Intelligent Marketing That Will Keep Your Investors Happy

When I spoke at the UK Business Show in London in November 2024, I opened my presentation with this quote: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted... the trouble is, I don’t know which half!”

It comes from John Wanamaker, an 1800s marketing pioneer! Fortunately, in the digital age, the outcomes of your marketing efforts needn’t be so opaque anymore.

And that was exactly the focus of my talk, titled: ‘Intelligent Marketing That Will Keep Your Investors Happy’! Here, I share some of the highlights from the keynote.

The tightest budgets: low-cost (but effective) marketing tactics

A small spend can still yield big results. In fact, some of the most successful social media posts in history were completely organic, and had zero spend behind them — their virality was rooted in timing and tonality.

Our work with the board game Mycelia is testament to this. The game’s crowdfunding campaign blew past its £9,000 goal and drew in half-a-million pounds from 10,000 fans. And a large part of that was from strategically posting in the right communities, e.g. board game-focused forums on Reddit. All totally free.

Another approach that’s essentially free is building an email marketing audience backed by a strong SEO strategy. Keywords bring in the traffic. Well-written emails secure the conversions.

But even on the paid media side, small ad budgets can deliver great returns — particularly when your vision is clear and your audience is well-defined.

Building momentum with medium-budget marketing

If your budgets are a little larger, you can scale your paid advertising campaigns faster. More freedom to A/B test and take measured risks with creative assets will give you more audience insights, which will help you hone in on and continually evolve your target audience, both on search and social.

This mid-weight budget range is also where you can begin mirroring your digital campaigns with real-world tactics that make sense for your brand, product, or service.

For us as a hyperlocal marketing agency, that might include booking a stand at a B2B conference (like the one where I presented the talk this blog is based on!), or occasionally hosting our own networking events and workshops.

For a restaurant, it might be flyers. For a hotel, some out-of-home ad placements. For a festival, posters in the windows of local businesses. All things which, by the way, can feed back into your online ad tracking through unique URLs, QR codes, and other methods of bridging physical and digital spaces.

With great budgets come great responsibility

Then, there are the largest budgets, which might feel daunting at first, but again, clear goals and well-defined audience segmentation can quickly help you break down big spends into focused, tightly-controlled channels. As the campaign unfolds, budget can be siphoned away from the worst-performing silos to expand the best-performing ones.

At this level, there’ll no doubt be a complex array of assets in play — from wider OOH campaigns to TV spots to affiliate relationships with influencers — so you’ll want to ensure everything is reined in and trackable with a robust attribution dashboard.

When a big-budget campaign isn’t backed by sturdy reporting and continuous optimisation, that’s when the John Wanamaker quote comes back to haunt us, and we lose sight of which half of the money spent on advertising is going to waste!

Use analytics tools to observe impressions and engagement. Affiliate platforms and UTM links to track traffic from referrals (e.g. partner influencers). Click maps to understand how people use your website. No guesswork. Just data.

They say “communication is key” for a reason

Everything I wrote above about clarity of attribution and reporting speaks to the importance of tack-sharp communication, with both your team and your investors.

Everyone should know their roles and responsibilities, the tools everyone is using to track and manage data and information, and what KPIs and goals investors are most keen to hear back on.

Streamlining all of this will keep investors happy, teams relaxed, and campaigns running smoothly.

Don’t overlook guerrilla marketing

The element of surprise can make a big, memorable impact with very little budget. Music to every investors’ ears!

Think: quirky, useful, unique giveaways — even seemingly tired concepts like free T-Shirts can work with the right creative idea.

And guerrilla marketing doesn’t just work for B2C — it can work for B2B, too! One time, I looked up the brands I wanted to meet at a business conference, and got some mugs printed based on the interests of the people I’d see on their stands. They loved it! It totally reversed the dynamic. Usually, it’s the brands giving stuff to attendees. But an attendee walking up and giving stuff to the people on the stand? That’s rare! And we got some great meetings out of that.

Branding vs. marketing: differences and overlaps

Though the two concepts are closely connected, they serve very different purposes.

Your brand is the face of the business. Your logo, colours, fonts, tone of voice. It create a visual and written identity.

Marketing is the strategy that drives sales and engagement, and gives the brand identity some equity and purpose.

Is $35 enough for a logo? Ideally, no, but that’s how much design student Carolyn Davidson was paid by Nike co-founder Phil Knight for the tick-like ‘Swoosh’ logo in 1971 (Carolyn was later given appropriate financial compensations for creating one of the most recognisable marks of all time).

The moral of the story is: the chunk of the budget allocated to visual branding doesn’t need to be anything extravagant from the get-go. It can (and should) be revisited later. It took Trapeze Media seven years before we rebranded away from the back-of-a-napkin sketch we’d had since our conception!

Stay focused, but also flexible

Find a balance between sustaining well-performing campaigns and experimenting with new ideas, and use your ever-growing base of audience data to make more informed risks.

Remaining agile also empowers you to react to shifts in the digital marketing landscape faster. The brands which always seem to find success on every new social platform and search tool are the ones that have built data-driven guardrails for experimentation, and, in turn, have scored deep trust with investors.