Chapter 1: Introduction
The long term advantages of a consistent and diverse marketing strategy can easily be overlooked by the budding entrepreneur looking to make a profit as soon as possible. It might be tempting to push your marketing to the side for now, or perhaps run a couple short promotions or campaigns when it happens to fit the budget. While this approach is a solid strategy for the holiday season or a specific sale you are running, singular, one-off marketing campaigns should never be the backbone of your brand awareness strategy.
Especially if you’re looking to run campaigns through Google, Facebook, or TikTok ads, it’s absolutely critical that you have a consistent and adequate budget. Smaller budget campaigns tend to drive disproportionately worse results compared to well-funded ventures. The reason for this is data. Modern digital ads platforms leverage data gathered by your campaigns to adjust their AI delivery systems for maximum conversion potential. By spending less money, you show your ads to less people, and end up giving the ads algorithm less data to base its predictions on. As you continue to spend more, your ad account gains a clearer picture of what your ideal customer looks like in terms of demographics. In turn, your results will get cheaper and better as you gain more data.
Overall, a good marketing strategy should be both diverse in its approach and consistent. Take a look at your finances and figure out a monthly budget for your advertising campaigns. Whatever your number is, you should be able to handle the cost for around 3-6 months without a return. This is not to say that your campaigns couldn’t be wickedly profitable day 1 - but you shouldn’t count on it. A 3-6 month buffer is a solid baseline in terms of deciding a healthy advertising budget, and should ensure consistency and sustainability.
A Note About Dropshipping: The advertising philosophy and applications covered in this course, while applicable to dropshipping, are intended for more traditional businesses generally with existing revenue. However, definitely feel free to use this info for dropshipping if you’re so interested.