If you’re a B2B marketer at a growing company, you’ve probably felt the sting of watching competitors with massive budgets dominate every conference, every ad placement, every channel. Meanwhile, you’re trying to figure out how to make noise with a fraction of their resources.
Here’s the good news: You don’t need a Fortune 500 budget to create a Fortune 500 presence.
We recently welcomed Udi Ledergor, Chief Evangelist/Former CMO at Gong and author of Courageous Marketing, to our Best Story Wins podcast for a chat about the state of marketing. At a time when marketers are being asked to do more with less, things can feel impossible. But Udi doesn’t see that as a limiting factor. In fact, he sees it as an opportunity.
Udi joined Gong as employee number 13 and the first marketer, eventually building a 60-person marketing team that helped scale the company from zero to hundreds of millions in revenue. During our conversation, he shared the creative hacks and unconventional tactics that allowed Gong to punch way above its weight—often creating the perception of a billion-dollar company when they were much smaller.
The Budget Problems Every B2B Marketer Faces
There are a million places you can spend your budget, but some of the most crucial are often some of the most challenging. For example, Udi points out the tremendous cost of conferences. If you’ve ever looked at the sponsorship prospectus for a major industry event, you know the smallest booth tucked behind the bathrooms costs around $150,000. The premium spots where you might actually get attention? Those run well into seven figures—sometimes $3 million for a single booth.
For startups and growing companies, that’s not just a big investment; it’s often impossible. But, as Udi puts it, “We’re not big enough to be lazy.” So when you can’t outspend your competition, you have no choice but to out-think them.
How to Punch Above Your Weight in the Market
Fortunately, when you’re facing that vacuum of money, creativity becomes your greatest asset. From Gong’s playbook and Udi’s two decades of B2B marketing experience, here are five strategies to create outsized impact without an outsized budget.
1) Command attention through valuable content.
“I couldn’t pay to get enough eyeballs in front of me,” Udi says. “I had to actually write content so good that people would want to consume it, would potentially even want to pay for it.”
In the early days, Gong couldn’t afford to blanket the market with advertising. So they created Gong Labs, a data-backed content series that showed “what works and doesn’t work in sales, based on actual data.” These weren’t generic best practice articles. They were written by experienced salespeople, using real insights from real sales conversations.
These data-backed articles built credibility and sparked great conversations. For example, Gong’s data once revealed that their sales professionals swear on 20% of their calls with buyers—and close more deals because of it. The article they wrote about it was attention-grabbing, data-driven, and the kind of content that got people talking. Years later, Udi says people still reference it. That is exactly the type of memorable content you want to create. But when you can’t pay for it, you have to uncover those ideas on your own.
Tip: Content based on real experience will always be more popular, especially in a world of regurgitated AI-generated content. Luckily, your priority data is a gold mine of unique, credible, and even newsworthy content. You just have to know where to look for that data. For more on that, see our guide to uncover the stories in your data.
2) Find high-visibility, low-cost alternatives.
One of Udi’s best examples of this strategy came from Gong’s Dreamforce campaign. Instead of spending millions on a booth, they got creative with a multi-pronged approach, including:
- Wrapped Uber cars: They branded 20 Uber vehicles and paid drivers extra commission to pick up and drop off people only around the conference venue during the event.
- Complete station takeover: They branded the floors, columns, screens, and every billboard in Montgomery Station (the nearest subway stop).
- Michelin-star dinners: They bought out high-end restaurants for intimate executive experiences.
When attendees saw Gong everywhere—on their Uber ride, in the subway station, and throughout the city—it created a perception that Gong was as big as Salesforce or Zoom.
“People started posting this on social media and asking me, ‘Are you the official transportation partner of Dreamforce?'” Udi says. All of this cost a tiny fraction of what even the smallest booth would have cost.
Tip: Identify where your audience actually is during key moments (traveling to events, commuting, etc.) and create the impression of scale through strategic, high-visibility placements. What can get you in front of their faces? In their hands? In their photos? These high-touch moments are key.
3) Create intimate, high-value experiences.
Not every campaign needs to reach thousands of people. Sometimes the most effective marketing happens in small rooms with the right people.
Those intimate Michelin-star restaurant dinners gave executives a much-needed relaxing dinner—and gave Gong a captive audience for a few hours.
This approach worked better than fighting for attention at crowded happy hours where dozens of companies were competing for the same prospects. Instead, Gong created memorable experiences with high-value targets.
Tip: Don’t just follow the herd to generic networking events. Host smaller, more intimate events that give you quality time with decision-makers. Think about venues or formats that create a “wow” moment, offer people a much-needed break, or give them a totally unique experience.
4) Mobilize your team as amplifiers.
Your employees are your best distribution channel, but most companies don’t take advantage of this. Gong, however, does this better than almost anyone, encouraging all employees to build their personal brands and share company content. When they executed campaigns like the Dreamforce takeover, team members amplified the message across their networks, multiplying the reach without additional ad spend.
However, you can’t just ask employees to repost company announcements. It’s about creating campaigns interesting enough that your team actually wants to share them.
Tip: Vet ideas through your employees. Would they be proud of sharing it? Would it make them look good? The more creative your campaigns are, the more naturally your team will want to participate. Then you can make sharing easy with ready-to-post content, images, and messaging.
5) Invest in a distinctive visual identity.
When was the last time you saw a B2B brand that actually looked different?
For Gong’s first three years, Udi didn’t use a single stock photo on their website. Everything was commissioned photography featuring actors, actresses, and dogs. (That’s how Bruno the Bulldog, their dog mascot, was born.)
This wasn’t just about looking different. It was about expressing their brand personality. Through an exercise with a creative agency, Gong identified that they wanted to marry two qualities: being an authority and thought leader, while also being “unbuttoned, hair down, playful, helpful.”
“Most companies confuse that authority with being very stuffy and stuck up and condescending, which translates into boring,” Udi says. “You see stock photos of people in business suits shaking hands in their boardrooms.” This makes a five-person startup look like Bank of America.
By investing in original creative assets that reflected their actual personality, Gong easily stood out in a sea of boring B2B brands.
Tip: You don’t need a massive budget to create a distinctive visual identity, but you do need to make intentional choices. Use our brand identity toolkit to create a unique, adaptable brand that reflects who you are and works across every channel
Remember: Creativity Fills the Vacuum When Budget Can’t
The common thread through all of these strategies is this: When you can’t afford to be lazy, be creative. As Udi proves, that pressure often produces better results than throwing money at the problem. From smart hacks to out-of-the-box ideas, these creative solutions help you look like (and become) much bigger players in your market.
Tl;dr: There is always a way to get attention. You just have to be brave enough to get it.
For more about how Udi and the Gong team built one of B2B’s most distinctive brands, listen to the full episode of Best Story Wins. And if you’re looking for a partner to help you bring creative campaigns to life on any budget, let’s chat about how we can help.
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