Marketing costs for online business

mondeo

I have been running my own business for more then 10 years, it's the kind of business that sells itself. I spent a very small amount of money marketing this over the years as it just wasn't really necessary.
However, I am starting a second business which is online based and this is going to require marketing. SEO, Fb marketing and a few other marketing gimmicks is what I have been told. I never had an online business before and it seems marketing an online business is going to be expensive. I have made a phone call to one marketing company in Dublin who wanted a lump of money up front which I refused to, plus they want a monthly figure. To be honest I didn't get the impression they were interested in my success, just trying to strangle thousands out of me on the spot with promises to do do this and that. I wouldn't pay up a shed load of money to someone up front with promises.

Can anyone here with an online business give me a strategy on how to market ? Reasonable expectations of costs ? My website is advertising a service for home owners. My competition is against a handful of others out there. I have a lovely site already made and it's ready to go, just no one knows who the hell I am yet.

Cheers

jimmii

The lump sum does sound a bit ropey especially if they've made you feel like they don't really care. A decent agency will make you feel like you're their best client even if your spend is pretty small. Imo it's worth using a 3rd party so ypu can focus on the bits you do know and let them take care of the marketing. A decent agency will put together a proper campaign for you to review and you'll get an account manager so you have one person you get to know and who gets to you know and your company. The success of the marketing is obviously in both your interests so worth getting one that fits well with you. Online advertising is pretty dam expensive and it can be hard to get a decent roas so important to get a company familiar with something along the lines of what you do even if they don't have exact experience of your industry.

antoinolachtnai

I don’t know, maybe you need to look at the basics here.

You are thinking of the marketing as something that is layered on to the offering. But really the way things have gone, marketing is really at the heart of any new offering, especially online.

A marketing strategy is a big undertaking especially for a new launch fir an innovative business. It’s not something a marketing agency can do on a hope and a prayer.

The marketer isn’t going to do a deal based on returns with you. They hardly know you and have no idea how your model really works.

Rather than forking out a lot of money I would suggest you take the time to really find out more about the whole thing and consider your plans carefully.

One thing that budgeting for marketing really drives home is the importance of the knowing the value of recruiting a customer. That might be one place to start.

IrishZeus

Hi op,

I spent a few years working on an online agency business, for international markets. It’s an extraordinarily difficult and expensive task to get known in foreign markets, and extremely hard to get proper SEO rankings if the sector you’re in is competitive.

Are you looking at domestic/international market? Single or multi-lingual? Are you low volume, high value or vice-versa? Are you looking for early-stage or qualified leads from your campaigns? Do you generate content naturally or need to outsource this? Is google your RTM, or do you need to look at social media? You say home-owners - but are they the young or old? (Targeting strategies are completely different). There are so many factors in determining costs.

I (vastly) underestimated what was required at the time. I was fortunate to meet with one or two CEOs of globally recognised online businesses who gave me a lot of their time, and when they gave me the realistic figures for getting known in my target markets, I pivoted the business overnight.

I’ve since worked on an online presence as this is our strategy, but in very different ways. I’ve worked with ads agencies in the past (can recommend one, if you want) but eventually we took it in-house for cost savings.

Let me know if you want info. PM if needed.

P.

JohnRock

If you're providing a service, also depending on the cost, it will take longer to build up trust with your audience compared to a product. If it is a low cost service you should offer the service at a discount or for free in order to get customer testimonials which you can use as part of your marketing material.

Also, as it's a new service, you should offer free content to build up trust and authority. For example, you could offer a free video guide or pdf in return for an email. You can then nurture the relationship and send out discount offers to your email list.

Using Facebook to run ads will allow you to target in specific geographic areas as well as people within a certain age range. You can also run a conversations campaign so you only pay for people who have placed an order or those who have signup to your email list. You need to figure out how much each potential lead is worth and test different advertising strategies to see which one can deliver leads at the lowest cost or generate the highest profit.

The cost of a lead will vary widely depending on your target market. A good lead price for joining an email list is €1 - €3.

If your competitors are big enough you can run facebook ads to their customers. If you work in a niche though it's probably unlikely. Here is more information on facebook ads.

Trying taking a look on Fiverr or Upwork as it will be cheaper than hiring an agency based in Dublin.

Let me know how it goes as we're always looking to interview entrepreneurs for our website. (There is no charge as we get free content for our audience)

IrishZeus

JohnRock wrote: »

Let me know how it goes as we're always looking to interview entrepreneurs for our website. (There is no charge as we get free content for our audience)

Mind me asking which website it is JohnRock?

JohnRock

Softintro.com - Started recently. Had planned to do video interviews but with restrictions it's not possible.

silver2020

mondeo wrote: »

I have made a phone call to one marketing company in Dublin who wanted a lump of money up front which I refused to, plus they want a monthly figure. To be honest I didn't get the impression they were interested in my success, just trying to strangle thousands out of me on the spot with promises to do do this and that. I wouldn't pay up a shed load of money to someone up front with promises.

They'll get calls like that everyday and push away the small fry with these costs.

The place I'm involved with looked at outside agency too about 2 years ago and they quoted €5k a month service fee + all the advertising costs and they were serious. Pity they did a crap presentation. We ended up employing someone on a 3 days a week - he does 2 days with another company and has transform the business (it now has 23 staff)

I'd ask around for students in their final year of college of digital marketing. They'd relish the opportunity to add something to their portfolio and will probably know as much as the agency you called.

tacofries

Join the group 'Facebook Ad Buyers'. If you sift through the scammers and fakes then you will find someone good for around €500-1k per month. Don't sign in to a contract and their fee should not be related to ad spend. If they don't give you screenshots of their success for random dates that you choose then walk away (e.g. show me a screenshot of your results for the last 14 days). Also make sure they have success at some sort of scale- so many people think it's amazing to see someone spending €10 on ads and getting 5 sales from it. It's much more impressive to see an adspend of €1,000 resulting in 100 sales. Also don't be fooled by big agencies, Facebook ads are easier to implement and run than people like to make out. The issue with them is they are expensive and for a lot of products and services, no matter how good you are at fb ads, the base cost is too high so they will never be profitable. This isn't the case for every business though so its definitely worth finding someone good to give it a try.

Fb ads are just one piece of the puzzle. You need to be selling a decent product/service at a justifiable price on a pretty good website backed up by Facebook/Instagram ads that use appealing videos, images and texts. If any part of this is lacking then the whole chain can break down. At the same time don't strive for perfection.

All of the above can be done a budget thanks to Shopify and your mobile. Note that videos and images have to be appealing, not professional. UGC and homegrown content is a winner as far as digital marketing ads are concerned.

I speak about fb a lot but depending on your product or service there may be better alternatives. Obviously this refers to YouTube, Google Ads, Amazon Ads, Snapchat etc.

Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/adbuyers/?ref=share

FionMc

Sounds like your marketing to a national audience or possibly even international? Anyway, you'd be looking at at least 1k per month for SEO alone on the cheap end for this type of business, but more like 2k+