Even when you have a limited digital marketing budget, there’s a lot you can do, and a great collaborative environment helps.

In this episode of AMP Up Your Digital Marketing, Glenn Gaudet speaks with Joshua Shulman, Digital Marketing Specialist at Bitmovin, a backend video SaaS company. They discuss how a startup can navigate its marketing campaigns on a short digital marketing budget.

You’ll learn:

* What B2C and B2B marketing have in common. 

* How to make the most of your digital marketing budget and find your buyer persona. 

* How great internal communication and collaboration can make up for what you don’t have. 

Marketing departments at startups typically have one common trait – a limited digital marketing budget.

The same is true for Bitmovin, but that doesn’t stop them from hitting their goals. As a SaaS company in a niche market, they had the additional challenge of finding their customer personas. How did they do that? Through a lot of testing, and a strong company culture that had a great internal communication strategy.

“I wish we had a lot of money to throw at it,” Josh said. “It’s all about pulling a lot of levers no matter what your budget is…It’s about chasing efficiency at low costs.”

Diverse Marketing Strategy

When Josh first arrived at Bitmovin a little over a year ago, the company was trying to define who it’s the ideal buyer persona is. Who is their audience? And how can it get that audience’s attention?

While some companies with more money can go all-in on advertising and big-budget marketing campaigns, startups with a limited digital marketing budget have to be more creative. The marketing team at Bitmovin worked together on different types of content, including blogs, ebooks,  and webinars, despite not having a dedicated content person on staff. Everyone was responsible for two blog posts per month.

The company also had a retargeting campaign using cookies and pixels on its website, tracking visitors and following up with them through ads across all its digital arms.

“There was a lot of testing of who our target audience is,” Josh said. “We had a guideline for what kind of persona we were looking for, but we didn’t know exactly how to hit them or who exactly they might have been.”

Team Collaboration

It’s not simple to collaborate on a content marketing strategy. You need people to go in and refine your content, work with Google Ads, create and place CTAs, and conduct keyword research.

It’s a lot of work for just one person and a lot for a team of people who each have other responsibilities, but that’s the reality of a startup marketing budget.

“There are organizations that put huge teams behind this, but we are a small startup,” Josh said. “You get someone from each part of the team to take on a small piece of the cake that is the task. I’ve never been on the content creation side, but I’ve been helping people coordinate blog posts, and I write blog posts. This is the first time for a lot of us.”

During the coronavirus pandemic, Bitmovin’s collaborative culture really came into the picture. The employees set up work-in meetings over video calls. There were some meetings that were just to check-in, but typically meetings were made to work on projects together, rather than have people do them on their own.

“Through quarantine,