Should You Advertise In This Current Economic Uncertainty?
A question that I’ve been asked many times over the last couple of days is: “shall I either start or shall I carry on advertising in these uncertain times?”
As with all things, it’s a quite complex.
If you’re a smaller business, you don’t have cash reserves and it’s a major, major decision for you to advertise, then no, absolutely not.
If you’re a slightly more established business, you have cash reserves or you’re funded and you’re looking to dominate the marketplace that you’re in, then potentially start looking at advertising because now it’s probably the single best time to be advertising that you could ever imagine….
But it takes nerve.
However, most people’s perspective of advertising is that you have to go out and invest a lot of money to this big, bad cold audience out there.
And that’s not always the case.
We typically operate a four level model of advertising. At the top, is a cold audience, which is where most people focus their Facebook advertising.
We split that into two. So you’re either making straight out cold offers i.e would you like to buy my product or service right now or you’re building out an audience for the longer term.
And then below that we call a warm audience, which are people have engaged with video content or adverts that you’ve already placed on Facebook.
You then have hot where people have taken certain courses of action on your website, like adding a product to the shopping cart but have not actually gone through to a sale or viewing an enquiry form but not submitting.
And then below that you have what we call existing clients or customers.
So here’s what I would be doing straight out the gate. If you already have any advertising accounts set up, if you’re already advertising, then now is an absolutely brilliant time to be smarter with your advertising.
Start off by advertising to your your existing clients. You can advertise to your existing clients or customers.
If you’re a service based business, like a consultancy or a financial advisory company, make sure that you are being seen everywhere where your existing clients are. You can do that by uploading your client list to all of the advertising platforms, Facebook, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, but Facebook is probably the easiest one to start with.
Upload existing client lists and advertise to them. And it might just mean a mental shift about what you view as advertising, as an advert isn’t this kind of product pitch with gaudy images, big blaring, shouting buy my stuff, buy my stuff, book a session with me.
No content can be promoted as adverts too. People need standout, visible experts right now. They need people who are on top of their game and they need coping mechanisms and strategies to help them get through the short term, but then help them find their place in the long term.
So if you have an existing client list, make sure you are visible because you need them to see that you’re on top of your game.
If you’re more of an eCommerce business, so you’re selling products or service, you need to be doing everything to stop the leaking bucket. Things like uploading your customer list to advertise to. As an example – say you have a service based product where people are on a 12 month contract, make sure around about 10 months you are placing adverts in front of them to make sure they sign up again.
This helps to reduce churn and keep that to a minimum.
Also enure that someone who was just bought from you is being shown ads for upsells and cross sells. It’s very, very easy to do if you have a product catalog. So for example, Facebook, you can link your product catalog and create many, many different rules to automate what they have.
So if someone buys product A for the next three days, show them everything listed as an accessory for product A a that is priced under £25.
These can run as dynamic advertising campaigns that are almost set and forget based on people’s purchase interaction.
What I would be telling most businesses to do is try and STEM the leaks that you already have.
So the question:
“should you advertise in the current economic climate and uncertainty?”
For most people, what I’ve just said are the most recommended courses of action. When it comes to advertising to cold audiences, look out for the rest of my content is as I’m going to be demonstrating their are ways that you can position yourselves now as the, the dominant leader up when things change for the better.
If you want us to have a look at your current advertising strategy and see if you have leaks that we can plug quickly, that will reduce your wasted ad spend, then reach out to us now at www.iwantpredictablesales.com