I started advertising my small business way too late. Stolen Ground Media was up and running for MONTHS without a single hint of website traffic. I made posts to social media, drafted dozens of blog posts and changed the name thirty times while I procrastinated putting money into my website.
I’ll never make that mistake again. If I had just committed $5/day (like I’m doing now… catch the new post covering results!), I could have seen massive amounts of quality traffic and started climbing the Google Results Page a long time ago. Sound familiar?
Here’s what I wish someone would have told me.
Should You Start Advertising For Your Business?
Businesses are organic, living things that react differently depending on the situation. If you choose to advertise, how do you know your business will grow?
First, consider whether you’re prepared for more business. If you’re already at capacity in terms of new business, a better route to consider may be retaining loyal customers and enhancing their experience with your brand at every turn.
Businesses owners who enlist digital marketing, but don’t have the resources to meet the needs of new customers, often lose money.
Wait for your business to open a new location, for your revenue to plateau or when you offer a new service.
Are You Ready As A Business Owner To Start Advertising?
You’ve taken on a massive amount of risk, debt and anxiety, and have come out profitable on the other side. It’s an enticing fallacy that business owners are advertising themselves in order to advertise their business.
Don’t fall into this trap.
In order to be ready for real, sustainable growth through advertising, you must be willing to consider your business a separate person. Legally, you’ve probably already distinguished yourself from your separate business entity to minimize liability, and your advertising must be able to as well.
Businesses change, sometimes for the better! You may have to adjust your brand’s voice to appeal to your target audience, even if your personal voice sounds nothing like it.
Where, at the start of your business, you likely had to advertise your own capabilities as a business owner, you now need to highlight your company’s capabilities, as well as it’s own unique voice and rhetoric.
If you can commit your advertising spend to promoting your company as an entity unique to yourself, you’re ready as a business owner to advertise.
How Do You Advertise A Small Business?
The best place to start advertising is display & social media. If your business is ready to advertise, as described above, you’re likely in the brand-awareness game. In other words, you’re trying to get people to learn about your business who don’t already know about it.
That’s why display especially kills when it comes to new advertisers.
Once your brand awareness advertising is profitable, experiment with engagement marketing & paid content strategy. When you’re ready to turn a profit, opt for a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or remarketing campaign.
First and foremost, set up a website that’s user-friendly and that highlights your products pages. Here’s a quick video on how to set up 3 key optimizations BEFORE sending the paid traffic described above:
If you don’t want to do these website adjustments yourself, freelancers or interns should be able to figure out the systems and the best practices for optimizing web content.
Once you get it right, you’re unstoppable.
How Much Does It Cost To Start Advertising?
The best thing you can do is plan for a $0 return on ad spend. As unfortunate as it is, marketing campaigns are not always successful, depending on who you use to advertise, which platforms or messaging you use, or who you target.
Let me stress that this will almost NEVER happen. Unless the person you hire runs away with your money without launching a campaign, you will have some kind of advertising. Good advertising works as long as a good message reaches an audience.
With that expectation, you’ll save yourself a lot of stress when, after a week, your sales haven’t doubled from your $100 investment, like other businessowners might expect.
When you start seeing massive returns in the third month, you’ll be much more likely to spend your money wisely. Other advertisers will be paying down debt from misplaced anticipation of immediate returns.
How Much Should I Expect To Spend On Facebook Ads?
If you’re advertising on Facebook, a good starting amount is $7.50 per day, per 10,000 people in your potential reach.
So what does that look like? If you look at the below screenshot, you’ll see that the Potential Reach is approximately 64,000 people.
In this case, you might choose to run for just one day to blast a brand-new promotion to as many people as possible. You would multiply your $7.50 budget by 6.4 (64,000 potential reach/10,000). Your budget would be somewhere around $48.
If you wanted to run for a week, you just multiply that number by 7 ($48 x $7 = $336).
This method is calculated based on a maxed-out budget, so if you want to save money by spending less, that’s completely fine as well.
Time and again I use it for my small business clients and see great results.
Admittedly, as you get into larger audience sizes (150,000 Potential Reach and above), this number becomes less useful, since Facebook tends to hit better performing users at a higher frequency.
Even in the digital space, advertising can become unpredictable. The cost of advertising is largely impacted by things like competition, advertiser skill and black boxes of secret Facebook and Google algorithms, so you cannot plan for perfection.
I hope this at least gives you a valuable understanding of when and how to start advertising. Let’s face it: your advertising isn’t as important as continuing to do quality work for your customers. But when you combine a quality business with a great campaign, the results are limitless.
If you’ve started advertising too early or too late, let me know in the comments!
Resources:
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/common-advertising-small-business-mistakes-4142640
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/355670007911605?id=561906377587030
https://www.upcounsel.com/separate-business-entity
https://blog.reachlocal.com/opening-soon-seven-ideas-to-promote-your-new-location-online
