Digital Marketing for Start Ups and Scale Ups - where should I spend my precious budget?
Is 2024 the year you’re serious about shaking up your digital marketing to finally see the growth you know you’re capable of?
But where to start?
For businesses hitting a new phase to scale, budget is always going to be precious, and your success hangs heavily on how wisely you use it.
Depending on your business, ‘digital marketing’ is the big umbrella which covers the area where most of the levers can be pulled to drive your growth. Even if you had the budget to go all in and start pulling at every lever from the start, there’s a process, and following it makes your spending more efficient.
Running ads is where you can use your budget to really supercharge results… but there is valuable work to do before maximising your spend on the platforms… three top tips to get started here.
Optimise your website/landing page
Does the first, or second, iteration of your website match where you want your business to go, and who you want to target? A healthy conversion rate on your site will get you significantly more out of your ad spend than an average or poor one. Work with someone recommended and experienced in optimising sites for conversions, and heed their advice. Investing heavily in ads which run to an underperforming site is not an effective route to growth.
Product, pricing and fulfilment
It’s obvious, but… does your product attract a clear audience, is it well priced and can you fulfil your target sales? Spending precious budget on ads to promote something which isn’t attractive to your audience, is poorly priced or regularly falls out of stock, is, again, not ad spend well used.
Organic audiences
There’s more value to get out of campaigns when you have healthy organic audiences. These might be social followers and fans, or engaged email subscribers. You should expect both to increase with the support of ads, but before you maximise your ad spend, put some work into getting these underway (top tip - a low budget ad campaign for email subscribers can be a very worthwhile bit of spend).
With the above boxes ticked, it’s a good time to turn your attention to more serious spend on the platforms, whilst maintaining the focus on good returns for your precious budget.
Over spending on ads before the underpinning work has been done can be where the best intended come unstuck. It’s where businesses write platforms off, claiming ‘Google doesn’t work for us’ or ‘Facebook’s got too expensive’, when in fact the key to their growth is in those platforms, and they may not be far from unlocking it.
If 2024 is the year that you’re serious about growing your business with ads, we’d be happy to have a chat and advise on some groundwork to get you in the best shape for success. Book a call in here.