During this unprecedented time, almost every business is evaluating their recurring expenses and trying to determine what is truly essential and bringing them value, and what is a luxury that can be trimmed down or removed from the equation. For small business owners, just understanding the ins and outs of marketing in order to make some of these decisions can feel like a daunting task. When it comes to small business solutions that can help you market on a budget, &Marketing was built for this. Our goal is to demystify the process and help small businesses understand their marketing efforts and help them spend their budget like it’s our own.

Just last week a small auto shop owner came to us. In light of the current state of world events, his business volume was down and is anticipated to stay that way for some time. He went to his current marketing provider to ask about turning off his Google Ads to save some money but was told to leave the costly ads running as is, because turning them off would be a too drastic and risky measure that would decrease his business even more. We offered to take a complimentary look “under the hood” of the auto shop’s Google Ads and see what was really happening with his spend and conversions.

What We Found Under the Hood of His Google Ad Spend

Our digital advertising specialists examined the setup of the ads, the keywords being targeted, and the current performance to get a complete look at how many customers were being driven to his website by the ads. Using our Marketing Analytics tools, we could show him with concrete data that those Google Ads were not producing the results he thought they were. Because marketing can feel so inherently mystical to lots of small business owners, he had never been given any actual reporting before on his ad performance. He just assumed (rightfully so) they were working for him the way they were supposed to.

The good news is, we showed the auto shop owner that his current paid ads weren’t actually bringing any customers through the door, so he could save all that money going forward. The bad news is, he had no idea those ads weren’t performing and had been wasting his hard-earned money all this time.

The Benefits of Marketing Transparency Now and Later

If he hadn’t taken the opportunity to check out what was under the hood with his marketing spending, our auto shop owner may have continued spending that money for years instead of getting the information he needed to understand where his marketing dollars are going and learning where to send those dollars when marketing on a budget.

Should he invest in Google Ads in the future? Absolutely, but he should do so by spending much less money, with a different setup, and with more transparency and better monitoring. We gave him some tips that he can implement himself right now that would cost little to no money:

• Create some content using the keywords he wants to target so he can spend less money on Google Ads and start ranking organically.
• Post and engage more frequently on social media.
• Send regular email updates to his current email list of contacts.
• Run a few geographically focused Facebook ads — always a worthwhile experiment for a local B2C business that costs less than Google Ads.

As an outsourced marketing department, most of us can’t look at a car engine and be able to diagnose a problem, because we don’t have the expertise. Similarly, this growing business owner couldn’t examine his own marketing tactic and diagnose whether or not it was providing ROI. Just like his auto shop would be able to quickly tell us we had a bad radiator, we were able to identify his ineffective Google Ads campaign and recommend some more budget-friendly options.

We were able to stop the ads that weren’t producing any results and advise him to put a fraction of that budget to work on hyper local Facebook Ads, increasing his social media presence through organic posting and set up an email campaign.

Growing businesses deserve the same level of expertise and execution as the big guys, they just need a version that meets their needs (and budget) where they are. If you aren’t sure if your marketing is working FOR you and think you need an expert to look under the hood, let’s talk! &Marketing offers a complimentary Initial Marketing Analysis (IMA) that can give you valuable information about your digital presence.

About &Marketing:

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.