How To Make Limited Marketing Budgets Work Is your 2017 marketing budget limited and do you need the best possible solution to spread your bucks wisely? Here's where to start.

Social and mobile need to be your immediate focus in 2017, but what you do on these platforms is vast and often confusing.

The most important strategy in content marketing today is video. Whether it's video on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Influencer Content, you need to be thinking about creating and marketing with video.

No matter what you're selling, if you don't have a video strategy in 2017 your competitors will leave you behind. Facebook is getting more daily minutes watched than YouTube. Instagram daily views are now in the billions.

Where to focus?

Facebook is getting more than four billion video views per day, and this will increase as the year progresses. Facebook's newsfeed algorithm is placing an enormous amount of weight on videos. This means that video content has a much greater chance of being seen by the masses than text and image-based posts.

Facebook also enables you to target customers like no other digital tool. Imagine you own an ice-cream parlour in a small town. You create an amazing video showcasing your flavours and kids and families enjoying the experience of eating your ice cream.

You then spend some advertising budget on targeting this video to (1) People who love ice-cream (2) People living in that town (3) Parents who have kids.

You're now reaching the audience that is most interested and profitable to your business. You're not wasting the time of uninterested customers and you're not wasting advertising spend.

Instagram is as important for brands and video. It has over 400 million active users, 75% of whom are outside the US and 40% of Internet users are on Instagram. 90% of Instagram users are younger than 35.

When Instagram introduced videos, over five million were shared in 24 hours. Engagement with brands on Instagram is ten times higher than Facebook and 84 times higher than Twitter.

In a nutshell, if you're a brand looking to grow in 2017, it's crucial that you're active on Facebook and Instagram.

What's stopping you?

If your response to video marketing is, "I don't have a camera or equipment for video," "I don't have funds for a production crew," or "I don't have editing skills," that's okay. You don't need them.

While I do believe that eventually all growing brands need to develop an in-house content hub or outsource to agencies, as a start-up you have the freedom and flexibility to be scrappy. All you need is a decent smartphone and some artistic flair.

Often the best way to produce quality content is not to try and create something from nothing; instead, just document what your brand is doing.

Do you own a clothing line? Capture the different processes of your business on video, from the production and making of the garments, to documenting the journey of the delivery guys from factory to retail. Chat to happy customers who are purchasing your products online and in-store. This allows customers to enter your world, go behind the scenes and really feel part of your team. We call this authenticity.

There are free apps that you can use for editing. I recommend Filmora, which is available from the app store and is relatively user-friendly.

So get that smartphone out, invest in a microphone and document your journey. The fans and sales will follow.