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One of the most innovative ways to spend your marketing dollars is quickly.
Most of what I share here is about growing your business without spending much or anything at all. That’s the whole idea behind No Budget Marketing.
But sometimes, if you have a small budget, there’s a way to use it to accelerate your learning and save money in the long term.
Let’s discuss...
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Gradual spending feels safe—but it slows down your learning
A common approach to running paid ads is to go slow. People will take a $500 budget and spread it out over 30 days. $15 here, $10 there. The idea is to minimize risk and “test things safely.”
But here’s the problem: slow spending gives you slow feedback. And slow feedback delays the insights you need to make your campaign work.
Let’s say you’re running Google Ads for a landing page. You want to test your offer, your copy, and maybe a few headline variations. If you trickle in your budget slowly, getting a decent number of clicks or conversions might take weeks. That’s weeks before you even know what might be working.
Now imagine you spend that same $500 over 3–5 days. You’d get meaningful data fast. You’d know which headline gets clicks, which audience isn’t converting, and whether the landing page needs work.
Yes, you might “lose” the money faster. But in exchange, you gain clarity, which leads to more efficient marketing decisions next time.
The faster path to smarter decisions
If you have even a modest ad budget to experiment with, ask yourself: “What’s the fastest way I can get real data?”
It doesn’t mean blowing your whole budget in one shot. But it does mean being deliberate about shortening your feedback loops. Because the sooner you know what’s working (and what isn’t), the sooner you can pivot, adjust, or double down.
This is not a push to start spending money. No-budget marketing still works, and I believe in getting traction through clever, scrappy tactics. But if you have a little runway, this is one way to make every dollar go further, faster.
Thanks for reading this. I appreciate it! If you have any feedback, just hit reply. I greatly appreciate hearing from readers about what they like and don’t like so I can shape future newsletters to give you helpful content.
-Mike
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Find me online: bio.link/mikeholden