In today's business environment, there doesn't seem to be a shortage- by any stretch of the imagination - of platforms through which you can promote your products and services.
Marketers now have an endless stream of apps like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and a lot more when it comes to opportunities to connect with their desired audiences.
And with word that Netflix is looking to get in on the ad game, I am sure small business owners will have a lot more avenues to spend their ad dollars. For quite some time now, my approach to paid ads has been one that involves running a bunch of ads on as many platforms as possible.
I pay for ads on platforms from Instagram to Pinterest. And again, with outfits like Hulu and Netflix pushing ad services, I have started to rethink my marketing strategy. I take that back, I have started to bring a bit more purpose to how I deploy my company's ad dollars.
I decided to start with a hard budget. What I have been doing till recently was just allowing all ads to run and just paying the bill at the end of the month. Since I have decided to spend some cash on newer avenues like Podcasts and other types of content, I figured I should probably plan things out a bit better.
I wanted to go ahead and share with you some of the steps I have taken to help make our ad spend a bit more predictable and to streamline our business needs with our marketing strategy.
Create a plan
My take on creating marketing plans is that there really is no wrong way to do it. You just need to identify what you are looking for as far as goals go and then settle on a budget and ways to go out and try to hit those goals.
For Saas businesses like ours, we want to acquire free trial users. That is our #1 goal. Getting folks to sign up for a free trial with any of our services is the first step to (eventually) enrolling a paying customer.
We can start the journey through quality traffic. To put my sales guy hat on, we want to get folks through the funnel first. You can download a free marketing template here to help you through the process.
We then want to choose the types of marketing we want to do. For most businesses, you want to employ a strategy that includes:
Paid Marketing Plan
Social Media Marketing Plan
Content Marketing Plan
Email marketing
