How to Make a $1000 Marketing Budget Look Like $50k

Americans love an underdog. The more unlikely the victory, the more we cheer for David’s triumph over Goliath. In the 2018 National Hockey League playoff, an expansion team, the Vegas Golden Knights, shocked the experts. They weren’t supposed to accomplish very much in their first year. The odds against them ran as high as 500-1.

Well, the Knights didn’t pay any attention to everyone who claimed to know better. Instead, they played hard, smart and with a lot of heart, winning the Western Conference title against long-established, well-funded teams who looked down their noses at them.

Our Challenge – the Startup vs. the Giants

We recently found ourselves in a similar situation. Our client was a startup fighting to compete against large companies with massive marketing budgets. Their marketing budget for the project? $1,000. To put it in context: for their competitors, $1,000 wouldn’t pay for the catered lunch.

How could we compete and get a big win for our client? With two simple words: creativity and technology. Creativity levels the playing field. Married with technology, you have a winning team with the power to compete against companies paying big money to out-market their competitors and squash them into irrelevance.

The Client Meeting

Our assignment:
Create a 16 page die-cut product sales brochure with a built-in pocket folder. Our client, Stone Barn Floors, also needed a series of top-notch, professional shots displaying their flooring products in different, high-end room settings.

The budget for a piece like this could be 50 times higher than what we had to work with. During our initial meeting, our client showed us samples of their competitors’ “spare-no-expense” brochures, gorgeous examples of what big budgets can buy. Yeah, we’re definitely the underdog here.

Two key goals:

• Highlight the range of their products from a variety of luxury vinyl flooring collections.
• Feature their flooring in various luxurious room settings such as a seaside villa, mountain getaway, high-end home kitchen, etc. You get the idea.
  

The challenging reality:

• A tight deadline with a new regional distributor launch just weeks away
• Only a few flooring samples available for the shoot
• The only installed sample available was in our client’s bedroom
• No commercial installations available to shoot
• No budget to hire an interior designer, stylist or architectural photographer

It was going to be tougher than expected. Regardless, we still needed to showcase Stone Barn’s Luxury Vinyl Flooring in a range of different room settings in order to compete with top brands like Armstrong and Shaw.

Our Approach

If there was ever a time to think outside the box, this was it. In spite of the limited flooring samples available, the client wanted to showcase their products in about 20 different room settings in various environments, emphasizing the range of uses for their flooring products. Not only that, they wanted to highlight the patterns and textures of each collection.

The game plan:

First, we developed brochure layouts and a photography game plan. We couldn’t afford an elite photographer, but we needed “Architectural Digest” quality photos. The solution was to use super high-end stock photos to display Stone Barn’s products. Great photography would instantly put the client’s brochure on a par with their competitors’. The selected images and perspectives would have to include enough flooring to allow us to showcase our client’s flooring.

Next, we would composite our flooring shots into our stock images. It was a real win-win. The client loved the idea of saving lots of money and finally seeing their actual products in the brochure and online.

We started searching for photographers, getting quotes of $3,000 and up…which we promptly declined. Way out of budget! So we decided to look for a young, talented photographer who wanted to build their portfolio. We finally hired someone for $400 for a full day shoot (plus pizza, fries, and mozzarella sticks which our client so generously provided).