Ad Spend: Six Ways to Ensure You’re Making Every Dollar Count
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Advertising, in one form or another, is necessary to get right if you want to properly market your product or service and get the word out to potential customers. However, because of factors such as the complexity of the customer’s journey and the creative strategy that goes into advertising, determining and ensuring a high return on your investment can be a difficult task.
In this way, when you’re unsure whether the time and effort you put into your advertising strategy will yield the desired result, you have to be careful to make every dollar count. This ensures you don’t incur more costs than are absolutely necessary.
So how can businesses be more mindful about their ad budgets? The business experts of Rolling Stone Culture Council recommend the following six steps. Here, they outline their top tips for making your ad dollars count and ensuring a high return when it can often be challenging to do so.
Start With Micro-Campaigns
Drip before you drop. Start with micro-campaigns to test all elements of your larger campaign with various audiences. Analyze the data and iterate until you have a clearly defined strategy and creative approach for your target audience. Once you have the correct elements, you can confidently increase your spending to drive growth. – Michael Klein, Sunset Amusements
Monitor Your Sales Numbers
When we buy ads, we mark our calendars with the start and end dates. We monitor sales during that time to see if there is an uptick from what our ad was about, then adjust accordingly. You’d simply measure the week or month before the ad for comparison. We also like to try major-level advertising mixed in with local. – Susan Johnston, New Media Film Festival®
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Be Selective
Taking time to choose what you spend your money on isn’t simply about being frugal; it’s about being mindful. You want to ensure that you aren’t trying to manipulate or overwhelm your audience. Rather, there is a reason and purpose behind your ad that is relevant to what is happening and what they need to have or need to know. – Magen Baker, Bell + Ivy
Hire Slow, Fire Fast
Pour rocket fuel on what works, but stop throwing good money after bad on what doesn’t! The key to this is not locking yourself into any long-term contracts with ad or marketing providers. Negotiate those front-heavy and/or long-term contracts and provide yourself with an out if things don’t work. Too many get unnecessarily locked into unproductive and expensive long-term contracts. – Scott Curran, Beyond Advisers
Adopt a Crawl-Walk-Run Approach
Adopt a crawl-walk-run approach to make your ad spend count. Test your ads in a small, controlled environment to avoid overspending. Utilize A/B testing to compare various versions of your ads and run these campaigns side by side to identify the most effective elements. By carefully analyzing the performance, you can optimize your campaigns for maximum ROI before scaling up your investment. – Dan Serard, Cannabis Creative Group
Find a Way to Quantify Your Campaign’s Effectiveness
There has to be a way to quantify the effectiveness of an ad campaign. Does it lead to quantifiable sales within a short amount of time? Does it lead to actual clicks? Does it lead to more site traffic? More Google searches for your products? Anything that converts someone seeing the ad into taking action can be deemed a success, depending on your definition. – Zain Jaffer, Zain Jaffer Foundation