How I Built a Marketing Engine with No Budget

Lessons in creativity, partnerships, and growth from my time at Increasingly

When I joined Increasingly, an AI-powered tech platform that helps retailers like Samsung, Sephora, and Boots drive more revenue by bundling frequently bought-together products, both on-site and via paid channels.

The brief was clear: build a marketing function that could drive growth. The budget? Let's just say modest. Definitely not enough to coast on brand awareness or paid channels alone.

Oh, and it was the middle of the COVID pandemic. Webinars were everywhere. People were craving connection and community, and I knew we could ride that wave. So I immediately began building a network of voices around our brand.

I started asking different questions:

• Where do our buyers already spend time?

• Who do they already trust?

• How do I earn attention without spending big?

  
  

For me, the answer wasn’t a new tool. It was people. It was partner marketing.

Why partner marketing works (especially when you have no budget)

When the budget is tight, you can't afford to shout into the void. Instead, you need to find someone who already has a microphone and a room full of your people. That’s what partner marketing gave me:

• Alignment with established brands, already trusted, already visible, but not competitive

• Co-created content that spoke to real, shared customer challenges

• Scaled distribution through partner newsletters, blogs, and established social channels

And the unspoken benefit? Borrowed credibility. I was showing up in the company of known, trusted names.

The three types of partners that drove growth for us

1. Affiliate Partners

The obvious place to start. Affiliate partners worked because our technology was implemented via the affiliate channel. So I aligned increasingly with the biggest affiliate networks on the market. We built relationships with Account Managers who were already looking to find strategic partners for their clients.

It was low effort for our potential customers as they could simply switch us on via the affiliate channel without having to manage a long, costly, and technical onboarding process. And the affiliate networks benefited by being able to leverage our thought leadership and technical expertise through joint marketing activities.

We ran webinars, published content, and offered guidance that helped both our partners and their clients. It gave us scale, trust, and relevance fast.

2. Agency Partners

Agencies already had the ear of our ICP. So I turned them into collaborators on webinars, articles, and co-branded content. They brought reach; we brought fresh ideas.

3. Fellow Tech Brands (Non-Competitive)

Think: other SaaS tools targeting the same buyer. We weren’t solving the same problems, but we were living in the same buying circles. We created joint offers, shared ebooks, and bundled our value!

At Increasingly, I built an entire resource hub from these efforts: downloadable guides, panel sessions, expert interviews, and co-hosted webinars with industry leaders from BigCommerce, Awin, MentionMe, and Mapp to name a few.

Here are a few examples of what we did to build awareness across our target market:

• Co-branded guide on How to Tackle Rising Acquisition Costs

• Webinar on how to Optimise Sales in an Attention-Deficit Era

• A case study on how Travis Perkins used product bundling to double ROI

In fact, these campaigns helped generate over half of our sales pipeline, filled with high-intent customers who were significantly more likely to convert. The halo effect of partnering with brands our buyers already respected meant we were entering conversations with trust already on our side.

Key lessons for lean marketing teams

• Trust over Traffic: You can buy clicks. But building trust and credibility is what converts.

• Depth over breadth: Three high-value partnerships will always beat thirty passive ones.

• Limited budgets force focus: It's where the best ideas live, and that’s a gift.

In year one, I was a one-woman marketing team. But once the partner strategy proved its value, I doubled the budget and hired someone to scale further. What started as a necessity became a scalable, repeatable growth engine.

When the budget’s small, marketing can’t be about shouting, it's about aligning with the right things or people, in this case. And earning attention in places you didn’t build, but were smart enough to step into.

And of course, it goes without saying even the greatest partner strategy won’t land if your message doesn’t resonate. I learned this first-hand rebranding 3S Money, where simplifying language and tapping into customer emotion helped us break through a saturated fintech market. If you’re curious about how that unfolded, I share the full story here.

Finally, remember people buy from people, so use them to your advantage.