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Building your brand on a budget – (with video)

Budgeting your brand with Dooner & Kevin Hill

Dooner and Hill tell you how to propel your brand to success without breaking the bank.

Spending thousands of dollars on fancy marketing techniques may seem like the only way to boost a company’s visibility, but that is not always the case. 

Dooner and Kevin Hill spent Wednesday detailing the easiest (read: free) ways to build your brand online and encourage visibility and sales. 


Still holding your coffee? Put it down! Join Dooner and Kevin Hill as they talk saving money to build clients

A lot of companies may look at the cost of marketing and think “I’m too poor for this,” and Dooner says that’s where they would be wrong. 


His best marketing tips from social media: Do what is free first. Dooner encourages blogging, content marketing, co-marketing with a friend, networking and crowdsourcing to get started. 

The two easiest to pull off as a new business owner: blogging and content marketing, but don’t get discouraged if efforts are not showing progress straight away. 

The content marketing for smaller businesses is where Erik Huberman, founder and CEO of Hawke Media, comes in. 

Hawke Media is one of the top marketing agencies for small businesses, billing itself as a peer to fortune 100 marketing groups. 


The goal is to help smaller brands figure out their weak links and where they can extend their reach, identifying the “blind spots” for small businesses. 

Dooner asked Huberman how people can break out of the “by-the-book” idea of content marketing. It is hard, especially when people are trained that way from the get-go, Huberman said.

His main point: Marketing in the 2020 world is much more than the consumer seeing and buying immediately; the see-then-buy conversion cycle is longer than most people think. 

Huberman also pointed out that 2020 has changed the way content marketing succeeds because consumer spending habits changed. 

From Q2 to Q3, online consumer spending jumped by double-digit percentage points even though ad spending went down. Huberman said there was a “huge audience spending their money online and lots of competition.”

The bottom line: No matter your strategy of choice, seeing the fruits of marketing labor takes more time than anyone wants to spend, but keeping consistent and seeking help when needed can be the key in small-business success. 

You can find more Put That Coffee Down recaps and recaps for all our shows here.


Kaylee Nix

Kaylee Nix is a meteorologist and reporter for FreightWaves. She joined the company in November of 2020 after spending two years as a broadcast meteorologist for a local television channel in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Kaylee graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 2018 and immediately made the Tennessee Valley her home. Kaylee creates written summaries of FreightWaves live podcasts and cultivates the social media for FreightWaves TV.