Growth marketing experts survey: How would you spend a $25,000 budget in Q1 2022?

What could an early-stage founder do with a $25,000 investment?

Hypothetically, they could use that money to buy 50 Herman Miller Aeron chairs or five top-of-the-line MacBook Pros for the engineering team. Or, they could use the funds to kick-start their 2022 marketing efforts.

A new year is quickly approaching, which brings new resolutions — and new budgets. To get some expert advice about how to optimize next year’s marketing spending, we reached out to several professionals we identified through our TechCrunch Experts project and asked: “If you only had a $25,000 marketing budget for Q1 2022, how would you spend it?”

“People really do come back from the holidays looking for new tools, new experiences, new ways to do things,” said Tracey Wallace, director of marketing at MarketerHire. She said companies can “make the most of that” by doing some industry-related research now that can be adapted after the new year for long-form site content and social media campaigns.

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Jonathan Martinez of JM Strategy advised running parallel campaigns on TikTok, Facebook and Google. “Instead of going full force on only one channel, I’d try to make the decision at about the halfway mark ($12,500) on which channel of the three to double down on,” he suggests.

Here’s who we talked to:

• Cam Sinclair, director/marketeer, Ammo
• Jonathan Metrick, chief growth officer, Portage Ventures
• Tracey Wallace, director of marketing, MarketerHire
• Jonathan Martinez, founder, JMStrategy
• Maya Moufarek, founder, Marketing Cube
• Peep Laja, CEO, Wynter and founder of CXL
• Lindsay Goldman, strategic advisor, MO Pros

Cam Sinclair, director/marketeer, Ammo

If we were advising one of our early-stage startups how best to deploy their $25,000 marketing budget for Q1 2022, here’s what we’d suggest.

Budget breakdown:

• Growth marketing course with Demand Curve: $2,500.
• Minimum viable brand design: $5,000.
• Events, PR: $5,000.
• LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram campaign: $5,000.
• Video content: $5,000.
• Copywriting: $2,500.

Understand growth

There’s some great resources and communities out there that help founders understand and apply growth. One we have been loving lately at Ammo is Demand Curve. They have a course, Slack community and templates for startups and can even review your campaigns when you get started. The other course/community I’d recommend for an introduction to growth is Growth Tribe based in Europe.

Build a “minimum viable brand” that can scale

Invest in brand and design upfront, but don’t go over the top. (We talked about the minimum viable brand concept in a recent TechCrunch story) Your brand touches everything you do in marketing so having a great foundation will put you in good stead and make sure you are looking professional in front of customers.

Invest in a copywriter

Distilling complex ideas into short, succinct copy is a superpower. Investing in a pro copywriter to explain your value proposition is always worth it.

Grow your network with events and PR

You may have been involved in your customer’s industry for a while before you started the company. Utilize these connections and ask for help. It’s amazing how many founders don’t first check with their immediate network when they start. After you take that first step, as Steve Blank says you need to “get out of the building” and start having conversations with customers but also be present in their community. Most of the time there will be events in your industry that you can sponsor or speak at as an expert in the field. If your technology is solving a big problem for the people in the room they should want to know about it.

Run a short LinkedIn/Facebook/Instagram campaign on your topic or service

Facebook and Instagram still remain amongst the cheapest marketing channels available. Not only does it give you a chance to test your brand message and content in front of live customers, but it can also help you build an audience or email list in the platform of your choice.

Make video content based on customer reviews and ad comments

If you or your competitors have some initial traction in the industry you can often find feedback and insights across online reviews. Start with social media channels and google reviews then head to G2 and Capterra, particularly if you are a SaaS startup. Use this to create video content that speaks to your customers using their language.

Jonathan Metrick, chief growth officer, Portage Ventures

In the first stages of growth, it’s critical for startups (and marketers) to find product-market fit before they scale. That means using your marketing budget to test different channels and value propositions to find a promising consumer segment you can reach cost-effectively.

With a limited marketing budget, you can’t overpay for creative. I would focus on lower-cost channels where you believe your customer pays attention. This will of course vary depending on your target audience.

If I was targeting Gen Zs or younger millennials, I would focus on TikTok, with its captive and growing audience, paired with a powerful back end, that allows brands to easily find influencers who can create compelling and inexpensive “native creative” to attract customers.

For older millennials or Gen X, I’d look to podcast or satellite radio. Like TikTok, you have captive listeners with new programming popping up all the time. Newer, non-established shows tend to have cheaper rates and more favorable (short-term) contract terms that are better for testing. I’d focus on securing host-read spots, which are cheaper to produce and often perform better than prerecorded branded advertisements.

For boomers and beyond, I would look to direct mail. This channel continues to perform well as a cost-effective way to capture consumer attention in one of the few moments we step away from our screens in our increasingly digital world.

Finally, one of the most effective channels that every business, regardless of size, should consider is incentivizing customer referrals. Amplifying the voices of customers who love your product, and encouraging them for doing so, is one of the smartest ways to build any business. When working with our startups at Portage Ventures, I often remind them — you haven’t found product-market fit until your paying customers enjoy your product so much that they start to tell their friends about it. If your audience isn’t doing that, keep testing.

Tracey Wallace, director of marketing, MarketerHire

If I only had $25,000 marketing spend for Q1 2022, I’d run a single campaign launching early January.

People really do come back from the holidays looking for new tools, new experiences, new ways to do things. So, make the most of that. Use some of the budget to conduct research that is tangentially related to your industry. Hire a writer to then write a long-form piece about it, including all the proprietary data points. Now, make a launch video about it (not full production, can be more UGC feel), and then cut that video into several smaller pieces for social ads and organic social posting.

Then, focus on graphics — create charts and gather quotes from other industry experts to contextualize the data. Include those in the article, and when the piece goes live, email all those experts letting them know they are in the article, and ask for their help sharing.

Then, do a PR campaign. You can use some of the budget to hire a PR freelancer, if you want. Proprietary data is helpful for getting press because it offers a new storyline and something interesting. You aren’t just promoting yourself!

Then, prep your homepage. Talk about the data within the copy on the homepage and link to the longer form post. Gather emails for a PDF of the document or for similar research in the future. Nurture those leads.

Now, over the rest of the quarter, retarget the traffic you got to the site via paid social or paid search ads, A/B test your email streams and your webpage to convert more folks and publish more content that dives deeper into specific stats and data found within the research.

Use additional graphics on social media to keep harping on it and be sure to tell larger people-focused stories that help prove out the data points and how it impacts your prospects.

This strategy uses almost all marketing roles –– they do work better when in harmony, after all –– including content marketing, social media marketing, social media advertising, PR, copywriting, email marketing and growth marketing for CRO across the site.

But, when you focus everything on a single campaign — you can spend less than you otherwise would, as you rally around a high-impact asset and build relationships with people interested in that kind of data.

This program gives you plenty of content for the entire company to use, all while driving top-of-funnel traffic and building trust with people in your industry. Q1 is often the best time to do this as people are looking for information that helps lead them on the right path for the new year.

Be that source for your industry and your prospects. And then, distribute that data everywhere you can.

Jonathan Martinez, founder, JMStrategy

If I only had $25,000 in the marketing budget for Q1 of 2022, I’d invest in the famous Facebook and Google duopoly, with a small portion dedicated to an experimental channel such as TikTok. Instead of going full force on only one channel, I’d try to make the decision at about the halfway mark ($12,500) on which channel of the three to double down on. My entire focus from there with this limited budget would be to exhaustively test and try to unlock that sole channel as quickly as possible.

By exhaustive testing, I mean campaign/ad set structure, event optimization, targeting tests and most importantly creative/copy testing. While I’m a huge proponent for other growth mediums such as influencer marketing, I think it’s very important to unlock a channel that’s scalable with huge inventory early on.

Maya Moufarek, founder, Marketing Cube

Early-stage startups, pre-revenue or newly live are at a stage where they need to find or refine product-market fit. With that in mind, the three main marketing activities to focus on are:

1. Customer insights qualitative and quantitative: Collecting insights from both prospective customers’ interviews and online tracking of the customer funnels (website tracking, surveys, headmaps). This will require licensing and implementing the relevant tools to allow for that (GA, Google Surveys, Hotjar or others). Estimate: $5,000.
2. Building a community: Building an audience that is or might be interested in the problem you are solving, i.e., problem aware or not, will help you have a group of people to beta test with, get immediate feedback from, but also become your early adopters and advocates to build social proof for your product at launch. Estimate: $10,000.
3. Testing different messaging and narrative: Based on what you have defined as the jobs customers might hire your product to do for them, also known as the “jobs to be done” framework, and your messaging house, start running tests campaigns (ads and landing pages) to see which messages resonate most and optimize as needed. Estimate: $10,000.

Peep Laja, CEO, Wynter and founder of CXL

If you sell to B2B (5-figure+ ACV):

1. Make a list of every company that should become a customer in the next five years.
2. Aim to build a media machine, become a media company for your target audience. So the investment here is to start a blog, a podcast, run a monthly virtual event, get your YouTube channel going, social media (Twitter+LinkedIn), a community.
3. Involve the target customers in that list in your media machine — interview them, feature them, get them to speak at your event, get them to join your community and you join theirs.
4. Invest money in repurposing all the content you get — for social, blog, YouTube, etc. Turn podcast episodes and virtual event recordings into blog posts and social media clips.
5. Create and distribute a ton of unique insight to that audience. Invest in creating original, differentiated content. Do original research studies.
6. Instead (or maybe in addition to) outbound email, you invite prospects to your podcast as guests. You highlight them and their company, in the process you learn a lot about their challenges. During recording, focus on building a relationship. Record eight episodes/day. It’s not so much about who listens to the podcast, it’s about you building a relationship and bringing your prospects into your community.
7. You play the long game. When the time comes to actually pitch someone, it’s already a warm relationship — or at the very least they know who you are and what you’re about. Makes a huge difference.

Lindsay Goldman, strategic advisor, MO Pros

If I had $25,000 to spend in Q1 2022 for an early-stage startup, I’d bring on Arielle Jackson (marketer-in-residence, First Round Capital) as a consultant to define my company’s purpose, position and personality. This work would define the company’s initial target customer, key differentiators, overarching purpose and brand personality — critical elements for aligning the team around a defined reason for being, positioning the product and defining the first target audience, setting up for launch and creating a basis for future marketing spend around product marketing, creative/brand marketing, PR/communications and performance marketing.

Once the company had purpose/position/personality defined, I’d spend the rest of the $25,000 contracting with a designer to create basic brand elements (i.e., a logo; it’s way too early for branded hats and coffee mugs) and a simple landing page for the company to create an initial public face for potential customers and investors. This page is a great place to show off that purpose we just developed and make sure we’re speaking to our target audience with the words and tone that will resonate with them (aka the personality we defined). I’d also set up basic SEO tactics for that page using free tools while laying the groundwork for when the site will start to grow.