your unique brand.
“Small businesses must be strategic about where they invest their marketing budget,” Adam explained. He gave the example of a divorce law firm, which may not benefit as much from building a large following on every social channel since “divorce clients seek legal help when needed, not ongoing engagement.”
Miranda made a similar point. “Small businesses should focus on a few key marketing channels, such as Facebook and Google, rather than trying to cover everything with a limited budget,” she said.
Not all channels are ideal for all audiences.
Which channels are right for your business?
To answer that you’ll need to know who your most valuable audience is and figure out how they typically learn about brands and services in your industry. Do they actively search certain keywords on Google? Or do they commonly talk about your topics on a social media platform?
8. Go organic
Colby Flood, founder of Brighter Click, is bullish on SEO and organic social media for growing brands and has a specific prescription for them to succeed.
“SEO is a strategy that takes time and consistency, but the compounding growth it brings is well worth the wait,” Colby said. “I recommend prioritizing gaining a minimum of 3-5 backlinks and publishing 1-2 blog articles per month for smaller websites.”
We’ve published a guide on getting quality backlinks to get you started there.
“Organic content marketing on social media is another great way to build an audience, but like SEO, it takes time and consistency,” Colby added. “Many direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are shifting towards organic social media as a driver for sales.”
Colby pointed to Fresh Chile Company as a great example of a DTC brand that’s crushing it on social media. I checked them out, and yeah, a niche product with over 200K followers across Meta platforms is pretty impressive.
The Fresh Chile Company’s Instagram page is a perfect mix of promotion, product ideas, and customer praise.
9. Know your customer
Both Colby and Kristin told me that knowing your customer is one of the most important steps in getting more from each marketing dollar.
“The single most important aspect of marketing is understanding your customer better than your competitors,” Colby said. “Do not assume your customers think the same way you do. Send out surveys, pick up the phone and call them, dive into Reddit threads, do whatever you can to understand the pain points they have relative to your business and how you help solve them.”
Reddit is a great place to see what questions your target audience is asking.
He offered a systematic approach to the task. “We recommend completing voice of customer and competitor research to better understand the rational and emotional motivators that best resonate with your audience,” he said. “From there, we’d select 3-5 motivators to test over a 90-day period. When analyzing ad creative performance, we generally start by looking at the high level to understand how performance averaged based on the messaging motivators, ad format, creative design style, UGC Creator, etc.”
For Kristin, knowing your customer gives you the freedom to be creative and play a little. “Know your target audience and know how and where to reach them,” she said. “Once you know how to reach them, have fun. It’s scary to make the first video that feels like it might be different, but do it. Having fun is the ultimate way to engage your followers. Once you find something that works, keep tweaking it and having fun.”
You don’t have to turn off marketing to stay on budget
One big takeaway from all of these tips is that you don’t have to stop marketing to save money. Actually, keeping a consistent presence on your top channels can help reduce overall costs compared to stopping and starting.
The theme I picked up on was the need to be agile. That means testing to see what works, ditching what doesn’t, and being ready to shift gears quickly when needed.