Marketing, channels, paid ads, SEO
How big is your monthly marketing budget? Like really, yes yours!
– 500€?
– 5.000€?
– 25.000€?But, IF every 1€ you spend brings you back 5€ or 10€?
How big is your marketing budget now?
Stop thinking – you cannot afford doing marketing for bigger budgets.
Start thinking what prevents you from achieving results.
What you need to fix with your marketing strategy, is your service or product well positioned and Personas properly described? Are you able to deliver flawlessly? What about sales funnel? How you get traffic to it? What if they are not willing to buy at once and need some insurance or convincing?
Fast marketing vs slow marketing.
It’s gonna cost anyhow, but which path to choose when?Let’s find out what should you consider and why?
I’ve always said I do not believe in stuff I cannot measure. Some scepticts keep saying – I only trust what I can control. Yet, these days to control you need to know and understand a lot. Fact is, there are too many tools and strategies on the market one must know to declare himself a competent. And most likely it’s the opposite, you seem inadequate as this is pretty tough job to do.
Channel ownership
You should think of “your channels” and “their channels” as like what happens on your website and emails is yours. What happens in any social media is theirs. Chat-bots may be yours and theirs, depends. Different are the ways you interact and attract people to interact with your content. Different is how you maintain and control what happens where. Different are the risks you take.
Traffic attraction, content quality
When social media channels and display ads usually have their own usual traffic and some of visitors engage with your ads then Google Ads are shown when people are looking for stuff they are interested in. For some it feels more natural. As for some time ago people prefered organic search results (SEO) over paid search results (SEM) then now this differention has kind of faded. What matters is the quality of search results people receive. Btw, React & Share is very effective tool to make your content qualifying for your readers cheap and fast.
Content strategy
The strategy you use in different channels should consider how people are acting in these channels. When in some works better the branding then in others you should use CTAs to get the engagements. People are bored of bad ads and for example gamification attracts younger generations. For some it seems that Instagram has lost its appeal in 2020. Some marketing gurus say – stay off social media as it wears out your time and gives you nothing but hassle, but you are after real clients and money, right!
What we've tried and recommend
Facebook Ads – used to work really good, but now you pay more and get less. So sooner you promote, more you get. Another threat is that FB owns this channel and keeps changing rules and updates pricelist rather too fast. Your audience has changed its signifficance lately a lot. Number of “Liked” people means nothing as most of them cannot see your ads, you gotta pay for it. You can build landings in FB or can redirect it outside for specially made landing pages to get the last conversion.
Budgets: depends, 300-2000€ monthly.
Dispaly ads – works the best if marketer needs to promote its content to people visiting public online sites and has no clientbase of its own. Cost depends on ads displayed, timing, etc. In general effective tool, considering. Precise targeting helps lowering costs. Works better for branding rather than for CTAs. If there is a CTA then it should lead to some landing page of yours.
Budgets: depends, 300-5000€ monthly.
Paid web ads – is the fastest way to get it going when you have something people want and already know about. It might not suit for coming onto market with something completely new. Cost depends intensity and on the competition of keywords you are after. 2-5 phrases lower the cost and specify better your target audience. Pay attention to your ICP and Personas while designing these ads. It should lead to your blog, web page or specially developed landing page.
Budgets: depends, 100-7000€ monthly.
SEO – if the project is to stay for longer and SEM is too expensive compared to organic traffic. Well done SEO lowers signifficantlty your paid ads expenses and as mentioned previously – some people trust it better. For marketer it’s a question of cost in longrun. As good SEO pays off always. There are lots of ways to do it with lesser cost by yourself as well. Yet, it has became complicated, there are huge amount of tools designed for it. Good thing – it works every time someone is looking for something.
Mostly used environments are Google Ads and Bing. Majority sticks with Google Ads though. Biggest goal used to be “1st on google page”, but since Google updated its algorithms, one should aim for being on 1st page at least in one’s target group.
Budgets: depends, 700-3000€ monthly, minimum 3 months.
Avoid Attracting Wrong Traffic – you gotta remember – not all traffic is good traffic. Eventhough even bad publicity is still publicity. Attracting wrong people increases your SEO budget or even social media budget signifficantly, but brings you no conversions and paid clients. So you promote yourself for a high bill and get no return on your money – yes, it is easier to do and until you don’t measure outcomes you can be tricked by low-end cheap marketers. So set your goals well!
Traffic is not the king, longlive the king! KYC – Know Your Clients applies in marketing as well, it has been crucial differentiator for a long time already, before financial people took that phrase into use. The trickiest part perhaps is to get the knowledge – what phrases and key words did your converted to paying clients use? It might differ dramatically what words you yourself use while promoting your products and services. Apply these findings into your marketing finetunings and you get less traffic, but then these are the ones that convert and pay your bills. Right traffic is the king!
Chat-bots – current World is fractured and everything happens very fast. Now or never is the motto too often. When emails are too heavy then bots initiate interactions for you and provide you selection of options. Bots are currently taking over all chat environments. But yeah, designing these conversations is not easy or suitable job for everyone.
Result – you could get all the information via chat instead of subscrition form with too many questions. And then a onboarding person can take over. Or the lead gets disqualified and noone gets hurt. Audience dependent.
Budgets: depends, 0-5000€ monthly.
Email-marketing – I believe strongly in that stupid and simple way of communication if it is related to business relations, making offers, confirmations, delivering relevant high quality information. There are lots of strategies and as former email-marketing software agency owner and software developer you can ask me detailed questions, why and how to set up strategies which convert.
Result – initiative can be made when necessary. CTA-s lead to next actions. Avoid spamming. Recipients reactions measurable. Audience dependent.
Budgets: depends, 0-1800€ monthly.
Landing pages – are usually endpoints where all this traffic is sent. These days there are numbers of tools which can help you to create your product/service test landings to find out if this works at all before you implement it into your corporate website. In case of emails, chat-bots, Facebook and paid ads it is common to have separate pages where even sales is finalized. All these tools are made really easy to use for now.
Budgets: depends, 0-200€ monthly.
Blogs – once so appreciated channel has brought me personally lots of learnings. For me it worked about 10 years as a filter for a long time till I believed our young collegues not willing to read and we renewed our website for a shorter version – easier to read. That was a bad decision as we started to get wrong clients.
Now what
You can google yourself how to do this properly, sure. I don’t mind.
You could save money and time and ask for execution.
We’ve worked together with number of great big and small companies/experts we trust and can recommend once we know what would help you with some specific or complex task. We’ll do the introduction and then you’ll take over the process.
Set up a free 15minute meeting with me and lets find out.
Lets wrap it up
Your marketing budget is endless if it works for you and you can grow your business accordingly.
It does not fly if something is not right. Fix it before you spend all your money attracting wrong clients.
Pick your fights with channels. Doing everywhere something might get you worse results than doing well in 1 channel that you control.
Read lots of marketing books and become an expert or hire one or many to work for you.
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