Many companies fall into the trap of using the same marketing strategies and tactics that they launched with as they later expand and grow. What worked to get the word out about your product in the early days may no longer be suitable when you’re an established business with different goals, even if you’re still trying to expand your customer base.
The Launch Stage: Test Before You Commit
When you’re a new business, you don’t have the luxury of making assumptions about your audience, messaging, or channels. So you have to spend on CPM-based reach campaigns to try different approaches and measure the reactions, in terms of CTRs, view-through rates and other indicators.
The Growth Stage: Volume and Format Diversification
Once you’ve proved your audiences and messaging, the game changes. Now it’s about speed – taking market share, ramping traffic to landing pages, and growing user acquisition before others do.
Customer acquisition costs have naturally increased over time. Paid search and paid social don’t provide a business case to increase traffic volume when the price-per-click just keeps increasing and your target audience is clicked on by every other business in that sector.
Format diversity pays off. Push notifications send ads direct to opted-in users, so your engagement rate won’t drop too much as the volume scales. Popunders provide the highest volume of impressions with the least friction – you aren’t blocking users’ view of what they’re there for, so resistance and reach is minimal and maximal respectively. They both drive landing page traffic without the search auction.
By this stage, finding the best cpm network offering verified, non-incentivized traffic is your biggest concern that most teams don’t realize. Poor traffic gives you false impressions and ruins your conversion data – if you’re not measuring the costs of the result of the eye behind that impression then you’ll never be able to optimize.
You need a network that has direct publisher relationships and transparent sourcing of the traffic.
Shift the budget split here to 60% conversion focused and 40% awareness. You’re still building the brand, but you need volume.
The Maturity Stage: Defend and Optimize
For a more established business with a firm base of customers, a different set of problems arises in terms of advertising. What to do with competition, for one. And how to get more out of your budget than you have been, for another.
With all this in mind, ROAS is for you! Not that it isn’t important for everyone but, at this stage – far more important than impressions, clicks, or even conversion numbers – is making sure that you are bringing in more than you are spending on advertising. Otherwise, why would you do it?
Start using the LTV data you’ve been hopefully collecting for some time (and continue collecting) to more effectively hone in on high-value customers. If you know that customers from a particular source or through a specific medium tend to stick around or spend more than average – then spend more to get them. Vice versa, if some are costing you less but also clearly don’t bring in as much, then cut those.
It also helps to segment LTV data by channel rather than treating it as a single figure. A customer acquired through push traffic may behave differently over twelve months than one who came in through paid search. Knowing which channels produce your best long-term customers shapes where the next pound of budget goes.
Regularly check your results. Not only for the “this is making us money and that isn’t” component – which is crucial, but also to ensure that expansion is happening in a sustainable way and not as a result of the same people simply seeing more of your ads. The latter happens far more often than you might think – and one way to avoid it is by, as before, regularly updating your creatives and keeping your placements fresh.
Matching Your Network to Your Stage
One aspect to consider is that the advertising platforms and networks suitable for a launch-stage business often don’t scale well, and the networks designed for scale performance can be too much for a company that’s still discovering its customer base.
Early on, you require adaptable minimum spends, self-serve tools, and insights on where your ads are being displayed. In the growth stage, you need high volumes, diverse formats, and assurances of quality traffic. In the mature stage, you need precise targeting features and accurate ROAS reporting.
Measure networks based on the actual stage you are in, not the one you aspire to be in. A self-serve platform offering direct access to publishers will assist a growing business more than a managed service that removes the necessary levers for you to get a better return.
The strategy that propels you from zero to attracting interest, won’t necessarily take you from attracting interest to dominating the market. Be aware of the stage you’re at.
