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I'm an online marketing coach and launch strategist who loves helping female grow successful online businesses!
It is incredibly tempting to invest in advertising to grow your business right away. But it's not always the best option. Here's how to know if you're ready for online advertising.
Not sure what I mean about online advertising? I'm talking Facebook ads, Google ads, and retargeting. The whole gammut, the things that will really elevate your business growth. But if you're not ready, you could end up throwing away a whole bunch of cash and only have the dreaded reach and engagement with very little in the way of sales in return for your ads.
Related: 4 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Be Using Facebook Ads
Three ways to know if you are ready for paid advertising:
If you're using free marketing channels, people are buying and you're getting great feedback and reviews, it's time to turn on the cash machine. It's very likely that you'll get a great return, as long as you've got a good strategy and you meet the below criteria.
On the flipside, if people aren't buying even though you're putting your products and services out there, this is a surefire sign that you shouldn't be advertising! Keep tweaking your offering before you even consider ads.
There is no point in spending money on advertising if you're already stretched to capacity and you're going to turn down new enquiries because you're fully booked.
So before you get ahead of yourself and turn the ad tap on, consider if you're ready for an influx of customers. Do you have the staff, resources, stock and time to deal with it all? If not, you need to spend some time getting your operations set up for growth. At least have a plan, start with a small budget and add the extra staff and resources as you go!
Make sure that you can say yes way more than you say no.
While online advertising can be amazing for traffic numbers, it does require time, skill and dedication to optimise this traffic so that it's useful to your business. Anyone can use ads to send a hoard of traffic your way, but remember you're paying for every single click. Therefore they've got to be the right customers and you've got to be serving them the right offer at the right time.
You have two options here.
Firstly, you need to have the time to learn the platform you're advertising on in depth, and you've got to have a budget set aside just for testing, learning, and making mistakes! You could even buy an online course to get a head start. In a nutshell, this is for you if you're willing to do the work to get the results that you know you can, since your product rocks!
The second option is to be prepared to stump up the cash to pay someone who knows what they're doing with ads. A professional can generally diagnose what is going wrong with an ad campaign within a couple of hours, and make sure you're not wasting money.
In a nutshell, you either need the time or the extra cash to outsource. Don't go into paid ads without either of those things, you'll leave with a sour taste in your mouth and the “ads just don't work for my business” syndrome. This just isn't true if the right approach is taken, and I don't want you to miss out on the possibilities for growth you can experience with ads.