The Small Business Marketing Paradox
Businesses transitioning from small to small-medium often face a marketing paradox. You know you need to spend money to grow, which usually involves hiring an agency. Many ‘entry-level’ marketing agencies focus on social media, while comprehensive agencies are financially out of reach. The problem with social media agencies is that while they can show engagement metrics or actions driving traffic to your site, they rarely demonstrate how much revenue their efforts bring in (although we would argue that they are rarely bringing in much revenue - Read More).
This lack of clarity makes it difficult to assess your return on investment, often leading to short client-agency relationships. Information is value, and the ambiguity surrounding the effectiveness of social media efforts inherently devalues their service.
In-House Social Media; Cost Effective, Time Inefficient
Executing social media in-house presents its own challenges. Whether it’s you or a staff member, the time and mental energy invested often yield unclear or inconsistent results. Social media should not be your primary marketing tool—it’s untrackable, unreliable, and demands a heavy upfront and ongoing time investment.
It is hard to generate enough value through organic social media alone to make it worth your while. That's why we don’t take on clients solely for social media management and always pair it with more measurable strategies like SEO, direct marketing, and paid advertising. For most small businesses, we simply don’t think standalone social media management is worth the money we have to charge for our time.
It’s All About Measurable ROI
With paid advertising, every cent you spend is accounted for. You know how many people saw your ad, how many clicked on it, what they did after they clicked, and most importantly, how many turned into paying customers. This means you can fine-tune your campaigns and focus your budget where it will make the biggest impact. You’re not just guessing—you're making data-driven decisions.
When operating with a limited budget, you must be absolutely confident that you are getting a worthwhile return. If you don’t have the resources to offer a scattershot approach (aiming to maximise brand awareness without concern for the short-term returns), then being able to precisely track your ROI is crucial.
Capture Untapped Market Share
Paid ads allow you to target specific groups of people that you aren’t currently reaching. This isn’t about casting a wide net; it’s about hitting the specific audiences you know are valuable, and for whatever reason, they just don’t seem to come to your business. Whether it's a demographic you're not currently engaging with, a new geographic area, or a certain type of customer demand that you believe you can satisfy but are failing to reach, paid ads let you capture untapped market share, bringing new customers through your door who wouldn’t have found you otherwise.
What We Recommend
There are so many different platforms you can use to run paid ads. We have found the most success for small businesses in Google, but other platforms, such as Meta, Tiktok, Linkedin & more can certainly reap strong rewards (but please, for the love of god, don’t spend money on print).
However, particularly with Google, you best exercise caution; new machine learning based advertising strategies can, at times, get really really good at generating the conversions you were going to get anyways…
How Google Ads Can Present a False ROI
If you open up a Google Ads account, create a ‘performance max campaign’, auto generate the headlines and images, and let it rip, it may well generate significant numbers of conversions, but it does so by simply paying for the clicks you were already getting. The machine learning algorithm figures out that if it just shows your ‘ads’ to everyone who is already searching for your business, they all seem to convert (crazy, right?). It creates a ‘false ROI’ of sorts; it might appear that you are doing 10:1 on your investment, but your sales aren’t increasing, and you are now paying for those clicks. Meanwhile, Google is making a killing.
Of course, there are nuances at play if competitors are bidding on your keywords, but that’s a whole other can of worms. Generally, for this to be a problem, you need to be large enough that you have highly intelligent, well-resourced competitors, and you are likely dominating some corner of the market.
Obviously, since you want to avoid this, you might configure your ads to not display for certain terms, so that the machine learning doesn’t keep wasting your money. But then, all of a sudden, you find that it is actually quite hard to generate cost-efficient sales, and it is not as easy to run Google Ads as the Google Ads for Google Ads with the lady and the bowl cuts made it seem.
If you are interested in exploring paid advertising, contact us about either a one-off consulting call to help plan your strategy, ongoing support, or outsourcing your ads to our team entirely. If you want to have a crack on your own, we wish you the best; we will always be here if you aren’t happy with your results.