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:
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, what made us successful is we over-communicate,” Josh said. “We talk about where we need support, what’s working, and what’s not working. At times we feel we have too many meetings…but we don’t have meetings that could be an email.”
Challenge of the Pandemic
Typically, Bitmovin does a lot of face-to-face marketing by setting up booths at events such as conferences and tradeshows, but just because event marketing is out of the picture, doesn’t mean that business stops.
The organization shifted its entire strategy quite quickly. It created its own digital event and trained its event managers on how to do many typical digital marketing tasks. Instead of shipping supplies and setting up booths, they were working with lists and setting up webinars.
“Everyone on the marketing team does a little bit of everything,” Josh said. “We lift each other up. No one is a single-use tool. We are all a swiss army knife. We all have our specialties but we all know how everything works.”
Similarities of B2B and B2C Marketing
Before Josh came to Bitmovin, which is a B2B organization, he worked in B2C marketing at a different company.
While there are some big differences in what your selling and that B2B marketers tend to chase the big enterprise opportunities, there is a major similarity both B2B and B2C marketers abide by.
“You want to make sure your messaging hits your audience members where they want to hit it and it’s interesting information that they’re particularly seeking,” Josh said. “That’s standard across B2C and B2B. You always want to make sure that you’re finding the correct message to hit your correct audience. That’s the basis of it all.”
AMP Up Your Digital Marketing brings together the leading marketing practitioners to share how they are succeeding in today’s digital landscape. Each podcast episode focuses on providing you with the knowledge and strategies you need to be a successful marketer. Subscribe via , , or wherever you get your podcasts.
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