The stakes are high. The CEO wants a new marketing campaign to build awareness. The CFO wants to see the sales attribution from last quarter. You have a major new product launch on the horizon.

Oh, and your budget just got cut in half.

Can your brand still break through? The answer lies in how much you’re willing to focus. Because yes, even on a shoestring budget, brands can punch well above their weight.

Step One: Having a budget—any budget at all

It may sound obvious, but any budget, even if it’s small, is the first key piece to overcoming adversity. Knowing what you can spend immediately sets guardrails and gives you a path to stay on. This forces a clarity that, if you stay focused, will pay dividends down the line.

If you’re a head of marketing, do this first. Find out what you can spend, and make it your rock—the constant around which strategy, tactics and messaging will grow and shift.

Yes, even if your budget is $0, you’re already on track to break through if there’s a mutual understanding of how much you are able to spend. This will help you set goals and expectations.

Step Two: Get your priorities straight

No matter if your budget is $1 or $1 billion, you can’t be everything to everyone. Having less money gives you the chance to identify what really matters. Do not be afraid to ask key stakeholders: If marketing could do one thing for this company, what would it be? A single-minded focus will be key in stretching your dollars without stretching yourself thin.

If you work in an organization with little marketing knowledge, you can start with the bigger questions:

• Is the immediate need to create awareness, drive consideration or convert to sales?
• Is this a short-term or long-term play?
• What will success look like, and how will it be measured?

Alignment on these questions, along with a clear budget, will make your goals clear. This is the foundation for your plan, whether it’s a full marketing campaign or a short-term tactical play.

Step Three: Deciding what’s worth it

One mistake we often see with marketers is that all marketing efforts are expected to result in sales. This can be true if you’re running very lower-funnel campaigns, but to build your brand and cement emotional bonds with consumers, you’re likely going to have to be patient to see awareness efforts reach the bottom line.

So, based on your goals, choose your strategy wisely. Start with the one thing that you could do to make the biggest impact—then work from there. To do this, you need to understand where your audience truly engages with you. That could be on social, on your website, via phone or even in person. To reach your audience with any message, you need to go to where they can find you. Branching out to an entirely new channel or medium should wait until you are driving growth from your core areas.

For instance, if you’re a retail boutique who generates a lot of comments and messages on your social channels, consider selling directly on the platform rather than driving people to a website. Your customers will show how they prefer to interact with you through their behavior.

Once you know where your audience interacts and how to engage with them, you can start to think about messaging.

Step Four: Being creative under constraints

Having a small budget can help you focus on the most potent version of your message.

In our research, we’ve found that brands perform above competitors when they get credit for the joy they bring consumers. Carving out a unique positioning and value proposition helps focus all your energy on that emotional payoff. Do the groundwork to make sure you stand out and provide your audience with exactly what they need.

A few places to begin:

• Social listening to understand how and why people use your brand
• Talking to existing customers or people in your target audience
• Going beyond features to understand your brand’s emotional benefit
• Looking at your competitors to carve out a unique niche

For a real-life example, we can look at Dollar Shave Club. They disrupted the razor category by being quirky, smart and irreverent. While all other companies talked about features like performance, feel and hygiene, Dollar Shave Club was making its audience laugh through videos targeting social media users. The cost to produce and promote the video was dwarfed by the value of word-of-mouth they received.

If you cannot outspend your competitors, outsmart them. Find what makes your brand truly different and go all in.

Step Five: Measuring ROI on a small budget

When budgets are tight, every dollar needs to count and be measurable. Your KPIs will differ based on your goals, but they should always be rooted in the single-minded focus of your efforts. The ending to your story should pay off what you set out to do in the beginning.

If you are trying to grow your audience, increases in social followers, newsletter subscriptions or foot traffic will tell the story. Similarly, if your goal is awareness, engagement and share of voice in relation to competitors will indicate whether you’re making headway.

But quantitative measures aren’t the only way to understand results. If you have one piece of content that goes viral, the “why” behind it can teach you just as much. Did you strike a nerve with your audience? Did you experiment with a new format that paid off? Did you leverage your expertise to solve an audience problem? Look between the lines of data for the whole story on why you were successful—or not.

Put it all together

1. Get a number, then start: Having a small budget begins with having a budget. Be sure there are clear expectations set between marketing and executives on costs and goals.
2. Priorities, people: Choose only the initiatives that will pay off most and put everything else on the back burner. Small budgets demand absolute focus on the most successful—or most promising—channels.
3. Create something different: To break through as an underdog, you have to be different. Make sure your message resonates on an emotional level, whether you’re selling vacations or septic tanks.
4. Measure what matters: Chart out what success will look like before you start. Communicate this with your peers and track only the metrics that indicate progress toward your goals.