Marketing is expensive. But you know what’s even more expensive? Spending money on marketing without knowing what you’re actually trying to achieve.
You can have a big budget, beautiful creatives, a solid product and still end the month wondering where all your money went. Sometimes, the problem isn’t that you need more money. You’re simply wasting the money you already have.
Here are six easy ways to do it.
1. Run ads without knowing your goal
“Let’s run an ad” is not a marketing strategy. Before you put money behind a campaign, you need to know what you want the campaign to achieve. Are you trying to increase awareness? Get website visits? Generate leads? Drive sales?
If your goal is sales but you’re optimizing for engagement because the likes look good, you may end up with a post that gets 10,000 likes and zero customers. Your campaign objective should determine everything from your creative to your targeting and the metric you use to measure success.
2. Target everyone
If your target audience is “everyone who needs our product,” you have a problem. Trying to reach everyone usually means your message ends up speaking to no one in particular. And when you’re paying for every impression, click or lead, that lack of focus can get expensive very quickly.
Try knowing who you’re talking to. Understand their needs, habits, frustrations and buying behavior. The more clearly you understand your audience, the better you can spend your budget reaching the right people.
3. Change your strategy every five minutes
You launched an ad on Monday. By Wednesday, it hasn’t gone viral, so you pause it. You try another creative. Then another audience. Then another platform.
Before you know it, you’ve spent money testing everything except giving any one strategy enough time to actually work. Testing is important, but random changes make it difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t.
The trick is to give campaigns enough time to gather useful data, then make informed adjustments.
4. Create content just because you can
Not every trending sound needs your brand’s participation and not every social media trend needs to become a carousel. And not every post needs to sell something.
When content is created without a clear purpose, you’re spending resources on posts that may generate activity without moving your business forward.
Your content should have a job. It could educate, entertain, build trust, start conversations, showcase your product or drive an action.
If you can’t explain why a piece of content exists, reconsider making it.
5. Ignore the numbers because “the campaign feels good”
Marketing can be creative, but your decisions shouldn’t be based entirely on wants. Focus on your numbers, they are definitely telling you something.
A high click-through rate could mean your creative is working. A high bounce rate could mean your landing page needs attention. Lots of leads but few sales could point to a problem further down the funnel.
Don’t just report the numbers. Ask what they mean and what you should do differently next time.
6. Spend more money to fix a bad strategy
This is probably the most expensive mistake of all. If your messaging is unclear, your offer isn’t compelling or you’re targeting the wrong audience, increasing your budget won’t magically solve the problem. It will simply help you waste money faster.
Before you increase your ad spend, make sure the foundation is working. Get the right audience, offer, messaging, creative and conversion journey in place. Then scale what is already showing signs of working.
Because the goal of marketing isn’t to spend the biggest budget. It’s to make the budget work harder.
So, before asking, “How much more should we spend?” ask a better question: “Are we making the most of what we’re already spending?”
Hope this was helpful! Check back next week for more marketing tips, insights and ideas to help you grow your brand.
— The Kontent Hub
You can have a big budget, beautiful creatives, a solid product and still end the month wondering where all your money went. Sometimes, the problem isn’t that you need more money. You’re simply wasting the money you already have.
Here are six easy ways to do it.
1. Run ads without knowing your goal
“Let’s run an ad” is not a marketing strategy. Before you put money behind a campaign, you need to know what you want the campaign to achieve. Are you trying to increase awareness? Get website visits? Generate leads? Drive sales?
If your goal is sales but you’re optimizing for engagement because the likes look good, you may end up with a post that gets 10,000 likes and zero customers. Your campaign objective should determine everything from your creative to your targeting and the metric you use to measure success.
2. Target everyone
If your target audience is “everyone who needs our product,” you have a problem. Trying to reach everyone usually means your message ends up speaking to no one in particular. And when you’re paying for every impression, click or lead, that lack of focus can get expensive very quickly.
Try knowing who you’re talking to. Understand their needs, habits, frustrations and buying behavior. The more clearly you understand your audience, the better you can spend your budget reaching the right people.
3. Change your strategy every five minutes
You launched an ad on Monday. By Wednesday, it hasn’t gone viral, so you pause it. You try another creative. Then another audience. Then another platform.
Before you know it, you’ve spent money testing everything except giving any one strategy enough time to actually work. Testing is important, but random changes make it difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t.
The trick is to give campaigns enough time to gather useful data, then make informed adjustments.
4. Create content just because you can
Not every trending sound needs your brand’s participation and not every social media trend needs to become a carousel. And not every post needs to sell something.
When content is created without a clear purpose, you’re spending resources on posts that may generate activity without moving your business forward.
Your content should have a job. It could educate, entertain, build trust, start conversations, showcase your product or drive an action.
If you can’t explain why a piece of content exists, reconsider making it.
5. Ignore the numbers because “the campaign feels good”
Marketing can be creative, but your decisions shouldn’t be based entirely on wants. Focus on your numbers, they are definitely telling you something.
A high click-through rate could mean your creative is working. A high bounce rate could mean your landing page needs attention. Lots of leads but few sales could point to a problem further down the funnel.
Don’t just report the numbers. Ask what they mean and what you should do differently next time.
6. Spend more money to fix a bad strategy
This is probably the most expensive mistake of all. If your messaging is unclear, your offer isn’t compelling or you’re targeting the wrong audience, increasing your budget won’t magically solve the problem. It will simply help you waste money faster.
Before you increase your ad spend, make sure the foundation is working. Get the right audience, offer, messaging, creative and conversion journey in place. Then scale what is already showing signs of working.
Because the goal of marketing isn’t to spend the biggest budget. It’s to make the budget work harder.
So, before asking, “How much more should we spend?” ask a better question: “Are we making the most of what we’re already spending?”
Hope this was helpful! Check back next week for more marketing tips, insights and ideas to help you grow your brand.
— The Kontent Hub