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Top three paid growth marketing tips for entrepreneurs

 

BY MANALI HANAMSAGAR
SENIOR GROWTH MARKETING MANAGER

 

Top Three Paid Growth Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs

A good paid growth strategy can help you build a more lucrative business, generate multiple avenues of demand for your products or services, and achieve your business’ revenue goals. However, creating a paid growth strategy when you don’t come from an advertising or marketing background can be challenging.

Instead of taking a deep dive into the world of advertising or hiring an agency that you might not even need, here are three important tips that have been super helpful for the entrepreneurs I coach at IFundWomen. These tips will help boost your business and keep you within your budget.

Tip #1: Optimize first, then create strategy

If you don’t audit and optimize your website and content before running ads, you will pay more for your customers. It’s inevitable. But wait, what does auditing and optimizing your website and content mean? At a high level, to audit your website and content means to examine what works well and what can be changed on your website. Optimizing means creating steps and actions on anything that came up in your audit. Below are some tactics to use when you audit. 

  • Make sure your checkout and user experience flows on your website are clear to both you and the user. If you have three different products/services on your website, you should be able to clearly articulate what steps you want your user to take to complete their visit aka subscribe, sign-up, or purchase. Try visiting your own website via social media as if you were a user and going through all of the steps a customer would go through to make sure the process is smooth.
  • Check how your website is running with regards to speed and overall performance. An easy way to check website speed is to use free tools such as Pingdom’s free website speed test tool.
  • If you want to start advertising your services externally through paid social or search, you should have valuable content on your website for users to get to know you and your business. Build up brand trust by showcasing your experience with an “about me” section, or highlighting the quality of products through customer testimonials. 

Tip #2: You don’t need a big budget to get started

On my weekly coaching sessions with entrepreneurs, I am often asked about ad budget: How much should I spend if I’ve never ran ads before? Do I really need a big budget to get results? 

My answer: No! You don’t need a big budget to see success on ads, but you do need to set realistic expectations for your results. Start out by asking yourself these questions: 

  • What is your current paid marketing budget?
  • What is your ideal paid marketing budget?
  • How much do your products cost?
  • What is your annual revenue goal for this year?
  • What is the size of your current organic audience? (Think past customers, website visitors, social media followers, etc.)

The answers to these questions will help you determine how much of your marketing budget you should allocate to ads. For example, if you have a high cost product and a low organic audience, you should not be spending a lot of money on paid ads to get purchases. 

Long story short: Early-stage businesses should focus on growing brand awareness by building an organic audience before investing in paid ads. Asking an audience to purchase through ads without them being familiar with your brand likely will not produce the results you want. Remember, it’s a long game!

Tip #3: Focus on the “why” and not the “what” 

It’s really easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of metrics that exist when running paid ads—cost per click (CPC), return on ad spending (ROAS), cost per acquisition (CPA). The list goes on. When you’re just starting out and are a solo entrepreneur, focus on the “why” behind the metrics and not the “what”. 

Pick two metrics you want to focus on. Let’s say that’s CPA (how much it costs you to get one customer) and CPC (how much it costs for one user to click on your ad). Analyze the high-level trends.

For example, you run an ad on Facebook and the budget is $200 for the month. You notice that last week your CPA was $10 and this week it jumped to $20. That’s a 50% increase! Instead of going into panic mode, think about what has changed in the past week that caused this? Was it a holiday, so the sales slowed down? Is it your audience targeting? Is your ad creative becoming stale? Think about the “why” and the “what” will follow.

By using these three tips and applying them to your paid growth strategy, you will be able to focus on the metrics and tactics that matter. Want to talk through your personalized strategy? Book a Facebook and Instagram Ads coaching session with me on IFundWomen!

Book now