So, you want to start marketing digitally? What should you start with?
Every day we here at Element 502 talk to clients about growing their brand and expanding their business reach. Many clients have dipped their toe in the water with some experiments with things like Google Adwords, Facebook ads, or more enhanced digital targeting. Maybe you paid a firm to do some SEO work on your site in hopes of keeping your Adwords cost down and pulling your organic placement higher? Odds are if you are reading this, you have either attempted one or all of these approaches. Most of the time, these approaches can yield poor results because of scattershot implementation and poor research beforehand. So, let’s take a look at how you can set expectations and prepare your company to move into digital marketing with positive results!
What’s your budget?
Knowing what kind of budget that your company is comfortable with spending on digital marketing is a great first step into figuring out how to allocate funds and to decide what approaches are going to be most effective for you. For example, if your company is only able to budget $500-$1,000/month on your marketing efforts, things like Geofencing and IP Targeting might be out of scope for what you’re looking for and your spend might be better allocated elsewhere. However, a $750-$1,500 Google Adwords spend monthly can be very healthy and yield very successful results depending on several factors including acquisition cost. One thing that can significantly affect the cost of your Google Adwords acquisition cost is your company website’s SEO rankings.
I would strongly recommend before moving forward with any significant Adwords campaign having an SEO health check performed on your existing site and any negative SEO deficiencies remedied. Google will sell Adwords to just about any source, and they use your SEO ranking to set costs for Adwords. In essence, Google can penalize you if they think you might be spam. Remember, Google built its business on the confidence that they serve up solid search results to its users.
Another lower-cost option for marketing spends is Facebook, especially if your company is a B2C focused entity. If you are B2B you can still have some success with Facebook. However, we would recommend boosting posts from your company blog or sharing whitepapers or case studies to offer up some value to your prospective customers. Depending on the amount of boosted posts per month and your reach targets, Facebook, like with most things, can be a pretty wide budget range. Which, on the bright side, does allow you to scale your Facebook campaign intensity as your business continues to grow.
Know Your Options
Maybe you are looking to target users based on where they live, work, or attended an event, etc. That is when you start looking into more advanced digital targeting services like Geofencing, IP Targeting, and Geoframing. These kinds of campaigns are very effective at speaking very directly to your desired potential customers. However, with this kind of more directed and specifically targeted approach comes a slightly higher spend. These campaigns are ad-based and are structured around how many users your source group is and how many ads you want to send to them over a specific period of time. As with all things in advertising the budgets can vary significantly. But a monthly spend of between $1,500-$5,000 would be needed for these efforts to truly yield the desired return, primarily due to the required frequency of ads needed to be placed per user for the campaign to be effective.
Now that you have a budget what should you do?
Since you have a better idea of what a budget for these kinds of projects is, I would next recommend some research. I always recommend that clients do a good amount of research themselves either on the internet or through conversation. We talk through realistic budget planning all the time with customers for them to get a better idea of what they should expect and for us to understand what the customer would consider to be a success. If you don’t first outline what you yourself consider to be a success it is hard for you to know once you get there. For many of these campaigns, we can talk about national averages of clickthrough rates and views. What is really important though is you understanding a win and what it will take to get there.
As with anything in marketing, setting a budget and being comfortable with it is important at any step of the project, especially from the outset. For marketing efforts to seed and for your return on investment to start truly taking time can take some time, depending on the business that you are in. If you are a B2C company doing Facebook ads for $30 Tervis cups your return can come quickly in many cases. However, if you are a large B2B industrial hardware vendor that sells million-dollar equipment, it might take a few months for the fruits of your effort to start showing up.
What’s Next?
We would love to talk to you about your current and future marketing plans. Element 502 can put together a marketing plan for you that can scale as your business grows and will meet any budget. Give us a call and I would love to tell you about all our great technology, and I would love to hear about your company and how you want to grow!
