ABOUT ADS: WHEN TO (AND WHEN NOT TO) START ADVERTISING AS A STARTUP

Startups have it the hardest. With limited budgets and little to no additional marketing help, advertising can become a very daunting task very quickly. From wondering how to set up Google Ads to booking Fiverr gigs and having to trust an external person, the world of advertising can be confusing, and more than anything - expensive. So what do you look out for when you are just starting with your marketing strategy as a startup, and how do you know you are ready for ads in the first place?

The natural, key response to the question of whether or not you are ready for ads would probably be: “hell yeah!”, especially if you’re talking to marketing gurus and ads experts, but it’s not always so black and white. 

There is one rule of thumb you can go by, and this is - if you have the infrastructure for it, go wild. Let us explain what that means.

Say you go ahead and start advertising. No matter if you are doing post boosts in Meta that aren’t working out because their reach is incredibly restricted in the moment of writing, or you’re going heavy on the advanced campaign setting in Google Ads, you need to be mindful of whether or not you are set up for it. 

A paid marketing campaign can only be successful when it is structured wisely. 

In that sense, do you have your website optimized? Do you have SEO done yet? Are your social links pointing to your website? Do you have all your landing pages pointing out to the website too? Have you removed your Linktree under your profile? 

In order for you to create a successful campaign, you need to create and maintain your marketing ecosystem. 

That is - have fewer social platforms but more frequent updates on them. Have these social platforms point to your website. If you are a part of Google Shops, have the products point to the same link on your website. Have one specific page on your website be the landing page. From then on, make sure you have Google Tag or Facebook Pixel installed on there, and not just on there but also all other pages such as your home, your store, and your blog.

All marketing is managing expectations and having a data-driven approach while doing it. 

Do you want to have 1000 customers before the year ends? Do you want to make a new New Year’s resolution and have 2024 be an absolute banger? Great. How do you get there? 

What are your numbers looking like? What kind of data do you currently have and how can that data project and be extrapolated to next year’s? What do you have to do to take the numbers you have now and 2x or 3x them so that you can hit a milestone that leads to the 1000 clients? 

It’s all a numbers game. And you need to make sure the numbers you are pumping into ads are in singular digits, and the numbers you are getting back out are 3x or 4x the former. 

To answer the question if every startup is ready for ads - no. If you don’t have that infrastructure, if you didn’t take care of your SEO, your social channels, your backlinks, and direct links, you haven’t installed your tracking successfully, do that before you take a leap of faith into the world of ads.