At Kaya, we have helped dozens of startups launch and scale paid marketing from scratch. In this post, we’ll share our insights and 5 key areas to consider when strategizing for your paid advertising:
Should you start running ads?
Paid ads is a good idea in these two scenarios:
Paid ads can be your powerful growth channel given the right investments.
Pros:
Cons:
A common pitfall for startups venturing into their first paid ad campaigns is losing momentum after a few weeks, resulting in wasted funds and missed learning opportunities.
Hence, before jumping into paid ads, ask yourself:
Choosing which type of paid ads and platform for your digital ads ultimately depends on where your users are. Think about your target audience’s demographics, interests, and behaviours, which platform suit their profiles?
The common types of paid ads include:
Paid search advertising is a type of digital marketing strategy where brands place their ads in the search engine result pages (SERP) of Google, Bing, and other search engines.
It’s great for driving traffic and getting high-quality leads, and eventually customers.
Paid social advertising is a method of advertising your product or service on social media to a targeted audience.
It’s great for building brand awareness and retargeting specific audience.
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💡 Tip: Don’t just spray-and-pray. Do a competitive analysis to find out where and who your competitors are targeting. Learn about their Ideal Customer Profile and messaging that resonates.
If you’re just starting out, consider allocating an amount that's manageable enough to risk, yet substantial enough to collect meaningful data.
If your budget is too low, it takes longer for the ads platform to optimise your campaigns, thus lower performance and slower learning for you.
If your budget is too high, your ROI will be low as paid ads is subjected to the law of diminishing return.
💡 Tip: Try out this template we use to get an estimate of budget, conversions and customer acquisition cost.
You can't improve what you don't measure.
Below a list of digital marketing metrics you should know, sorted by importance in the context of paid advertising.
💡 Tip: Compare your metrics against industry benchmark or other channels.
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If you have started acquiring customers from multiple sources, it is essential to measure and track various KPIs and break them down by channel. This allows you to understand:
Struggling to find answers to the questions above? Setting up a minimum viable marketing analytics stack could help.
If you’re just starting out, the end product can be as simple as having a spreadsheet where you manually update KPIs regularly (weekly/monthly). However, the key is to have reliable sources from which you can obtain each metric value.
At a later stage, you may want to invest time and money to build a data analytics pipeline that provides access to raw data and allows you to create custom dashboards.
The following diagram shows the high-level architecture of a marketing analytics stack:
Essential components:
For more details, please check out this article. 👉 How to Build a Minimum Viable Marketing Analytics Stack
We've just uncovered the 5 key areas to consider when strategizing for your paid advertising.
From when to run paid ads, targeting platform and audience, budgeting, metrics to campaign optimization - the exciting journey has only just begun.
Think of Kaya as your extended growth team. We provide services and a marketing analytics platform, empowering startups to grow 10x faster without having to hire a traditional agency or freelancer:
✅ We launch and optimize your marketing campaigns across multiple channels.
✅ Customized dashboard to track CAC and all marketing KPIs.
✅ Task management tool so you spend time on growth rather than project management.
✅ Logs to track progress and learnings.
© Kaya Technologies Ltd.
