I spent years working as an freelance writer and SEO expert before launching my own business and practicing what I preached. In the space of five years, I worked with numerous clients who had 7 and 8 figure budgets and I had some insight into campaigns across multiple platforms.
When I launched my own business selling healthy organic tea like dandelion and sideritis, I began implementing a lot of what I had learned. The problem is, I didn’t have the same budget that my clients had and I quickly realized that what works for the big brands doesn’t necessarily work for the small ones.
These marketing platforms are seen as a must for the big brands and the small ones tend to follow suit, but rarely do they get the same benefits, as I found out to my detriment.
Facebook Ads is the go-to platform for any E-commerce business. You can target specific demographics, you can begin with small budgets—what more could you want? The problem is, Facebook overvalues its “engagements” and video views and leaves small brands out of pocket.
An author friend of mine claimed to have dropped $20,000 on Facebook Ads and received very few sales. I didn’t believe him at first, but then he showed me the metrics. Upon seeing this, I decided to take it easy with my own campaigns, spending $20 here and there advertising herbal tea to try and find something that stuck.
Nothing did.
To give you an idea of just how poor it is, one of the campaigns I ran for a tea deal cost $50. It had a catchy tagline and image and it included a link to a sale’s page. When I saw that the ad had generated over 300 engagements I was delighted, but then I discovered that many of those engagements were likes or picture-clicks, none of which benefited my bottom line. In total, that $50 ad campaign generated six website clicks, only three of which actually stayed long enough to show-up on my backend metrics, none stayed for more than 30 seconds and none purchased anything.
Facebook also allows you to pay for campaigns that promote your page and results in page likes. The problem is, you can pay $1 to $1.50 per like from an account in the US or UK, and because Facebook has a tendency to hide liked pages from timelines, only showing those that have actually been promoted, these page likes are next to worthless.
Paid for Impressions
There are numerous high traffic websites that charge you several hundred dollars for packages of impressions. These sites typically charge between $200 and $500 per 50,000 impressions of an article or video. They rely on the fact that the average buyer will do a quick sum in their head and assume that it’s a good deal.
After all, even if only 1/50th of these impressions leads to an actual read/view, 1/10th of them leads to a click and 1/10 of those leads to a sale, that’s 1,000 views, 100 clicks and 10 sales—not bad for a couple hundred.
In actual fact, they can generate as few as 20 clicks and 0 sales because it’s possible for 1 user to record multiple impressions and an impression can be everything from someone clicking on and off the page, to someone browsing past it.
There is a reason these websites sell their ad-space directly rather than using Google Adsense, and that’s because they know they can get 10x to 20x more for it from some poor sap who doesn’t understand how low the conversion rate can be.
Twitter, like Facebook, massively overcharges and their advertising is simply not viable for small businesses. The “Sponsored Tweets” are out of the question from the get-go, as these campaigns begin at 6 figures and go much higher from there. You can, however, sponsor your account and get this placed in prominent position, leading to more page likes.
The problem is, the average return on investment is around 1 like for every $0.50 to $4 spent. As any Twitter user can attest, the vast majority of users will pay little attention to any of the people they follow or the content they tweet, and they’ll pay even less attention if they followed that person on a whim and not because they saw an interesting tweet.
Think how many accounts you see with several hundred followers and no activity—this could be you if you use Twitter promotions, but you could be spending $1200 for the honor of having just 300 followers.
Newspapers
Small businesses are of the belief that getting their name in the paper will give them a huge boost, so they go out of their way to try and make this happen, dropping thousands on PR companies or direct ads. The problem is, newspapers don’t have large readerships these days and they never provide a good ROI.
Even in my days of big budget marketing, the best we ever managed was a return of around $0.05 for every $1 spent. I’ve also seen this myself after recently dropping a few hundred on a few key placements about herbal tea that ultimately resulted in sales worth $20.
Alternatives
A lot of PR companies and ad firms will dismiss any talk of ROI by telling you that they generated good “exposure”, as if this was a thing that had a tangible value. These days the average person is hit with hundreds of brand messages a day, and the only way for them to remember yours if if they see it multiple times on multiple platforms, do don’t believe this exposure nonsense.
As a small business, you need to know that for every $1 you spend on advertising you’re getting at least $0.50 back. One of the best ways to do this is to invest in a good SEO strategy, cutting corners where possible by doing some of the work yourself.
This is one of the only effective ways to get a solid return on your ad spend and to stop your marketing budget from overspilling. Google Ads is also very effective, especially if you focus on Shopping Ads, which can return anywhere from $0.50 to $2 for every $1 spent if you take time to optimize the ads.
