INsights
You’ve put together a solid promotion. There’s real value for the customer, it makes commercial sense, and the creative is good to go. Now comes the part that often gets overlooked: how are people going to see it?
Too often, a promotion goes live on the website, gets posted on social, and that’s where the plan ends. From there, we’re just hoping the right people see it.
If the goal is new business, hope isn’t a channel.
Before selecting a channel, decide who the promotion is for. If it’s aimed at existing customers, you already have ways to reach them through your database, remarketing and organic social.
New customers are a different job. Organic posts largely work with an audience that already knows you, and only a portion of that audience will see any individual post. Your followers might include current customers, previous customers and people who simply like the brand. They’re valuable, but they’re not a new audience.
So before anything else, get clear on a few things:
Those answers shape what happens next.
A good promotion rarely belongs in one place. Paid social can introduce it to people who don’t follow you yet, while Google Ads can put the offer in front of people already searching for what you sell. The website should reflect the promotion, particularly on the pages people are likely to land on, and email and organic social can keep your existing audience informed.
You don’t need every channel. Use the ones that suit the audience and the way they buy.
They also need to work together. Someone might see the promotion on Instagram, Google the business later and enter through the website rather than clicking the original ad. If they then have to hunt around to find the offer, or can’t work out whether it’s still running, you’ve created unnecessary friction.
Make the promotion easy to find and understand wherever someone encounters the business.
If the promotion is expected to make money, media needs to be included in the budget from the start. It shouldn’t be whatever is left after photography, video, design, copy and web work have already been paid for.
Start with what the opportunity is actually worth. What does a sale generate in profit? What margin are you working with? Is this likely to be a one-off purchase, or could that new customer buy from you again?
If an additional sale generates $1,000 in profit and you invest $2,000 in paid media, you know how many additional sales are needed to cover that media investment. The calculation will be different for every business, but at least there’s some commercial logic behind the number.
Before setting the budget, look at:
You won’t always have every number nailed down, and that’s fine. The important part is having some commercial thinking behind the media budget rather than choosing $500 because $500 feels comfortable.
Organic content works with the audience you’ve built. Paid social gives you access to people outside that group, which becomes particularly useful when the promotion is supposed to generate new business.
Simply putting money behind a post doesn’t automatically make it a good campaign. You still need to think about who sees it, what they see, where they go next and what you want them to do when they get there.
There can also be value beyond the immediate sale. Someone might see the campaign, visit the website and follow the business without buying today. Others may become part of a remarketing audience or simply recognise the brand when they see it again.
That isn’t the same as revenue, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. But awareness and brand familiarity have value, particularly when you’re introducing the business to people who didn’t know it before. Some of the people you reach now may become customers later. That matters too.
“It didn’t work” isn’t a diagnosis.
Work through what actually happened:
Those are different problems and they need different fixes. More media spend won’t solve a poor conversion experience, just as changing a perfectly good offer won’t fix a campaign that barely reached anyone.
Decide what you’re going to measure before the campaign launches. When it’s over, you want more than a sales figure. You want to know what worked, where people dropped away and what you’d change next time.
Don’t finish the conversation at “the offer is good”.
Work out who it’s for, where you can reach them, what the opportunity is worth and how much it makes sense to put behind it. Then decide which channels have a job to do.
You’ve already put the work into creating the promotion. Give it a proper chance to work.
Dont forget to promote it!
Plan the offer, audience, distribution and budget together. That gives the promotion a real chance to perform and gives you something useful to take into the next campaign.
Strategy Before Spend.
