Paid marketing

It is important to choose the right advertising platforms to get tangible results. Firstly, identify which channels your target audience use, and what keywords they are searching for on search engines. You can do this by using Google Analytics.

You can learn more in these platform guides:

• Beginners guide to Google Analytics
• Google Ads
• Facebook Ads
• Instagram Ads
• TikTok Ads

To avoid wasting money, it’s key to set your objectives and plan what you want to achieve. Is that visits to a campaign landing page on your website or increased bookings? These guides are helpful in getting you started with putting your plan in to action:

How to set objectives in your marketing

Beginners guide to developing your marketing strategy | PDF 0.4MB

A marketing budget is a list of all the money a business plans to allocate to marketing. Particularly when budgets are tight, you want to ensure that you are getting as much back for every pound spent.

Once you have your marketing plan and goals set you should decide on your budget.

For paid marketing, you need to consider both the money you have to promote the advert, but also the cost of producing the advert. This might include new photography or producing a video. The budget you have available may impact which channel you choose for advertising – some are more expensive than others to run an advert.

Making the most of paid advertising will require testing and monitoring. Start with the platform your audience uses most and increase ad spend as you see results. Testing your ads will:

• boost performance of your adverts
• optimise the targeting of your audience
• let you learn more about what people want to see from your business
• give you more to analyse in your results to then take learnings for future paid activity

As with all marketing, it's important to track your results and evaluate these against your goals.

A crucial aspect of managing your marketing budget is regularly measuring the results of your efforts. Use analytics tools to track the performance of your digital marketing campaigns. 

Results of paid marketing can be checked easily on a daily or weekly basis, while more in-depth analysis should be done fortnightly or monthly. These checks are essential to make sure the performance is roughly what you would expect and that everything is running correctly. Your budget spending should be in line with the amount of time your campaign has to run – ie you have enough budget to cover the remaining days or weeks of the campaign. By checking regularly, you can catch and fix any issues early.