January is upon us which means it's the time of year businesses freak out in a quest to make the new year better than the last.

There’s energy in the air after a Christmas break which often see’s a lot of reflection and rest and from this everyone wants to hit the new year running!

The savvy business owners have already planned Q1 and all the marketing activity is in place. However the off the cuff business owners are looking for ways to start Q1 with a bang. A lot of the time this looks like spending £ online in order to get a head start on revenue.

We always bang on about the good, the bad and the ugly when online advertising. In this quick fire blog we wanted to give you our top six “things” to have in place to ensure the odds of spending money online is in your favour…

1. Know your customer lifetime value. 

This is one of the most important numbers to figuring out how much you can afford to spend online to acquire one customer. You need to know the ins and outs of this no matter the industry you’re in.

The downfall of not knowing this apart form the obvious of going broke is that you might be underestimating how much you can spend online to acquire a customer. The more wiggle room you have the more aggressively you can scale. There’s even some brands we’ve worked with that can afford to lose money on the front end as they’re so confident in the customer lifetime value. 

2. Tracking - Often seen as the boring side of business. 

Most people that grow a business are “visionaries”. They have a vision of what they want to create and are AWESOME at getting the fire started but shit at keeping it going.

The small intrinsic things like tracking are often missed because they’re not in the visionaries mind of the business (we are talking from experience here…one of our founders is a text book visionary so don’t take offence!).

However, tracking across your platform is the only way to know if you’re running successful marketing or not. Make sure you have the appropriate tracking in place (GA, Facebook pixels or whatever you need in order to track via platform).

The downside of having this wrong is getting all your numbers mixed up. We’ve even seen horror stories of pixels miss firing and registering double the value of sales which nearly bankrupted a business.

3. Speed is everything…for once speed is impressive! 

We’ve done numerous blogs on website and landing pages…check them out here.

Speed is everything in the online world. If people are waiting an age to get on your site or page then you will lose…period. Bear in mind that every second loses around 5-10% of users. We are in an age where convenience is the new currency. Making people wait in this format is a no no.

Speed your online assets up and make sure they look good on both mobile and desktop in order to get the highest conversion from your online marketing.

4. Have a good product and an even better offer.

Sounds stupidly simple…but it’s not. Many people in the service business world know that they’ve got improvements to make. Just check your refund or usage rate of your product (if online).

Reputation is everything, word of mouth/referrals needs to be a big part of your business and if it’s not, its largely to do with the lack of service you’re giving that people aren’t quite ready to shout from the roof tops.

Furthermore to this you need a sensational offer to put in front of your demographic. An offer really can make or break your online marketing so don’t be scared to switch it up and change the angle of attack.

5. Already be making money from other platforms

There’s too many brands that are reliant on ad platforms like Facebook without paid ads they make zero sales. Making sure your eggs aren’t all in one platform is a good idea but more so than that, be in a position where you can make sales without ads.

Any ad platform is just an amplifier of what you’re already doing. It will amplify the good of your business but if you’ve got holes it will show them. 

Be diverse with your revenue streams and don’t just have one unless it’s fully in your control. 

6. Know your audience

There are a lot of people in the world which is amazing for opportunity. However it also means when advertising online its so so easy to blow through your budget and make zero sales. Segmentation of audience and segmented messaging is the key to winning online. Start with one specific audience, with specific messaging and grow as the results come in. Researching this phase is similar to preparing a house for paintwork. The more time you spend on preparation the easier the execution phase will be.