– How should I start advertising my brand online?
– Which channels should I do first?
– What budget do I need to start?
In any online business, understanding each advertising channel and choosing the one that’s right for your business is a must!
It will give you a better ROI (return of investment).
Everyone thinks that if they can advertise on all channels, they will make more money.
This is true, however, at the same time it can also cause you to lose more money than you can ever imagine.
Before you start advertising, you need to know that not all advertising is equal and not all can turn into profits.
In order to answer the question: “How should I start?”
My answer was and is still the same: Go 80/20.
I am not sure if you’ve heard about the 80/20 rule.
If you haven’t, let me explain to you as it is a really great fundamental, not just for advertising, but for your business as well.
The 80/20 rule basically means 80% of your revenue is actually brought by 20% of what you do.
Let’s look at a traditional business like a restaurant. In a number of successful local restaurants, 80% of their incomes are actually generated by 20% of their customers.
These customers might open expensive bottles of wines and even come dine on a daily basis.
If the restaurant owners focus on these 20% of customers, they will actually make even more money.
Same way with advertising. 80% of your revenue is actually achieved by only 20% of your traffic source.
Within that 80/20 rule, there’s another 80/20 rule within the specific traffic source.
80% of your revenue is achieved by 20% of your placements or campaigns within the advertising channel.
The 80/20 rule is not set in stone, sometimes it may vary by a couple percentage points.
But the important thing is to know that many successful businesses follow this rule.
Now what does this all mean to online advertising?
Basically, I want you to be prepared that not all traffic sources may work for your funnel or your business.
You may have more converting traffic from one source over another.
When one advertising source does not work for you, drop it and come back at a later date.
Then focus on the ones that are generating you 80% of your revenue and build on it.
The ultimate goal is to break that 80/20 rule and try to make sure you have all traffic sources running.
I may sound very contradictory here because I just talked about the 80/20 rule and now I’m telling you to make sure you run as many traffic sources as possible.
Let me explain. Your business is like the roof of your house.
The roof has four or more supportive columns. Each one represents your traffic source.
One can be Facebook, one Google ads, one YouTube, one TikTok.
You can also add Bing, Organic social, Google Display network etc.
Your goal is to build as many columns as possible to lift and sustain your business.
This way if some of your traffic sources are not converting, you will still have other traffic sources or columns to support your business.
If you put all eggs into one basket with only one or two traffic sources, your business will collapse when these columns collapse.
When you first start advertising, you really need to apply the 80/20 rule and then slowly move towards getting all sources to work.
The 80/20 rule is basically helping you get off the ground faster and not wasting all your time on a single traffic source that is not profitable for you.
When you run out of traffic sources, you return and re-visit the non-converting ones and try to create custom funnels for each and strengthen your columns.
But on which channel should I start?
At Byrne Media, we mostly specialised on Meta as an acquisition channel.
So I suggest everyone start on FB. Why?
Because it is the advertising medium online right now that is the easiest to get on without any commitment of how much you have to spend.
Anyone can actually advertise on Facebook. If you are able to make a profitable campaign on Facebook, you will most likely do well on other traffic sources.
Meta/Facebook’s ad inventory is enormous. It’s a powerhouse right now and with their targeting capabilities, you can literally advertise to your exact audience.
This is extremely powerful!
Facebook is perfect for beginners ONLY if you know what you are doing.
If you are going there right now without knowing how to make your campaigns work, you will lose a lot of money.
When you master Facebook and you are profitable, you an look at other traffic sources like Google ads, TikTok ads etc.
IMO… Google is the best quality traffic source you can ever imagine and get your hands on. It has so much to offer as an advertising platform.
Advertising on Google is a dream for all advertisers but it’s always just a dream for most of them because it is the most compliant-driven network in the online industry.
You need to know exactly what you are doing and how to get your website to be compliant before you can ever start or think about advertising on Google.
Google shopping we like the most! It’s really easy to implement for eCom brands.
Search and display ads are great too
Then after Google ads words, I would suggest adding a YouTube channel. YouTube can work incredibly well if you know how to produce engaging videos.
YouTube has a lot of inventory and placements and it’s not so hard to make it work.
Especially with ‘before’ ads where 30s without click is free.
Then for the fourth column I suggest TikTok Ads if it makes sense for your business demographic and you have some great creatives to work with
We obviously will not go into all available ad platforms and channels, but these four ad platforms I think are the most important for eCom brands we mostly work with.
We start with FB and support you there and when you’re ready to scale, we can slowly add other channels as well.
I hope that was helpful.
Have a great day 😉
If you need help growing your ecom stores revenue, get in touch via my DM/ and let’s get a conversation going to see if we can help you move the needle forward.
