Adwords for Startups
Startups don’t have the same marketing budget as Apple or Microsoft, but what they do have is the ability to iterate quickly. This is why so many marketers love the creativity behind startup marketing campaigns.
The power of startup marketing comes from not having a 4-week wait to clear a campaign with your boss’s boss’s boss. In a startup, you can risk the brand because there usually isn’t one yet.
However, having this ability comes at a price, literally. You don’t have the same marketing budget as the large company waiting 4-weeks for brand quality control.
So what do you do when you have a low monthly budget and need to grow your user base 30% month over month to raise your next round?
Google Adwords should be running in the background as sales/BD does their outreach, regardless of the budget. There needs to be a growing baseline of leads feeding into sales/BD. Creating this flywheel early, is healthy for everyone on the team to know and understand.
In our opinion, 10%-20% of every dollar coming in (revenue) should be going to paid marketing like Adwords. That is a relatively low amount but in my experience founders and small startups are comfortable spending 10 cents out of every dollar to potentially make another dollar.
Adwords is an auction where companies compete for the amount they are willing to pay for someone to click their ad.
Example: If there are 4 companies competing for the keyword Coffee:
Company 1 bids $8 per click
Company 2 bids $7 per click
Company 3 bids $6 per click
Company 4 bids $5 per click
If Company 1 wins the bid they would only pay $7.01 (Company 2’s bid + $.01).
There are other factors in play such as; relevancy and your quality score. These all come through experience using Adwords. You have to walk before you can run.
Obviously a startup with a $500 a month budget cannot pay $7.01 for a click. You need to go for relevancy. Instead of bidding for a broad keyword like Coffee, narrow the searches down to a short phrase like “Coffee San Francisco”, or “Coffee Shops SF”
In the description of your ad include the keywords. Making your ad headline the same as the ad body increases relevancy and Google will index it accordingly.
Organization is key for success with Adwords. The structure is very simple which helps.
First create campaigns (i.e. 20% November Discount) and organize with Ad Groups (i.e. Mommy bloggers) That has helped me more than I would like to admit over the years. Keeping your ads organized helps showcase the data and builds confidence.
Running 4 to 5 ads with a monthly budget of $100 while tweaking your keywords using Google’s Keyword Planner will generate leads.
Use your power of being agile to tweak your ads and test for what works. If you stay organized and test enough with any budget you will grow.
