Difficult decisions: Marketing your small business

There are many hard decisions we have to make as founders. From team to marketing strategy, there’s always a tough choice to make. In this four-part series, I’ll walk you through the mistakes – and successful strategies – I made surrounding some of my toughest decisions as a founder.  

I’m Jamika Martin, the founder of ROSEN Skincare and Flora Studios. I launched ROSEN in 2017 to transform the acne space for people of color. Through innovative, clean formulas, we transformed our customers’ skin and landed on the shelves of Target and Ulta Beauty. Now, I work with consumer‑packaged goods (CPG) brands through Flora Studios. At Flora Studios, we support personal care brands with product development and launch strategy services, as well as low minimum order quantity (MOQ), U.S.‑based manufacturing. 

With that in mind, this series is meant for you – the founder of an emerging brand. You know, the brand fronted by a boot-strapped founder who wears 10 hats. Should you find yourself in a more scaled and capital-rich position, this series may be a little too scrappy for you. But if you’re like me, someone who started their business out of a tiny apartment – then this is for you. Ahead in this article, we dive into marketing – where to spend, when to spend and how to know when to cut spend. 

Where I’ve seen the best returns 

Marketing is tough. Especially when everyone online is telling you it’s as simple as “run this ad and scale to six-figures a month.” Spoiler: it’s not. 

For us, the strongest returns have almost always come from influencers first. Why? Because there’s trust. When someone is hearing about you from a friend or trusted content creator, the wall is already down. We’re not having to pay to build awareness and convince them we’re worth it at the same time. 

Ensuring you begin to build a community of customers and micro-influencers to share your message is critical to early, scrappy scale. I like to aim for about 1‑3% of monthly sales = number of ambassadors. So if your business is doing around $10,000 a month, you should have a group of around 100 always on ambassadors to share campaigns with. 

Outside of building a community of ambassadors, the next best thing has been creative story telling. I can get on my soapbox here, but I will keep it short by saying pure UGC and TikTok trends makes it difficult to standout. Create a unique campaign and story to tell on social media. Think of it as a true commercial and extend the campaign past that. On’s recent campaign with Zendaya is a great example. 

When to start paying for marketing

There’s a mindset shift that has to happen here. Spending money on ads, influencers or even large shoots for the first time is scary. It feels like you’re throwing money into the void. And sometimes you are. 

That’s why I always recommend staying small. Keep your campaign lean. Don’t go for the $5,000 / post influencer with the hopes that one big bang will work. Can you do 5 creators that charge $1,000 for a post? What about 10 who do $500 per post? Or what if we: 

• Seed to our community of 100 ambassadors 
• Choose 4 creators who charge $250/post
• Choose 4 creators who charge $500/post
• Spend $1,500 on a campaign video and photo 
• Spend $500 on an IRL moment + content 

Now, spending looks a lot less scary. You’re hedging your losses by diversifying your bets and you’re creating a story that lives beyond one singular post. 

The goal isn’t to go viral or hit a 5x ROAS overnight. The goal is to learn. What copy worked? What creative hit? Who’s post flopped? You’re building the engine. The dollars are just fuel. 

How much to spend

This is the golden question. And it depends on how much cash you have—and how fast you need to grow. 

I always recommend starting from your margins. What can you actually afford to spend to get a customer and still make money? That’s your CAC ceiling. For example, if your product sells for $40 and your gross margin is 70%, you make $28. If you spend more than $28 to acquire that customer, you’re losing money. 

Now, you also need to be looking past just this CAC, because product isn’t the only expense you have. If you break-even on your sales, cool from a marketing perspective, but what about rent? You need to have a clear enough idea to not only understand what it takes to keep the lights on, but what it takes to never lose money on a product. 

Now when it comes to agencies, creatives, influencers etc… my best advice is to shop around. Compare rates with people whose work you enjoy to get an idea of the industry average where you are. Know that big names or big clients probably also means big spend, and really evaluate if you’re there yet. 

Organic vs paid

This is where I see so many emerging founders get tripped up. You see a competitor running paid ads and assume you have to do it too. But paid doesn’t fix product-market fit. It doesn’t build community. And it doesn’t work well until some of that is already in place. 

If you’re under $30k/month in revenue, I recommend leaning into organic. Content, community, partnerships, customer experience—all of that builds your base. You need that warm traffic to eventually make paid ads worth it. If you skip this step, you’ll end up spending thousands for clicks that don’t convert. 

As you scale, paid can absolutely be a tool. But it should never be your only tool. 

When to stop a campaign

This is where it gets tough. You made the ad. You filmed the video. You were sure it would work. But it didn’t. 

Knowing when to cut a campaign is a discipline. And it gets harder when there’s emotion or time involved. But marketing is math. If it’s not converting and you’ve optimized the funnel—cut it. 

This is why I really like taking a unique campaign approach with marketing. We let our campaigns run anywhere from 4-8 weeks and we observe. Which messaging point made sense? How many ambassadors posted? Did the ads move the needle enough? Did certain stories or visuals hit harder than others? What about the promotions? 

And you tweak and tweak. But this way, you’re working on the next campaign as the previous one is running. You’re not letting anything run for too long and burn your cash. In today’s day and age with social media, things can get stale quickly anyway. 

Now, when it comes to an agency, a partner or just a general paid ads budget, it’s a lot easier to run the numbers and see if you’re in the red. You can continue to tweak, but if you’re in the red for more than 3 months (if you can even afford that), you absolutely need to pivot. 

Marketing is one of the hardest parts of running a brand. It’s equal parts science and art, logic and gut. There will be wasted money. There will be flops. But there will also be wins—and those wins get clearer the more you test, tweak and pay attention. 

Stay scrappy, test cheap and build the channels that don’t disappear when your card declines.

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About the author

Jamika is a serial entrepreneur whose journey started with ROSEN Skincare, an acne care line with a purpose of making women of color feel confident in their own skin. After bootstrapping ROSEN straight out of college, Jamika scaled ROSEN to a 7-figure business, raised $2M in seed capital and secured retail partnerships with brands like Target and Ulta Beauty. Since growing ROSEN, Jamika has launched Flora Studios to support emerging CPG founders through product development, low MOQ manufacturing and launch strategy. She's passionate about ways to make your brand stand out digitally and on shelf, all while staying scrappy.