With shrinking budgets and lack of staff talents, marketers need to get more creative than ever in their digital marketing programs. And they need to hustle more too.

In a recent study by Lisa Nirell of Energize Growth, one of the most common complaints of marketers was a lack of budget and staff.

Here’s a part of the study from Energize Growth:

Based on the findings, and our ongoing conversations with CMOs within  our private peer gatherings, we discovered these key points:
The major obstacles they are facing include:

1. Inability to manage time and self-lead effectively – 10 responses

2. Budget and resource constraints (primarily financial and talent shortages) – 10 responses

3. Lack of digital, social, and interactive technology acumen – 9 responses

4. Internal organization dysfunction, especially between Sales and the Board – 9 responses

The greatest enemy of the CMO may not be any of these challenges, but their lack of urgency around improving their condition. Only three of the respondents expressed commitment to addressing their challenges immediately, and ten were very willing within the next year. More than half of our respondents were “somewhat willing” or “not willing to address their challenges now.” They attributed that delay to major budget constraints.

We’ve seen the problem firsthand. Find New Customers had a client – a software company in Stamford, CT called Protegrity who retained Find New Customers to help them with their marketing.

Their Director of Marketing continually complained about a lack of budget and staff in her company. (She posted and pulled jobs and there was no content marketing budget at all.) Despite the lack of resources, we accomplished a lot in a short time, including a new flagship e-book.

Here’s what I think. Get over it. The budget dollars and talented people aren’t coming – ever. So stop waiting for them to magically show up and get to work – now.

This’s a simple fact about marketing today:

It does not take a lot of money to do great marketing, but it’s very, very hard work.

One of the first things I recommend marketers do is go back to the beginning and check things like value propositions, keyword selection and buyer personas – especially the remarkable insight you get about buyers from your buyer persona program.

If you spend time and resources on the preparation, the results downstream will be much better.  Your digital marketing programs are powered by the groundwork  you did. The better the groundwork, the better the results. Be prepared to work hard.

For instance, Value Propositions need to have three things (Thank you, Jill Konrath)

1. Business Driver - what area of the business do you improve? e.g reduce labor costs, improve sales velocity.
2. Movement - a verb indicating change – increase, enhance, grow
3. Metrics - hard number results – time frame, dollar amount or percentages.

Keywords are the terms buyers use to search for products or services like yours. You can use the free Google Adwords tool or buy a service like WordTracker.com. Look for keywords with more than a little traffic and not the most competition.  So-called “long-tail terms” work well too.  A long-tail term is a specific series of words used in search. For instance, “travel agent” is going to be highly competitive, but “travel agent in Suffolk County” is not going to be very competitive. It is often useful to dominate a less popular term.

One of the biggest and most important areas is Buyer Personas. If you wish to create truly useful buyer personas to use in your downstream marketing activities, you better learn all about it (Check out the Buyer Persona Institute)- or hire a company like Find New Customers to do the buyer personas for you. (We’re becoming certified in Buyer Personas by the Buyer Persona Institute.)

Want another example? Most companies have rarely updated blogs. Many I’ve seen publish only twice a month. And infrequently updated blog does not deliver the search marketing results desired.

This blog, Fearless Competitor, publishes every day – and it is written almost exclusively by one man, Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers. And it runs on the amazingly fast and rock-solid platform WP Engine offered here.

It can be done.  It’s hard work, but it can be done. Are you willing to work that hard?

One other key point: Consistency is critical. When this blog started, it did not post every day. But over seven years, it got better and better. The key is to start and stick with it. Blogging results come from a long-term commitment.

What do you think? How can marketers deal with the lack of financial resources and talent most of them face. We love comments and those who share on social media.

Jeff Ogden is an award-winning BtoB marketing expert and President of the digital marketing company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator and host of the extremely popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV.