Digital marketing for start ups and scale ups - where should I spend my precious budget?
Are you serious about shaking up your digital marketing and finally seeing 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 much 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… our three top tips to get started are here.
Optimise your website/landing page
A healthy conversion rate on your site will get you significantly more out of your ad spend than an average or poor one. Your website will probably always be a work in progress, so don’t obsess about making it absolutely perfect before you run ads, but work with someone recommended and experienced in optimising sites for conversions, and heed their advice. Investing heavily in ads which run to a beautiful but underperforming site is not an effective route to growth.
In particular focus on:
High quality product imagery and video
Customer reviews
Website speed
Customer journey to and through check out
Tripwires such as high shipping costs or poor returns service
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. Building a meaningful community takes time, but your ‘gang’ will forever be valuable to your brand and your growth, so get started early!
Bonus points?
With all of the above boxes ticked, it’s a great time to turn your attention to an ads strategy.
But as you do… for the strongest route to scaling you’ll also want your email flows fully optimised to dove tail with your ads, so when you’ve ticked off the three points above and are looking to ads for the next stage of growth, review your Klaviyo performance (we’re always happy to talk through the relationship between our campaigns and your Klaviyo activity).
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.
Working with brands who are ready to scale is our specialism. If this sounds like you, we’d love to talk strategy.