One of the chief concerns of small businesses when they begin to advertise is usually cost, or how much they are able to budget for ad expenses per month. Compound that with the various choices for small business advertising—social, television, billboards, newspapers, and much more—and determining how to strategize your small budget media campaigns can become a real challenge.
Traditional advertising, for all its pros, is often limited for small businesses due to higher CPM (cost per thousand impressions) costs and longer-term commitments. Local newspapers still offer more competitive pricing for small business, but beyond that, television, billboards, and radio have long been cost-prohibitive for small businesses. In addition, the lack of targeting options for traditional means tons of wasted impressions—impressions that small business owners are footing the bill for.
Online, or digital advertising, on the other hand, can offer much lower-cost CPMs, and, combined with the increased targeting options that digital media offers, can be a much more effective solution for small businesses. Small budget media campaigns can be quite effective online, particularly for businesses with smaller geographical footprints. With all of the digital advertising options out there, how can you begin to plan your media campaign knowing budget is a chief concern? Here are three tactics we here at Screechy Cat Media consider when developing small budget media campaign plans.
Meta
With Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, Meta represents the largest social media audience in North America. As we’ve covered before, Meta can be an incredibly effective platform for small and large advertisers alike, with budgets beginning as low as $10/day. Meta ads can utilize photos, videos, GIFs, or a combination thereof in the form of carousel unit, and the platform offers a creative studio for advertisers in order to edit video and create slideshows from a series of images.
With well over 2 billion daily active users (DAUs), Meta-owned networks generate in the tens of billions of impressions each day; impressions that all contain one (if not several) ad units to sell to advertisers. With this bulk supply of impressions to sell, CPM rates come in the cents or dollars instead of tens of dollars, on average, even for typically-more-costly video inventory. These tens of billions of low-cost impressions also tend to generate higher engagement rates than display, with CPAs (cost per conversion) often competitive with those seen on paid search, historically a digital media campaign’s most cost-effective channel.
Targeting options are extensive with social media platforms such as Meta, with users self-identifying their interests via profile updates and content engagement. Geotargeting options such as zip code targeting are also available on Meta, boosting the platform’s importance with small business advertisers. Meta can be successful in both targeting new audiences and converting those familiar with your product or service—a solution for both ends of the marketing funnel.
TikTok
A newer player in the social space, TikTok exploded post-pandemic, with over a billion DAUs worldwide. Like Meta, TikTok has the benefit of having a significant number of ad impressions to sell, which translates into low CPMs with a highly-engaged audience. For a small budget media campaign, TikTok represents an additional social outlet with similar targeting, ad, and cost structures, diversifying your campaign strategy across more than a single platform.
In our experience, where Meta works well at both the top and bottom of the funnel across most verticals, TikTok shines at the top of the funnel, but still is not a conversion-driving platform for most—with some exceptions. Retail is having its moment on TikTok thanks to their marketplace feature, and local service providers, travel, and foodservice may also see bottom-funnel success with TikTok campaigns as well.
ConnectedTV
Cord-cutting has, for better or worse, created a new channel by which advertisers can reach target audiences: advertising on streaming networks. This advertising, dubbed ConnectedTV, provides small business owners something that traditional media could not—highly-targeted advertising at cost-efficient CPM rates. With ad space on streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu, ConnectedTV officially brings network television-style advertising into the small business advertising consideration set.
Streaming services collect extensive data on their audiences, which in turn can be used to develop digital media campaigns that are not shown based simply on time of day or content, but by the demographic makeup of the viewer themselves (as with other digital media tactics). This targeting creates a more effective media buy than geotargeting alone for business owners looking to connect with a specific audience.
Note that with ConnectedTV, most impressions are not clickable: including QR codes in your ConnectedTV ads can be effective means of getting folks to your website, but it shouldn’t be the primary goal. This tactic is all about creating awareness, interest, and visibility for your product, service, or brand; then following that up with effective digital media advertising in the form of social, search, and display.
Where to Start?
The tactics chosen for a digital media campaign depend on several factors: audience, location, goal, and more. Deciding whether Meta, TikTok, or ConnectedTV are right for your campaign will come down to whether or not your audience can be targeted on those networks, and their popularity in your particular service area.
Planning for a small budget media campaign means less room to make mistakes. Screechy Cat Media has nearly 20 years managing campaigns for small and larger advertisers alike: drop us a line and let us provide you a free consultation and see how we can help.
