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Marketing is an expensive proposition. Businesses will often sink several times the cost of developing a product into building awareness around it. Hollywood executives will spend hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing a single movie. In most areas and industries, large organizations with significant budgets are dropping serious sums on professional ad campaigns.
But what about small and medium-sized organizations with valuable offerings but limited budgets? Estimates suggest that the costs associated with even a simple marketing agency can run upwards of $3,500 per month (and at times much higher). How can an SMB run a professional ad campaign for less?
At least part of the answer in 2025 has to come in the form of innovative applications of technology. There are multiple tools, suites, and entire platforms that offer streamlined, cost-effective, and scalable ways to market a business. Every entrepreneur looking to maximize and optimize marketing budgets must be looking for ways to take advantage of these game-changing technologies.
Visual ad design has become incredibly accessible
Visual advertising used to require intense training and experience. Now, virtually anyone can use tools with comfortable, easy-to-understand user interfaces for effective ad creation. Applications use things like templates and automated sizing to help design visual social posts, headers, and other content-related elements. Often, these creative tools leverage their accessible and intuitive interfaces for ad creation, as well.
Canva’s ad creator is a good example. It uses its signature easy drag-and-drop formatting to edit display ads for a variety of visually-driven platforms, including:
- YouTube
- Google Ads
- X
The intuitive ad solution comes with over 3 million stock photos and graphics, too (a common feature for most creative suites that makes sourcing images faster, easier, and safer). Tools like Canva are also featuring increasingly sophisticated AI-powered generative support, making the process of turning ideas into visual ads even easier.
As far as affordability is concerned, much of Canva’s ad creative suite is free for end users. Some elements are only available through their paid membership, but that remains extremely affordable ($120 a year for an individual plan). Others are similarly priced, and many even come with a free trial for curious business owners interested in giving a platform a try.
Audio advertising is also streamlined and affordable
Audio media, especially podcasting, has become increasingly popular in recent years. As more people tune in, the podcast advertising space has become a valuable and effective way to reach consumers. However, packages can be expensive, with popular shows demanding thousands of dollars per ad.
AudioGO is an example of an audio advertising platform that was built with small business scalability in mind. The user-friendly technology allows entrepreneurs to access the highly competitive audio advertising space on a budget. It helps users build, target, and run audio ads for as little as $250 per campaign — pennies on the dollar compared to mainstream pricing models.
Like Canva, AudioGO also uses AI to make the ad process easier. One way it does this is by creating synthetic voice ads for free, completely cutting out the need to find and work with voice actors. Users can even pay a small fee (usually around $10) to request a professional ad from an actor within 48 hours.
Industry-leading platforms in the audio advertising area are also enabling small business owners to target their ads to unique listeners by location, content genre, language, time of day, and countless other predictive and demographic audience features. This new approach makes it easy to start advertising on a budget and then scale the reach of an ad as a business grows and its marketing budget permits.
Social post creation is no longer bogging businesses down
Social media is a powerful way to promote brands and their products to consumers on their turf. With so many platforms, demographics, user behaviors, and content formats, it can be challenging to know what kind of ad content to create for each platform a business uses.
Technology solutions, like Predis.ai, care addressing this process by making it possible to create and format social media ads without pouring excessive resources into the process. Like the two other tools in this list, these tools often use cutting-edge AI technology to power a suite of ad content elements, including:
- Turning text into visual ads.
- Generating custom ad headlines, captions, subheadings, and copy.
- Resizing ads to specific social platform specifications.
- Translating ads into multiple languages.
- Generally editing ads and creating A/B testing scenarios.
In the case of Predis.ai, the platform has a free initial option and scales with monthly fees from $27 to $212 per month. Again, this is indicative of the accessible cost of similar tools, making them much more affordable than the average agency. From memes to quotes, e-commerce products to everyday social posts, social advertising technology offers a flexible, affordable, and adaptable way to propagate marketing material on a budget.
Overcoming advertising barriers
In the past, smaller enterprises had to find other avenues to promote their products. Now, technology is breaking down these barriers to entry. It is giving smaller, cash-strapped companies access to platforms previously reserved for big-budget businesses. These tools are also equipping teams with limited talent, time, and resources to create professional ads that can keep up with the most sophisticated advertising content.
All that remains is for entrepreneurs to take the initiative. They must set marketing budgets, assess their bandwidths, and then look for technologies that can span gaps and help them build ad campaigns that affordably and effectively get the word out about their growing businesses.
