How to Maximize Your Marketing on a Budget

Jeffro
Welcome back to Digital Dominance. Today, we’re diving deep into practical marketing strategies with Anna Rose Quinn, business director at Pratt Marketing Agency. Anna Rose brings extensive experience in brand management, consumer marketing, and staying ahead of industry trends, all while emphasizing the importance of relationships in every aspect of her work. Today, we’re going to be talking about maximizing influencer marketing and how to run impactful campaigns on any budget. Anna Rose, it’s great to have you on the show.

Annarose Quinn
I’m super happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Jeffro
Awesome. I’m excited for our conversation today. And I think one of the topics might really excite our listeners, which is how to run a campaign on any budget. I think a lot of small businesses assume that they need a huge budget to see results. So maybe we can start by having you share some of those strategies that worked well for low budget campaigns.

Annarose Quinn
Yeah, totally. I think one of the things that people hear so often from marketing agencies is that you have to have this big budget to do something effectively. And I’ll tell everyone a little secret is that you could do it with zero dollars. You just have to do it the right way and set your expectations. So you can have a full organic marketing campaign, be super successful, if you know what to expect going into it, or you can spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and

you’re going to get great results just a little bit faster than if you were going to do it on a zero budget. I mean, we work with small businesses like a local private medical practice that’s just looking to do social media marketing and Google ads, and they don’t want to spend more than $2,500 a month, and that’s going really well. And then we worked with a local pest control company who does a six-month run for their marketing campaign, and they spend quarter of a million dollars. And they had a really successful campaign this year. So…

That’s the fun of it, you know, like getting to work with small businesses local to your area that are really doing great things and they want to get creative and have fun with it.

Jeffro
So how do you kind of determine where to focus those limited marketing resources in order to get a maximum ROI?

Annarose Quinn
Yeah, that’s such a good question. It totally depends on who you want to reach and how quickly you want to reach them. for example, with this pest control company, they really focused on homeowners, 45 plus living in the Valley. They service Arizona and Las Vegas, and they’ve been super successful in the past with, you know, nurturing their current customers. But this year they came to me and they said, we want to get younger customers. We want people who are moving to Arizona from out of state, maybe don’t know about our company. They’re local in the Valley for 41 years, family owned.

they’re like a staple of Arizona. So it’s really easy for Arizonans to say, want to go to Bird’s Pest Elimination. But maybe someone who doesn’t live here is going to a bigger national company because they don’t know that they exist. So where do you find people who are 35 to 45 online, probably Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, maybe Pinterest, if you want to go to moms who are owners of homes and they just moved here and they’re googling why is there a scorpion in my house in Arizona?

Jeffro
Mm-hmm.

Annarose Quinn
And so you just have to go find them where they are. think that’s a big mistake that people make, especially when you’re a business owner, because you’re so ingrained in your business, you think that your target audience is you. And so I would be thinking, what am I doing on social media? Well, I’m on TikTok every day, I go on Instagram, I don’t really use Facebook, but I’m not my target audience. Your target audience is actually who’s going to be a paying customer. So for Burns Pest Elimination, we said, let’s do billboards and put them in high traffic areas because we want that broad awareness and

it fit in their budget. And then we really focused on Facebook because we knew that that’s where that 35 to 45, you know, maybe younger mom, new homeowner in Arizona was going to be. And we got really granular with who we were targeting because we didn’t want to spend a ton of money on, you know, nurturing or retention customers. We wanted to acquire new customers. And so it really just takes time to figure out who you want to target so you can be responsible to your budget. Now, if you have a couple million dollars and you just want everyone to find out about you because you’re a

a company trying to sell flip flops on Instagram stories, that’s great. Just go put as many ads out there as you can. But $250,000 or even $2,500 is a lot of money to some small businesses. So it’s my job to then figure out how we can be responsible to their ad dollar. I would never want to spend my customer’s money on something that I wouldn’t want to spend my own money on. You know what I mean?

Jeffro
Right. So part of it is making sure that the campaign is good. The message is good quality in order to put money behind it. Otherwise it’s kind of a waste.

Annarose Quinn
Right, and putting that money in the right place.

Jeffro
Okay, so how does a business owner know what is the right place? Like, let’s get specific. So you talked about billboards versus Facebook and such. How do I know if my audience is on Instagram versus Twitter? Because I could read an infographic that says, these type of people are on this platform. Do I go based on that or is there more to it where I have to dig in and kind of find something else out?

Annarose Quinn
That’s a really good question. think it depends on how long you’ve been advertising for. you know, with like a burns pest elimination, they’ve been in business here for over 40 years. So they’ve got a pretty good idea of who their customer is. So what I can do is do my own research, gather data on my own and look at some of those like infographic things and say, you’ll get this demographic here and there. But what I really wanted to look at is, you know, psychographics. So what customers care about the way they behave.

how they feel, what makes them loyal to a business, their consumption constellations. So what are they consuming in addition to like a pest control company? What else would they need? Maybe it’s like DIY pest control services or other relative home services and then their usage behavior. So how often are they going to be using our service for pest control? Probably monthly, ideal monthly.

in Arizona might be more seasonal because we get our hot, humid summer months. So how often are they going to be calling for emergency services or how often are we getting phone calls from parents that their kid just got stung by a scorpion? So really looking at our own consumer behavior from our customer data and then saying, how do we want to show up online and how is this going to resonate with who we already know as our customer? So then we can take their email lists and their audience demographics and things like that.

plug and chug that into, let’s just use Meta as the example, create a custom audience and then we can create lookalike audiences for them where we know that these people are more likely to purchase from us because they’re so similar to who Artie is.

Jeffro
I like the term consumption constellation because it helps you think about what else they need and other ways you can get in front of them or even find potential partnerships. And we’re going to talk about influencer partnerships in a minute. But I was curious also to hear what are your thoughts on how important is it to be in multiple places? Sometimes we hear the same company advertisement on radio and then we see a commercial or then it’s in the store on the end cap. So how does that play?

Annarose Quinn
Right. I think when you see businesses in more than one place or everywhere, it just helps with like, authority in the industry because you see them everywhere. So they’re highly recognizable. mean, we all know those jingles from growing up that you’re just going to remember for the rest of your life. And it’s because they were everywhere. You saw them on TV, you heard them on the radio, you saw their billboards.

Jeffro
Hmm.

Annarose Quinn
Now you’d see them on social media, they’d be running ads, but they’d also be posting organically and you’d be seeing some funny videos and some educational videos from them. So it’s really important to be in as many places as you can be. And that’s what I like to say with my, my new clients or my, my service based like clients, because it’s tough, like you’re running a business and you don’t want to have to think about what tick tock you’re going to post tomorrow because that’s not important to them. So that’s why you need to bring in someone who’s creative and understands this digital landscape.

of where it is today. So we can go meet people where their feet are actually at and not force them to go back to terrestrial radio or television where people aren’t there anymore, especially in a younger demographic.

Jeffro
Okay, well that all makes sense. let’s move into the influencer marketing side of things because let’s say you found someone, you know what, I think this would be a good partnership or it’s someone, it’s part of that constellation. They follow something else. So, and this I know has been a part of your agency’s campaigns, right, is leveraging influencers. So what are some tips that you have for service-based businesses specifically that are looking to, you know, explore influencer marketing?

Annarose Quinn
Yeah, mean, influencer marketing feels like it’s this really big, almost maybe monster under the bed for some people where they’re like, what is this? Why is this working? What do I do to make it work for me? And how much money do I need to do it? And so you can partner with local influencers, if you’re a local service based company, and just work with someone who’s in your community because that’s word of mouth.

Now, like social media is the new business card. People are going to look you up and see what you’re posting, how many people follow you. And if you have influencers, they’re your spokespeople. And so you can go really small with trade of all, you know, give you six months of free service for one post, or you can, you know, half cash, half trade deal or a full cash deal. So, you know, just to use the pest elimination company again, as an example, people don’t think that you can use influencer marketing for a pest elimination company. It just doesn’t sound like it should be in the same sentence. It’s like an ox.

were on. But we went and we found someone who’s local to Phoenix and she has a daughter and pet pigs. And she cares a lot about the health of her family and protecting her home. So we said, that’s what we care about. And let’s do some work together. And she really emphasized that all of their products are safe for for kids and for pets. And then we partnered with another influencer who’s in Tucson, and she’s really focused on sustainability. And people don’t know that there are organic options for pest elimination companies.

So we focused on our organic services for her. So that’s where you have to think about those like consumption constellations. Cause it’s not like you’re going to go find an influencer who’s posting about scorpion hunting every day and how to get us out of your home. But you can find people who are talking about things that are relevant to your values, your mission, your vision as a company.

Jeffro
like that a lot. mean, that’s a great example because we do often think of influencer marketing as like products, know, the unboxing or the using this thing. And this is how I tried this and this actually worked and this didn’t. But yeah, services, it gets a little trickier.

Jeffro
So Pest, you know, that’s a good example with the Pests and having a service-based business. What about something like a roofing company? Because that’s still technically a service, but it’s going to be harder to find an influencer who happens to need a new roof today or this month. And you can’t do that every month, right?

Annarose Quinn
Right. It is difficult. I think that, you know, for a roofing company, you’d really have to think about like, the area and the environment that you’re in. geez, I’m so sorry. For a roofing company, you’d really have to think about the environment that you’re in. Like, in Arizona, I don’t know how relevant a roofing company would be. But if you’re in like, more aggressive weather, like constant rains, or maybe hurricanes or

or something like that, maybe it’d be more relevant. The other thing that you can do that isn’t necessarily directly influenced or marketing, but it has, geez. Okay. The other thing that you can do that maybe isn’t directly influenced or marketing, but has the same appeal is working with nonprofits. Like for example, I partner with a nonprofit out here called Titus House and they’re looking for a new roof. They need to fix the roof. And so kind of, you know,

being ingrained in your community and then utilizing social media to spread the word about it is almost influencer marketing, even if it’s not directly like having somebody showcase your roofing company and say, go use my name for a discount code.

Jeffro
One, you just maybe think you can, indirect associations are okay, right? So if your company happens to donate to some local shelter, you find an influencer that also supports that shelter, okay, maybe they’re willing to do something like that and talk about how you guys are helping support that shelter as well, and they hope you guys can help support them through their work, whatever. There’s ways you can find crossover.

Annarose Quinn
Right.

Annarose Quinn
Definitely. It’s all about network effect when it comes to influencer marketing and, you know, knowing that you’re a part of the community, showing that people are using your products or your services and, and like getting that, that social proof is really, really important.

Jeffro
So are these micro influencers then, the ones that are local to the communities? Does the follower size determine how much you pay them and who you approach? Can you talk about that aspect a little bit?

Annarose Quinn
It’s really difficult to talk about cost of influencers because like you said, it depends on so, so much. So one of the factors is follower count. So for example, that influencer in Tucson, I would say she’s probably more of a micro influencer. The one we used in Phoenix, she has maybe a total of 600 plus thousand followers. So that’s not micro, it’s not huge. She’s not…

millions of followers, but she’s got a pretty good impact, especially when you’re thinking local. We’ve also worked with some influencers with like a Christmas event out here that have maybe 10,000 followers and they want to bring their kids out and they just want the experience for their family and they want to build up their page so they can then charge in the future. So that’s more of like, we’ll give you tickets if you can come to the event and showcase what you experienced and then

There are some other ones that, you know, we work with Welcome to Arizona a lot and they’re a pretty big influencer out here. and that’s usually a cash deal with them, but it totally depends on, you know, like what the event is, how it resonates with their audience because influencers now, it sounds weird, but they, they like, they pick and choose who they want to work with and what they want to showcase as their brand is so important. They don’t want to just take everything and, and put it on their page and take a check.

for the sake of taking a check, they wanna make sure that they’re staying consistent and relevant to their brand, which is what I really appreciate. So I’ll go to like the Welcome to Arizona guys or some of the other influencers we work with and say, hey, does this feel like it works for you? And they’ll be honest and say, yeah, this sounds great, let’s do this. And we can work out a deal or maybe not so much, maybe talk to these people because I think this resonates with their page. So it’s almost like a community where they’re like lifting each other up and it’s really cool.

Jeffro
Mm-hmm.

Annarose Quinn
And then the better relationship you have with them, the more that you can provide them to build up their page to grow, the better relationship you’re going to have with them and the more flexible they’d be with deals on posts and things like that.

Jeffro
That makes sense. So let’s say you found someone, you found a good fit and an agreement on terms and stuff. How, as a business, do you measure the impact of that partnership to make sure that they’re actually driving value or revenue?

Annarose Quinn
Yeah, that’s a really good question. There are a couple of different ways that you can do it. I’ll tell you the way that we do it at Prep Marketing Agency. So we have a software that we use that we can see everything on the backend. you know, for example, with this, like Christmas event that we use influencers for, we brought on 10 influencers last year. We’re welcoming them all back this year. And so we put them into our software and we say we’re getting these posts on these platforms on these dates.

And here are the hashtags that they’re going to use. So then our software tracks all of the activity on their posts. So for example, last year, Chelsea Houston, her Instagram is called, them eat this. She had the biggest post for us. It had over a million views, thousands of comments, people entering in contests for ticket giveaways. And then we tracked all of the engagement on that post and assign a dollar value to a like, a comment, a share. So we can get an earned media value for each of the engagements on the post.

And then we also give them an individual tracking link and we put a pixel on the website so we can see how many people actually purchased a ticket from each influencer’s link. So Chelsea had X number of purchases from hers. Welcome to Arizona had X number of purchases from theirs. And then we can say, okay, here’s our earned media value. Here’s our actual ROI, a number of tickets sold from our influencers. And after the entire event, we found that influencers drove most of the traffic to the event.

it’s just so powerful what they can do and it’s really cool to actually be able to see real results from it. Whereas I think your question’s fair, a lot of people think how do I actually see a tangible result from this? Because social media doesn’t feel tangible.

Jeffro
Right, well, and I understand the tracking pixels so you know exactly who bought what, but how do you assign a dollar amount to a like?

Annarose Quinn
That’s a really good question. So the way that we track earned media value is equating it to what we would have had to spend on an ad in order to achieve that much engagement. So, you know, for, for example, we, I think we had a 32,000 % ROI on this Christmas event, which you should never see a number that big in front of a percentage line. So it was really cool for me to see that, but it’s because our earned media value.

was insane. We would have had to spend $2.5 million in ads just to get that much engagement on what we got on our influencers. And we spent a fraction of that.

Jeffro
Yeah, so if you find good alignment, then obviously this is a huge way to get in front of a big audience that’s aligned with what you’re trying to do. And so it’s a huge bang for your buck.

Annarose Quinn
Right, 100%. But like to hear what you just said, it has to be the right alignment. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel real.

Jeffro
Yeah. So what mistakes should businesses avoid when they start doing this, especially in terms of managing that relationship and the expectations too?

Annarose Quinn
Yeah, that’s a really good question. think the number one mistake to avoid is thinking that follower count is the most important thing to look at. The most important thing, three most important things I would say, number one is their engagement rate. So you can see that on like a couple of softwares on the back end. If you don’t have access to the software, you can like scroll back for the last 30 days and see, you know, number of posts to…

Likes, comments, shares, things like that. But what you really want to compare that to is impressions. You can ask an influencer for their media kit, but make sure that you ask them for the most up-to-date version of it. The second thing that you want to think about is where they’re located and if they’re in your service area. Because they might not have followers from that service area. One thing that we have found a lot is…

influencers are moving to Arizona from California or New Jersey or Florida or wherever it is. And that means their audience is in their home state. And they haven’t necessarily built up an audience in Arizona yet. So if you’re local to your state, you want to make sure that the person you’re paying to promote your business is promoting it to the people who are actually going to be able to use it. And then the third thing is to make sure that their audience cares about what you have to offer.

One of the things that we can see on our back end is audience affinities and interests. So you can see like what other creators their audience is following or what they’re searching the most. So like for example, with Burns Pest Elimination, one of the main things that the Tucson influencers audience was interested in is, you know, home services and DIY services and like house cleanliness and things like that. And that’s super relevant to what Pest Elimination offers.

So it’s important to understand beyond the individual influencer who’s going to be saying, get this product or this service, you need to know who they’re saying it to.

Jeffro
That makes sense. Now, another question I had was when you approach an influencer and say, okay, we’re going to do this thing, we find they’re good fit and everything. Where do you fall when it comes to dictating the type of content or video that they do? Or do you say like, this is the phrase you have to say about our company and this is the type of video we want you to make? Or do you just tend to let them know the overview and say, we trust you to make something that helps us. You know, how do you do that?

Annarose Quinn
Yeah. It varies from business to business. I’ve worked at some like on some huge, huge brands like with influencers talk tracks and because the influencer is getting to work with a huge brand that’s given them a huge paycheck, they’re like, yeah, I’ll say whatever you want. For some of the smaller companies, I think it’s really important to focus on authenticity. And so that means letting the influencer speak in their own voice, speak about their experience as they’ve experienced it.

And then of course, I always have them send it to us before they post it and just make sure that aligns with the brand guidelines and messaging guidelines for our clients and you know that they’re not saying anything that’s negative about the product or service or you know, maybe could be taken in a negative light. But I think they should always be able to post about it and speak about it in their own words. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel like the influencer that everyone’s following and grown to love.

Jeffro
It feels forced and then people don’t trust it.

Annarose Quinn
Right, it feels like an ad then.

Jeffro
Yeah. So, yeah, this has been really cool. I like this approach because you’re tapping into other people’s audiences that they’ve spent the time to build, but you’re doing it strategically by only picking the ones that happen to line up with your potential clients and shared interests and the overlap there. And so this is a great way to have a campaign on a lower budget, but still get high impact for every dollar that is spent as long as you’re doing it right. So,

I appreciate you taking us through that and answering questions, giving us some practical insights into how that works. I really appreciate you joining me today. And I think the listeners will find it useful. For those of you at home, make sure to use the links in the show notes to connect with Anna Rose and Pratt Marketing Agency. I have one last question for you before you go, Anna Rose. What do you think is the most important lesson you’ve learned in marketing that new business owners or marketers should keep in mind?

Annarose Quinn
that’s such a good question. Maybe the biggest myth that’s been busted for me in marketing is if you build it, they will come. And I just don’t think that that’s true. I think if you build something great and you tell people about it the right way, then they’ll come. That’s the biggest thing that I’ve had to learn and that it takes so much time for that to happen. And patience is a virtue when it comes to marketing.

Jeffro
I love that, patience and strategy, right?

Annarose Quinn
No, 100%.

Jeffro
Well, thank you again for being here, Anna Rose. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you thought this was valuable, please leave a review for the show. I’m rooting for you guys and I’ll see you next time on Digital Dominance.