From Shoestring to Success: How to Build a Brand on a Budget

Is there a relationship between brand success and the marketing budget? Maybe, but it’s not as strong as you might think. Some of our favorite brands, from Microsoft to GoPro, had humble beginnings, while Tropicana’s $35M rebrand saw a… 20% drop in sales.

However, a strong brand is worth investing in as it generates revenue and saves money in the long term in many ways. A memorable brand reduces the cost of customer acquisition, an emotionally resonant identity increases customer lifetime value, and brand recognition through your visual assets increases the return on investment in your marketing.

When you’re building a brand on a shoestring, the boot has to fit. You need a razor-sharp brand identity that aligns with brand tone, visual identity and other brand assets. Here are five steps to help you build a powerful brand, without a powerful budget — and some high-impact, low-cost marketing strategies to help you bring that brand to life.

1. Ponder the Meaning of Life

The good news for anyone building a brand on a budget is that the foundation of a strong brand isn’t money — it’s asking the right questions.

Yes, an exploration session with an agency and large-scale audience testing is always helpful, but sometimes the simplest questions provide the most powerful insights.

• Who are your customers and what makes them unique?
• What is your brand’s style — elegant, practical, cool, outside the box?
• How do you want to make people feel?
• If you were standing in front of your first big customer and had 1-2 sentences to convince them to move forward, what would you say?

If you don’t know the answer to a question, go and talk to your potential customers and clients, or even friends and family who understand your niche. Find out what they need, what is missing in the market, and align their answers with your skills and vision.

Through these questions, you’ll discover the unique selling proposition you must communicate to customers and the brand positioning that connects with those customers. Your purpose, mission and values become the foundation of your brand identity.

2. Find Your Voice

Now that you know who you are, you can determine how to communicate with your customers. Your brand tone is where your business plan and target audience meet, and the right tone ensures that every customer interaction reinforces your identity. Some of my favorite brand tones that resonate with the right customers are:

• Prestigious
• Historied
• Fun and playful
• Warm and inviting
• Modern
• Innovative and cutting-edge
• Emotionally impactful

Feel free to mix and match. Some brand tones complement each other, such as historied and prestigious, or modern and innovative. Others clash: prestigious brands are rarely playful.

Let your favorite brands inspire you. Nike’s emotionally impactful and empowering brand tone makes their sportswear aspirational, while rival sports brand lululemon aims to empower while staying light and playful.

Source: Nike

Source: lululemon

Don’t choose your brand tone in a vacuum, however. Your brand tone must represent your brand identity, and meet the needs of your audience. It even has to align with your price tag.

3. Select Your Name and Domain

Now you’ve honed in on brand identity and brand tone, you can integrate these answers into your business name and acquire a matching domain name.  When building a brand on a budget, it’s wise to allow domain availability to influence your naming shortlist, and not the other way around. 77% of consumers consider a brand’s domain name important, but due to the scarcity of strong domains under the .com extension, chasing your domain based on a business name can see costs soar.

Short, punchy names based on single English words are ideal, but often unaffordable for small enterprises. Compound names which pair two words together can reveal strong, brandable names with domain availability. Make sure these two words have synergy to provoke metaphor, imagery, or emotion: Hubspot, Facebook, Microsoft, and Red Bull all follow this pattern to create meaningful and memorable names. AI-powered tool like Atom.com helps you to generates business names based on your input and can quickly start your brainstorming process.

When it comes to domain, avoid hyphens, numerals, and names over 12 – 13 characters, and only consider alternative extensions (such as .co, .io, or .ai) if they are paired with exceptionally strong and short names.

Lastly, for ambitious startups looking to corner serious market share, consider payment plans for elite domain names. Public’s CEO Leif Abraham recently revealed on X how they funded their $900,000 acquisition of Public.com, and what they anticipate seeing as a return on investment.

4. Time for Design

Humans are visual creatures: 30% of the cortex is devoted to processing imagery, and studies have shown that at least two-thirds of people are visual learners. Consequently, your brand’s visual identity is hugely important. Fortunately, you can create a visually rich brand on a budget — don’t be like Pepsi, spending $1M on a logo that sparked derision.

The work you put into defining your brand means you can get the most out of generative AI and web 2.0 tools, while freelance sites Upwork and Fiverr provide access to design experts who can apply the finishing touches. To save even more, platforms like Canva and Visme offer foolproof design tools that anyone can use, once you understand a few basics.

Here are some tips to build a visually appealing brand:

• Use the color wheel to discover complementary tones.
• Explore color psychology to find emotionally resonant imagery that aligns with your brand identity.
• Undertake competitor research for industry trends. For example, you’ll see a lot of blue logos in finance (including American Express and Chase) because this color is seen as trustworthy and dependable.

When it comes to design, consistency is hugely important in reinforcing your brand identity at every customer interaction, and consistent branding can boost revenue by one-third. Choose a limited color palette (I recommend one to two primary colors and two to four secondary colors) and one or two fonts that resonate with your logo and brand identity.

5. Put it All Together

With the building blocks assembled, it’s time to put it all together into a winning package your audience will love.

• Build your website: Wix, WordPress and Shopify for ecommerce have ready-made themes that can get your site up and running in minutes, without the need for designers or developers. Keep your theme in alignment with your vision.
• Write your copy: your product copy, website copy and email marketing must align with your brand tone.
• Promote: Advertise in the right place for your target audience. That might be LinkedIn, Instagram or Google. Again, make sure your ads align with your brand.

If you need some help, there are lots of affordable creatives out there, from WordPress developers to content writers. You can make big savings by forgoing an agency and directing these creatives yourself, so it will be your job to ensure every creative choice fully represents the brand that you’re trying to create.

High-Impact, Low-Cost Marketing Strategies

You’re building a business here, not a baseball diamond, so “If you build it, they will come” isn’t going to cut it as a marketing strategy. Some new businesses struggle to apportion appropriate funds to their marketing budget, as they’re concerned about the return on investment (ROI) they can expect from certain strategies.

It’s important to put your marketing budget into perspective. Yes, you must track key metrics to ensure you’re getting value for money, but it’s a must for ambitious businesses to pursue growth over profit in the early days, months or even years of operation. Some big names like Hubspot and Spotify spent years aggressively reinvesting in growth before becoming profitable — for Hubspot, it took 18 years from 2006 to 2024, to eventually turn a profit.

For bootstrapped brands and new startups, focusing on certain high-impact, low-cost marketing strategies can supercharge your growth without breaking the bank.

1. Grow Your Online Identity

Search engines, and Google in particular, remain hugely important at the discovery stage for small businesses and the average business is found in over 1000 searches per month. For businesses with a local element, search engines are even more important: Almost half of all Google searches include local intent.

SEO — search engine optimization — is not only essential for new businesses then, but it’s surprisingly affordable and can be done without expensive expert advice. Firstly, prioritize on-page optimization, including internal linking, site speed and using appropriate title tags and meta descriptions across every page of your website.

Secondly, build a library of genuinely valuable content that can be discovered through top-of-funnel searches based on low-competition, high-search-volume keywords.

Increasingly, customers are using large language models such as ChatGPT to research and discover brands too, so familiarize yourself with GEO (generalised engine optimization) alongside SEO to make sure AI tools have easy access to your site and content. Given how many customers can find you through Google and AI search, this is an essential high ROI strategy.

2. Turn Customers into Advocates

Flashy advertising and paid PR campaigns are expensive — what’s cheap is customer advocacy, but it doesn’t come easy. To turn your customers into passionate advocates of your brand, you have to build a strong emotional connection and reinforce loyalty through reward schemes.

This is particularly important and effective early on. Your early adopters are likely to be well-informed and well-connected in your industry — after all, they found your brand before anyone else did. Reward these customers with discount codes, first access to new products or services, and encourage them to share through word-of-mouth and social media.

3. Strategic Partnerships and Collaborations

One powerful way to expand your reach far beyond your current customers and their immediate circle is through strategic partnerships or collaborations with relevant brands, businesses, influencers, and other organizations. By making these partnerships mutually beneficial, both parties benefit without having to spend a dime.

Networking through startup accelerators is a great way to find potential collaborators. Online, creators and micro-influencers can put you in front of high-intent audiences, providing a better ROI than traditional advertising. To maximize value, ensure that the audience you’re reaching — whether it’s through another brand or an Instagram influencer — is highly affected by the problem you’re solving.

4. Invest in Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the very best ways to reach an engaged audience, that is, those potential customers who are most likely to buy your products or services. That’s why it’s one of the highest ROI marketing activities, and for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses make between $36 and $42 — an ROI of 3600 – 4200%.

Prioritize email capture across multiple customer touchpoints — for example, by offering free tools, ebooks, or discount codes for subscribers. Crafting engaging email content is made easy by tools such as Mailchimp and Kit. In the early stages of your business, these are often free to use, with Kit offering a free service for up to 1000 subscribers.

Consistency Makes Every Asset Work Harder

The major cost-saver is that you’re going to drive your brand, not rely on an expert to build it for you. And if you follow these steps, you can do it. From the foundations of your brand identity to your high-impact marketing strategies, cutting costs doesn’t mean cutting corners: as long as you know where to focus, and when to invest, you can build a powerful brand on a shoestring.

Across every branding decision, from your color palette to your email templates, remember this: Consistency is key. Frame every decision, and expense, with the question of whether it fits exactly with the identity you’re communicating to your audience. Consistency in your branding and communication makes every brand asset work overtime because they’re constantly reinforced with your customers.

Finally, listen to feedback from your customers. Don’t ask people if they like it; ask them what it makes them feel. Is it joyful, safe, or exciting? While branding agencies and marketing news sites endlessly debate the latest logo redesign, remember they’re not the arbiters of brand success: ultimately, it’s your customers who decide.

Grant Polachek

Grant Polachek is the head of branding for Squadhelp.com, 3X Inc 5000 startup and disruptive naming agency. Squadhelp has reviewed more than 1 million names and curated a collection of the best available names on the web today. We are also the world’s leading crowdsource naming platform, supporting clients such as Nestle, Dell, Nuskin, and AutoNation.