Are Google and Facebook still your best marketing tools?

This article is the first part of a five part series outlining Momentum Academy’s In Focus: Marketing and Growth – Beyond Google and Facebook, which happened on 27 May. 

To find more about the event, email us at [email protected] and you can watch the recording here.

Many companies spend most of their digital marketing budget on Google and Facebook. In fact, statistics show that more than 67% of online marketing spend was on Google and Facebook. It’s obviously where most customers are. 

But is this money spent effectively?

Talking about effectiveness, Michael Bloomberg spent more than $18 million in 2 months on Google ads for his US presidential campaign in 2020. He surpassed Donald Trump! 

However, (a lot of) money spent on Google was clearly not enough to get Bloomberg where he wanted to be. Perhaps some food for thought here. 

In fact, while there are a lot of gurus and best practices out there, we found the following six points poignant in optimising the spend on performance marketing: 

• Define, understand and remember what works and doesn’t – Only financial returns count
• Understand your users and do not “carpet bomb” them – Do try to put yourself in their shoes and don’t put them through a horror story
• SEO – it is still alive and well
• Don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board when things don’t work out
• Remember that it matters only if your long time value is higher than your customer acquisition cost (not clicks, installs, or other vanity metrics)
• Marketing team to sit right next to the product – Don’t let your marketing team work in silo

We also found the following quote by Julia Samodurova, founder of Dubai-based marketing company Unmarketd who has years of experience running online growth campaigns globally (even in Iran!!), particularly relevant:

Julia has kindly contributed her insights through a series of articles on TheLowDown. Check them out!