Stop Wasting Your Startup’s Money on These 3 Marketing Tactics

The ever changing world of digital marketing — packed with its constant updates and constantly emerging technologies — has offered every marketer out there with unparalleled convenience and ease. On the flip side though, it’s also undeniable that the seemingly endless changes can become increasingly overwhelming.

This is why it’s always important to declutter your marketing toolbox. What tools are you wasting money on? What strategies are you unwittingly holding on to despite the lack of results they bring? What can you get rid of to loosen up your budget? This post will discuss why you should stop wasting your startup’s money on these four marketing tactics.

1. Stop pouring money on display ads

Display ads have been in existence ever since the beginning of the world wide web, and they are clearly showing just how ancient they are in terms of effectiveness. Simply put, there are just too many other cheaper and more effective options to advertise to your target market.

This is not to say that display ads are completely useless. It remains one of the most popular marketing tactics because it offers an apparent benefit: these ads are huge so they’re easy to spot. In turn, display ads can contribute in boosting your brand awareness. Generally speaking, however, display ads turn in quite low conversion rates. So while these can still help with your marketing efforts, you need to be more cautious of how much you’re willing to spend on them.

Avoid allocating a big part of your marketing budget on display ads. Check out other ways to promote your startup. In the past years, a lot of marketing platforms have taken off. Take cue from huge companies that are taking advantage of tools like Google AdWords and even Facebook ads. Study how to use strategies such as retargeting instead of focusing all your energy on banner ads. You have to use some techniques like retargeting, but display ads can actually give you some impressive results.

2. Stop spending your money on senseless backlinks

A key component to excel in SEO is a healthy number of inbound links. To acquire inbound links, however, you will need to have other websites linking back to your own. This system does not really give your startup any kind of control — and this is where the idea of “microsites” become appealing.

Some marketers believe that the best way to boost their SEO is to create several websites, which they would then have linking back to their original site. These new websites are called “microsites.” In their minds, this strategy would give them sufficient backlink juice to power their rankings and dominate in the market. Needless to say, this tactic is useless.

To be able to keep these websites up and running, you’d need to spend a lot of time and money — both of which you could have just allocated to your original domain. If you have all these “microsites,” you would also need to continuously produce content to keep them active. Clearly, this tactic is not sustainable since it would demand too much from your startup manpower and budget.

More importantly, inbound links need to come from a broad array of high quality websites for them to have any merit in your rankings. Unless your plan is to create thousands of “microsites” with premium content for them to be featured in search engine results, then this strategy is a complete waste of resources.

To better allocate your budget, work on becoming relevant enough for organic inbound links. Produce content and exert marketing efforts that your audience will appreciate. While on the startup stage, one of the things you could check out is your competitor’s traffic sources. To do this, you can easily do a handful of Google searches for the relevant keywords associated with your site and take a look at the sites that rank on top for these terms.

You can also use tools like SimilarWeb to check what are the highest referring websites for particular competitors in your search. In doing so, you can learn a lot of useful data like the number of visits of the site, the sources of its traffic, and how much traffic they’re getting through display ads. Once you have the relevant information on your competition’s backlinks, you can start implementing strategies to replicate their success and receive the same type of attention for your site.

3. Stop wasting money on too many reports

While conducting market research is an integral part of any startup’s success, there’s such thing as too much information. Gathering and processing too much data could cost you time and money. Instead of quickly moving forward and implementing your strategies, you can end up wasting your energy on interpreting what the figures and analytics mean. It’s easy to get lost in all the reports and analysis that would come your way. However, bear in mind that spreadsheets and graphs do not make an efficient marketing tactic.

In your research, it’s advisable to focus on the 4Cs: conditions, circumstances, concerns, and community. From the get go, set the parameters on what information you need and set aside those you have no use for at the moment. Only go deeper in your analysis when you feel that it’s absolutely necessary for your plans. Focus on data that could provide you with more actionable strategies to move forward faster and more efficiently.

Learn to isolate the metrics that are relevant to your success. As a startup, look closely at aspects where your business has done well and develop those. Start spending more time and money on areas that offer more potential for growth.

The Takeaway

With upgrades virtually released almost every week, the pressure to be in the know and apply each new trend could get stressful. These new updates tend to create a pressing need for marketers to either keep up or be left out. However, not all these fresh ideas are useful. In fact, some of them could be doing you more harm than good. Aside from wasting your time and energy, these ineffective tactics could be costing you marketing dollars. It’s also beneficial to get all of your employees on board with marketing efforts.

There’s no better time than now to start evaluating your marketing tactics to determine what are effective and what aren’t. Every startup has ambitious goals and your business should not be any different. That’s why you should be aggressive in putting a halt at money-wasters. Get rid of the ineffective marketing tactics mentioned here and focus more on strategies that have the potential to boost your business.

Amanda DiSilvestro is the Editor in chief for Plan, Write, GO. She has been writing about all-things digital marketing, both as a ghost writer, guest writer, and blog manager, for over 10 years. Check out her blogging services to learn more!