If you want to succeed in business, you need to familiarize yourself with marketing. Today, marketing wields a massive amount of influence. Almost all industries are crowded in one way or the other and you need to ensure that your stand out amongst the competition as much as possible. However, marketing and advertising can be a black hole in which you keep pouring money and see very little in return.
If you want to lessen the investment and increase the return on investment, you need to decide where to spend your ad budget on. But how does one go about deciding that? Here are a few tips.
Set the Budget
Before you start thinking about spending money in particular aspects of the ad campaign, set a budget that would be an absolute cap on how much you’re willing to spend. Be sure to set two levels of budget. The first limit is the one you can push if it’s absolutely necessary. The second limit is one that you wouldn’t budge for the world. You need to remember that this is your overall ad budget, not just something on PPC or other such avenues.
Consider Your Business
After you’ve determined your total advertising expense, it’s time to determine exactly what you’re going to spend it on. Your first step should be to understand the needs of your business. For example, if you’re primarily an online company that caters to people below 40 of age, you might want to spend more on digital advertising. If you’re a brick and mortar establishment with older clientele, you might want to spend more on traditional ads.
This is just a very broad example but it illustrates what you need to do. You need to look closely at your business and determine what it needs. Keep a list of the most important aspects of your business, including your product, the industry, the target demographic, and the geographical boundaries in mind.
Find Out Where Your Customers Are
When you want to start an ad campaign, you need to know where your audience are. For example, if you’re a company that sells smartphones and tablets, you need not spend much on newspaper ads and similar traditional mediums. But it would be a good idea to publish ads on phone or tablet review websites. This is where the most interested buyers would probably be.
Be Where the Customers Are
Now that you’ve determined where you customers are, it’s time to adjust and refine your marketing strategy. You need to research the demographic and find out where they’re most likely to be at any given time. For example, after you’ve determined that you’ll be better served if you post ads online, you need to find where your demographic might be. You’ll find young professionals on LinkedIn, younger teenagers and their like on Instagram and SnapChat. Naturally, you need to place ads on these websites.
By considering the above mentioned points, you’ll be able to understand just how much money every individual campaign might need.
