Over the course of a career, you’ll be fortunate enough to work on accounts across a variety of industries, platforms and regions. Each presents their own challenges and opportunities but one thing that stands out is the complexity of an account doesn’t necessarily scale with spend. In fact, accounts with smaller budgets can sometimes present the biggest challenge as there isn’t scope to run all the tests and campaigns you’d be able to with a larger spend.
This week, we’ll be taking a look at the optimisation of low budget accounts and how to set priorities effectively to drive the best results possible with a limited overall spend.
1) Identify Your Core Conversion Metric
Most accounts will have a number of conversion points they’re working towards with some, like sales, leads & revenue, focused on direct performance while other conversions are focused on brand goals like overall visibility. On a larger account, this isn’t a problem as there’s scope to optimise towards many different goals simultaneously. For smaller accounts this presents much more of a challenge as optimising towards many different conversions will spread budget too thin and lead to poor performance across all metrics.
Luckily, there’s a simple solution. When taking on a new account with a limited spend, identify the primary conversion and build the account around that metric. If it’s an ecommerce account, visibility isn’t as important as sales & revenue while an event promotion account should entirely focus on registrations & bookings. That’s not to say that the secondary goals aren’t important and they should be factored into overall performance but with a limited budget it’s crucial to gear all activity around the most important metric.
2) Focus On A Single Key Area
Whatever the industry, most businesses have a number of different products or services to promote via paid ads. In an account with a large budget, marketers have the freedom to build out many different campaigns for each business area with distinct strategies and goals for each. With a lower budget, marketers don’t have the same freedom and need to be smart when allocating spend.
After identifying your core conversion metric, identify the business area that’s likely to help you reach that goal. For an ecommerce business, this might be a particular product line that consistently generates sales. For an event promotion, focus your efforts on driving registrations for the next event rather than trying to spread budget across many different events in the future.
Focusing on a single area will allow you to narrow down your attention and optimisation efforts for the best results. This attention will lead to increased performance resulting in more conversions and is a surefire way to increase the available budget as the account sees success.
3) Be Ruthless With Low Performers
On a large account, time is your friend. With monthly budgets in the tens or hundreds of thousands, you have time to let low performing campaigns and focus areas respond to optimisation. When you only have a few hundred for a particular area in a given month, you don’t have the same freedom.
Optimisation should always focus on low performing areas first with a mixture of tactical and strategic changes made to boost account performance. However, if you’re not seeing any uplift after a month, take the decision to pause that activity and reinvest into areas that are working. This allows you to double down on what’s working while making space to build a new plan for activity that hasn’t worked as expected.
4) Test, Learn, Repeat
With a limited budget, the importance of every click is magnified. Every piece of activity should have a structured testing and optimisation plan in place to quickly identify successful tactics which can then be implemented elsewhere in the account. While larger, more mature accounts can get away with month on month optimisation, small budget accounts should be optimised daily to ensure that all spend is actively being used to push the account towards the primary conversion goal.
Long term optimisation and planning is important too. Along with the daily optimisation to maximise performance against spend, ensure there’s a monthly and annual roadmap focused on account growth. As you narrow down the account to what works, you don’t want to left without a plan for how to continue pushing the account forward in the future.
Small budget accounts are challenging, but not impossible. In order to achieve the best results, marketers need to be skilled at tactical & strategic thinking while also having the courage to quickly make decisions when things aren’t going to plan. Speed is essential for account performance as one quiet week can disrupt an entire quarter’s results and any optimisation should be focused around this way of thinking.
Whatever your budget, Scope Digital can assist with driving the best results possible. For more information, get in touch.