You’ve launched your startup and now you need to get customers. Great! But how are you going to advertise?
If you’re advertising online, you’re stuck with an ad duopoly: Google and Meta. I could spend thousands of words arguing whether or not that’s a good thing, but let’s skip that argument and jump straight to what matters, which is how to properly leverage the two platforms since, no matter how much I write, those are the tools we’re stuck with.
The challenge for most entrepreneurs using Google Ads and Facebook Ads for the first time is that entrepreneurs aren’t usually digital marketing experts, and the platforms are an unholy mix of confusing and powerful. They’re confusing because the dashboards and instructions sometimes feel like they were created by aliens. And they’re powerful because, once you start running ads, they have the ability to send thousands of people to a website almost instantly.
That ability to drive enormous amounts of traffic seems great until you discover you’ve spent lots of money and gotten very few customers.
This is exactly what was happening to an entrepreneur I’ve been working with for the past year. He finally launched his startup, began buying online ads, and quickly spent thousands of dollars without getting any sales.
“Why didn’t anyone ever tell me marketing my startup was going to be so hard?” the entrepreneur huffed as he came into my office, sat down, and took out his laptop. “And expensive,” he added with a sigh.
The entrepreneur had come to my office asking for help with his digital ad campaigns that weren’t getting any conversions. The petty part of me who enjoys a good “I told you so” moment wanted to mention how, before he’d even launched his startup, I was advising him to stop worrying so much about his product and focus more on developing a viable customer acquisition strategy because that was going to be the hard part, but it didn’t seem like an appropriate moment. Instead, I asked to see his…