Business Learning Center

In order to truly maximize your marketing spend, finding the best ad channel for your business is the first step. Of course, every business presents a unique challenge and avoiding channels that are irrelevant to your goals is imperative to your success.

That’s because millions of marketing dollars are flushed down the wrong ad channels daily. In fact, a survey by research firm Experian found that five percent to 30 percent of marketing budgets are wasted as a result of bad data alone.

That’s a pretty significant portion of any budget.

And from there it only gets worse: add more marketing dollars wasted on business lunches, trade shows, and other sales tactics that are never going to directly lead to revenue.  The reality is that most small businesses don’t know how to track return on investment (ROI) per ad channel because it can be a rather complex affair.

However, fear not. There is a three step process to help you determine the best places for your marketing budget, but first ROI must be tracked.

But before you begin, check our video here on the importance of RIO tracking.

Step 1: Research & Discovery

Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your business: What advantages does your product or service have over competitors?  Do you have any unique selling points like free shipping, free consultation, money back guarantee, 30 day warranty or similar aspects?

Research competitors’ tactics: What channels are your top competitors using?  Contact their marketing agency and request a similar proposal.  If they are publically traded you may be able to get highly specific insights into their tactics.  If not, there are a number of free and cheap tools online which can give you great competitive insights.

Research new tactics relevant to your customers/targeted demographic groups: Your competitors might be doing well but are they leveraging cutting-edge tactics like Social Media Marketing or Viral Content Development?

Start preparing your platform (website or CRM tool) to track ROI: Can your website determine what traffic sources delivered the most sales for the least amount of money?  Check if your sales staff can attribute each sale to a specific lead source  Can your retail locations determine if increases in foot traffic were due to specific promotions/advertisements?

Step 2: Planning & Strategic Development

Determine ad channels to test based on competitors and past successes: Refine your list of tactics to the top five to 10 channels and be sure to record the results in a centralized location (spreadsheet, database or analytics platform) so you can make a quick comparison as to which results in the most sales for the least amount of money.

Customized messaging: Refine your sales pitch and Calls to Action per ad channel in order to address each specific audience and then create multiple variations because the way you say things can have a massive effect on conversion rates and sales.  And it is nearly impossible to determine what combination of words will work the best without testing on your actual customers.

Custom images and creatives: Similar to sales language, your creatives (banner ads, TV commercials, product photos etc.) should be catered to each channel and have a number of variations.  You may find that loud and distracting ads work well on Facebook but not on the Google Display Network.  Larger ads always perform better than smaller ones and video ads perform even better.  Some experts even recommend making up to 10 variations per ad.

Step 3: Initial Testing & Implementation

Initial testing: Use a small portion of your overall budget to determine what messaging and creatives are delivering the best results.  Which ones have the highest click-through rates, highest conversion rates and lowest cost per acquisition rate.  Most importantly, what is the ROI per channel? What geographic regions and times of ad delivery impacted these numbers most?

Implementation: Once you have the previous questions answered there should be a clear winner, but don’t focus your entire budget on this specific channel yet.  There are still a number of important questions that need to be addressed.  Are you tracking your customer’s progress throughout the entire sales cycle? If not you will miss important stages costing you sales and making customers leave like shopping carts requiring way too much information or not functioning properly.  Getting relevant customers to your “point of sale” (website/store location) is only half the battle; from there you need to focus on conversions or closing the sale.  This process is called Conversion Rate Optimization which includes things like speeding up the checkout process & conveying credibility to the customer more effectively.

Conclusion

I wish there were a magic bullet that would find the best place for you to spend your marketing dollars in order to generate the most revenue but it does not exist yet. Extensive research and testing must be done in order to make an informed decision based on solid data for your unique situation. These three steps should give you a good understanding about finding the best advertising channels for your business but it definitely gets more complex.

If you would like a free consultation on this process and what it can do for your bottom line just drop us a line.