What is the Most Bang For My Buck

starting a business, costs can be a big deterrent to growth. Oftentimes it is a question of the chicken and the egg and many business owners don’t know how to market without taking loans out.

The difficulty with marketing is that most of it is long-term. You can get some immediate success with a few platforms but others take sustained investment to pay off. To add to the pain, many advertising options don’t work for some business models but  by the time they figure it out, there isn’t enough money to try a different avenue.

Finding the happy medium

Usually the best option is to try multiple options with low investment up-front. Expect that not all of them will work so you can unbiased see what does and doesn’t work.

I will outline a few options that will give you the most bang for your buck and why in this article. As I mentioned not all avenues work for all businesses so start with low budgets to test the marketing funnel before increasing your spend.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is really popular right now for advertising due to the targeting. I am not a Facebook advertising Wiz of any sorts but I have seen a little success with B2C businesses. B2B I haven’t been able to create any success which does not mean it isn’t possible, I just think it is a little more difficult.

With Facebook you can set your budget at $1 per day but I would recommend $5 for some actual data. Then give it at least a week to run and then measure results. With this type of option you only spend around $35 and if it doesn’t work you haven’t lost thousands to find out.

Google Display with Adwords

Google has a reputation for being difficult to use and expensive. All of the ads are show on a bidding platform so the more competitive a keyword is the more it will cost. There are some cheaper forms of adwords though that you can use and drive your costs down.

Image and video ads are shown only on websites that have adsense installed. There are a lot of them and unlike the main search engine, the costs are usually significantly less.

You have the option to target specific sites or you can go for categories or keyword specific pages. This makes it very helpful to target your audience based on their interests.

Much like Facebook I would recommend going at it with a small budget so you can test it before investing large amounts.

Reddit Thread Advertising

Did you know Reddit has advertising options for the top of the subreddits and sidebars? The cost is actually pretty cheap as well so if your audience has a large enough following on a subreddit I would say give it a look as well.

Regardless of what you are looking to market, a solid plan is to test first and then invest in advertising. Finding the biggest bang for your buck is the most important part of advertising, otherwise you will be leaving money on the table.

Your Experience

Do you have any great advertising funnels for your business? Feel free to leave them in the comments and any that aren’t spam will be posted. Thanks for contributing!