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How Should I Spend My Advertising Budget?

By Snap Agency September 24, 2019

When it comes to allocating your advertising budget, selecting the ideal marketing or advertising avenue for your brand can feel like driving in the dark. Your end goal is to reach a target audience with the right content at the best time. Achieving that goal, however, is not always an easy process. Due to the changing nature of social media and other digital mediums, the impact of your content matters more than ever. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the best way to determine where your funds would be most useful.

Who Are You Reaching?

Before you can figure out where you should be spending money, it’s vital to nail down your target audience. Knowing exactly who you’re trying to reach will help you determine the right digital medium for your brand, the optimal time to post or run ads, and the language and tone that will generate the most engagement. 

To begin developing a target audience, precision and categorization are key. When identifying your ideal buyers, use these five steps to help build a defined audience. 

Analyze What You Already Know

Who is buying from you right now? Why do your consumers choose you over your competitors? And what unique features does your brand offer that sets you apart? Checking out the data you already have will help you identify your existing niche and understand the consumer appeal your business holds.

Boost Engagement

Based on what you already know, start engaging with your consumers on a personal level. If young people are your primary consumers, how much money do they make? What social media sites do they engage with? What selling points do they look for in an offer or product? Identify your current audience and test out some new engagement avenues like social media.

Investigate Real Behavior

Tools like heat map analysis, User Zoom, and PPC budget calculators allow you to investigate how users interact with your social and web content. In addition to revealing pain points, they also show where users spend more time and engage more. 

Evaluate Consumer Feedback

Once you know who your primary consumers are, how to engage with them, and how they behave, it’s time to evaluate what you’ve learned. Are your current marketing and advertising efforts effective? Are you seeing reasonable ROI? Do your sales funnels make sense to the average user? If the answer is no, you may need to reevaluate your growth strategies.

Execute

Now that you’ve asked and answered questions about the experiences your consumers have, it’s time to build or reapportion your marketing and advertising budget around the feedback received—and test your user experience. 

Your Advertising Budget Matters More Than Ever

Effective product advertising is an essential element of a successful business, particularly in light of the continued ecommerce boom. Without it, your target audience might never come into contact with your brand. 

Companies today have more consumer data available than ever before, but few small and medium-sized businesses actually take advantage of that data to produce effective campaigns. While some brands may see this data as overwhelming, it could be your greatest tool when it comes to budget allocation. 

Where to Spend Your Advertising Budget

Right now, Amazon, Google, and Facebook are at the top of everyone’s list for ad spend, but not every option is ideal for every brand. 

Amazon Sponsored Products

Amazon’s paid search and display advertising platforms have improved dramatically in recent years. With the continued debut of helpful new features and the millions of dollars some companies are netting in annual online sales, it’s no wonder brands are flocking to Amazon advertising and utilizing Amazon Sponsored Product Ads (SPAs). 

The most popular ad for PPC, SPAs are one of the most effective ways to increase conversion rates and product discoverability. Because they appear at the top of search results, they’re hard to miss and provide an easy buy for the eager consumer. 

However, if you don’t own the Amazon buy box (located on the product detail page and the start of the purchasing process), your products won’t appear. To win a buy box, you need a     competitively priced new product, along with an established history of good sales and reviews. If you’re new to Amazon, or still in the process of establishing a sales history, SPAs may not be the best place to start.

Google AdWords

A PPC service that allows you to create and run ads for your business, AdWords provides clickable ads that are displayed in Google’s search results. Highly measurable, AdWords offers users a substantial leg up against the fiercest competition and often produces quicker results than SEO alone. With 80 percent of search results now containing Google AdWords, allocating part of your advertising budget here is a wise move.

But though the usefulness of AdWords is indisputable, it’s not for everyone. If you’re a small business, it’s nearly impossible to compete with the big brands and their even larger budgets. Also, AdWords requires close monitoring and content that is free of mistakes. A simple misspelling could cost you your ad, and letting a campaign run unmonitored could cost you more. 

Facebook Ads

With 68 percent of adults using Facebook, allocating part of your advertising budget to Facebook PPC ads can seem like a no-brainer. The broad audience, finely-tuned analytics, and easily-accessible targeting options provided by Facebook Ads make this method a good use of advertising budget for many brands. 

Despite its usability, there are some downsides to advertising on Facebook. Since ads constantly bombard scrolling consumers, getting attention is harder than ever before—and keeping that attention is even more difficult. If your ads are less than creative, or your products aren’t immediately eye-catching, it can be challenging to produce the ROI you want to see. 

Get the Most Out of Your Marketing and Advertising Budget

If you aren’t sure where your budget is best spent, or even who you should be marketing to, contact Snap. With our PPC experts and experienced strategists on your side, your advertising budget will go to the most effective options for your brand.