Your Budget Will Dictate What You Can Do – Prioritisation Is Everything

Having a plan is one thing. Having the team, time, and budget to execute that plan is another thing entirely. 

Unfortunately, without all 3 it’s difficult for a business (particularly a small business) to achieve all the ambitious digital goals they tend to set.

A key process we undertake with clients upon onboarding is defining success. More specifically, defining success given a businesses operational parameters and constraints. To be blunt, a client’s budget will often dictate what we strategically suggest.

Our goal is to get the best result and return on investment possible for our clients, both in budget, and time.

Let’s explore this through an example. 

Let’s say a client with a relatively modest budget approaches us with the desire to build a new website. Ultimately, they’re aiming to get a greater influx in leads and higher conversion rates across their site as they head into a key sales season. 

The reality, however, may be that the budget the client possesses would be the cost of the site, not accounting for the amount of time to build it in its entirety – without the guarantee of an influx in traffic.

In this scenario, with budget and time key considerations, we may suggest to the client that they would be better suited to (in the short term) update their current site, or perhaps build landing pages for some of their expected high-traffic pages, with the goal of doing a full-site build at a later date. 

The freeing up of both budget and time would then allow resources to be put to more income generating activities, for example paid search, or social media ads. Once a consistent return on ad spend (ROAS) has been achieved, we may then pivot and suggest the site redevelopment. 

The key takeaway is that sometimes there may be a better way of achieving your goal.

Building Your Brand Organically Is Great, But It’s A Long Game.

Building a brand organically from the ground up is the stuff of dreams. 

Unfortunately, we mean that as a double entendre.

It would be great to build a brand and scale up to a successful 6,7, or 8+ figure business organically, but the reality is in this day and age, that seems more like the stuff of dreams.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t aim to build through organic means and channels, but to remain competitive, we would caution you about putting all your eggs in one basket.

Let’s explore why.

A key point to consider is your expectation of both the short and long term. Building up a strong organic presence, whether through search engines, such as Google, or across social media platforms, such as LinkedIn and Instagram, are always great ways to gain brand awareness and traction, however, to achieve these feats, you often need research, planning, content, hard work, and most importantly, time. Luxuries of which some smaller businesses don’t have. In saying that, it’s important not to reject this approach all together, but like most things, find balance.

One of the core services we offer at Kings Digital is strategy development. In short, we work with clients to define metrics of digital success, select appropriate digital channels, and start a clear reporting structure.

This process often results in the development of a detailed 6–12-month plan relevant to the client’s business. Within this plan, clients can expect to find a framework for achieving their desired outcomes, which in most cases contains a mixed marketing approach that is tailored specifically for the client to achieve the right outcomes at the right time.

Below is a recent example that exemplifies the case in point.  

We recently had a lead come in asking for assistance with their website SEO. Of course we did our due diligence, performed a digital audit on the brand and made some interesting discoveries.

Note: our sole purpose as a digital agency is to help clients achieve their digital goals. However, we wouldn’t be doing our clients justice if we didn’t delve deeper into their desires and uncover the ‘why’. 

In this case, there were many other areas digitally that could (and would) have a greater effect and ROI than just focusing on SEO alone, and as such, we advised against this approach.

Now you may be wondering to yourself: “Why would they not suggest optimising for search volume?”, especially when the client is asking for it.

In this scenario a few bits of context are required to understand our suggestions. For one, the client wanted to see immediate success. Secondly, the service this client was offering was highly specific with minimal search traffic for their desired keywords. Lastly, when searched, the client already appeared high up the page organically on Google. 

So for this client, the pain point wasn’t their inability to make their audience aware of the brand – it was the inability to promote the actual category and service.

As a result, we suggested adjusting their ad spend to focus predominantly on Meta ads (as it suited their audience), and ultimately they achieved a successful outcome. 

This leads us to point 3.

You’re Only As Good As Your Creative

It shouldn’t be understated the power a high-quality (and relevant) creative can have on a brand’s digital marketing efforts.

Posting content, sharing articles, and running display ads are all great forms of content marketing. But, they all have one thing in common – If the content (creative) isn’t good, then it’s an opportunity missed. 

For smaller brands competing in highly competitive markets, high-quality creatives can be a noticeable point of difference on a digital marketing front. Even in the ‘Meta-sphere’, there has been a gigantic shift in the power the creative has on an ads-front. The introduction of the Dynamic Creative function within Meta Ads is a perfect example. In short, Meta’s Dynamic Creative feature tests multiple creatives to determine which is the most effective ad variant for the relevant audience.

3 considerations when making content for your brand are:

Question industry norms

Just because “no one does that”, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.

Video is (still) king

Video engagement is considerably higher in most cases when compared to still image content. 

Create with purpose

It’s too easy to fall into the trap of making content for the sake of it. Create content with purpose and get results on purpose.

Want to Learn More?

If you’ve gotten this far, we hope you’re a bit more informed about what it takes to effectively market your business in the digital sphere.

If you’d like to learn more about our expertise and how we may be able to support your business goals, feel free to reach out.