For DTC brands, deciding when to implement paid advertising and organic SEO is a critical strategic choice. Each has its benefits and challenges, and understanding these can help in crafting an effective marketing strategy. Both have very powerful effects on your business when done right and at the right times. Some cost more upfront, some cost less later, We’ll talk about those situations.
Paid Advertising:
Prospecting Ads/Top of the Funnel:
“These are ads and funnels going out to new customers as most of you reading this already know. These are the most expensive ads you will run hands down. Cost per acquisition in this model is where most brands fail. Running poorly executed prospecting ads is like going to a casino and putting it all on black when there is a 50/50 chance you lose it all. That’s just not smart. You want to start lightly when it comes to your prospecting ads. I typically spend about 25% of my paid media budget on prospecting ads and I start very small, like $5-$10/day to test my campaign. Once you’ve found winning ads, scale up appropriately. Your media buyer should be able to guide you here. Move your budget up slowly until you find the scale and then you’re off to the races! If it’s working, don’t touch it!
Now you’re probably wondering, well how are you getting new customers for your brand then if only 25% is top-of-funnel funnel ads? Great question”
Retargeting Ads:
“When starting, I spent the other 75% of my paid ad budgets on retargeting ads. These are ads and sales campaigns that target people who have already visited my site, social pages, or email lists. This is why I am a big advocate for getting all your socials, Facebook group, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, etc., and using that as best as you can to get the ball rolling with new customers and retarget them with paid media so you can save costs on acquiring those upfront customers. Retargeting ads can oftentimes be 2-3-4 times less per acquisition.
Is this starting to make sense?
Use your blood, sweat, and tears to get the word out first, then retarget those customers, build a small customer base that you can email, speak with, get referrals, get them on subscriptions, and then spend more money on prospecting. This can save you so much start-up capital out of pocket and can create a really solid first base of customers who really love you because they’ve seen you before, they are familiar with you and trust you a bit more. You have a higher chance of getting that 2nd purchase from them, which is massive.”
Immediate Results:
“Unlike SEO, paid ads can generate traffic and sales almost instantly. This is the great thing about paid media, you can pay for a customer and usually get one pretty quickly if you have a good product and landing page. The best product won’t sell if the landing page is garbage. The best landing page won’t work if the traffic is garbage. It all has to make sense. Do your homework and take your time building out your sales funnel for each product so you can be the most effective with your ads and budget. I am typically OK with breaking even in the beginning on ad spend. $79 to acquire a $79 customer is ok when I know I’m going to get 40-60% of them on a subscription or a second purchase. This becomes a fun game for all you nerds out there.
This is where you start to look at LTV, lifetime value. If the LTV of your business over the first year is $300 and it only costs you $79 to acquire that customer when you were a start-up, that’s not so bad, is it? You’ll make that trade every day of the week, wouldn’t you? You have to be thinking about this from day 1 and thinking like this once you get your feet off the ground to have a successful business running. This typically happens in years 2-4. You have to make it to year 2 first. Don’t go broke, don’t blow all your money on ads too fast, and have your sales funnels and emails mapped out upfront.”
First Hire Should Be A Designer:
“Success requires continuous creative refreshes and testing to maintain effectiveness. The best thing I did was hire my designer in-house right away. This money spent on payroll or contractors is worth its weight in gold. When you can have someone creating content, graphics and ads every single day for your brand, you will see massive growth. Social matches ads, matches emails, matches website, matches everything. We formulated a “creative machine” as we called it. We had the entire year mapped out up front with every single sale, event, product launch, etc. Then we had all the creative for every single channel, paid ads, banner ads, social graphics, instagram stories, reels, etc etc. All built-up front for months in advance. When the time came, we used software like Sprout Social to have it all deployed for us automatically. Our peers thought we were literally a creative machine! We were, kinda. We were just really organized and efficient. You can be too. Keep the creative rolling as you grow!”
Organic Search Engine Optimization:
Long-Term Value:
“SEO may take longer to show results, but it provides sustainable, cost-effective traffic over time. We are big SEO advocates in our office. Typically over 50% of our revenue comes from organic traffic from search engines with our targeted keywords. If paid ads are like renting space on the internet, SEO is like owning space. It is not easy for the weak-willed. This takes time and lots of money typically depending on the niche. For local brick-and-mortar businesses, this is the most underutilized strategy out there. Blows my mind it has not been fully adopted yet by a higher percentage of owners. It’s coming and they will destroy the rest that are not doing this locally.”
Here are the basic starting points:
- On-Page Optimization
- Meta Titles, done accurately, use programs like SEM Rush, MOZ, or AHREFS to help.
- Word Count on each page
- URL Structure (compare to competitors that are ranking for the words you want)
- Keywords on each page, use tools like Clearscope.io for this.
- Off-Page – Inbound links coming to your site need to be high quality from other high domain authority sites and relevant sites. Stay away from the bots and link farm type of deals, google doesn’t like that stuff and can put your site in “Google jail”. I’ve been there, not fun and can last years before they let you out.
“For e-commerce brands, this can take months to build out and rank for your first keyword. Obviously, you want to be able to rank for your branded search terms “company name” or “company product” first. Don’t forget to be running ads to that as well so your competition doesn’t get to it first. Trust me, they will sooner or later if you do a good enough job. It’s a form of flattery! Seriously though, be patient, this will take 6-12 months, but once you get it, rinse and repeat on every page and catch as many rankings as you can. There is a lot to this, but this is a start. Get your website dialed in first before doing off-page SEO.”
Higher Conversion Rates:
“Organic traffic often has a higher conversion rate as it’s based on user-initiated search intent. This is the #1 reason why SEO traffic is King.”
There are 3 types of prospects:
- Thinking about what the “thing” is still in my head, talking about the “thing” with peers.
- Education Phase, looking things up and learning what particular “thing” is best for me.
- Buying Phase, looking for where the best place to buy that exact “thing” is.
“Now apply that to how you search online. You want to rank for all of the keywords but you have to choose wisely what you spend time and money on first. The buying keywords will get you the hottest, cheapest, fastest conversions and they will stay for multiple purchases typically because they are the most educated and sold already before finding you. The education keywords you will want to rank blog content to help educate the readers and hope they end up browsing your store. You can build a roadmap of keywords and prioritize them based on this mindset.”
Content:
“A strong SEO strategy requires consistent content creation and editing efforts. This is the hard truth and where most entrepreneurs fall short. Like I said this is not a game for the weak-willed business owners. You have to be patient and stay the course even when you have no reason to believe it will work. That’s why it is such a great marketing sector to learn. The harder it is, the less competition you will have and the higher value it brings. Creating text content every single day is tough and requires editors, writers, and now AI tools. I won’t comment on using AI tools as I think it’s not yet been shown to be the best idea so until it is, I won’t make that claim or push the use of it. Maybe soon. Use AI to write content then have a human edit it and then scrub it through all your tools to make sure there is no plagiarism and reads at the proper education level (typically 4th grade reading is best). Maybe this can work for some, but call me old school, I’ll probably continue to use real writers and editors for a little while to ensure the best unique content for another year or so.”
Link Building:
“This is tricky. There is so much spam out there for buying links and sharing links. This can be a slippery slope and not one you want to mess up on half way down. The search engines do not like halfway building or sharing. If you’re being sneaky, they will find out, if you’re trying to be cheap, you will lose to those not being cheap and if you try and take shortcuts, you will get lose in the sea of notshortcutsge 109 where nolost ever looks. You must make sure the websites you are buying links from are the main authority for specific niches and have content related to your keywords. Reddit is also a great place to share links and get people talking about your brand. Forums are an amazing place to get great links and meet others to find high quality links. Links can range from $25-$1high-qualityng on where you are buying them. It takes time to build your portfolio of links. Don’t rush it. Be patient, quality of quantity every day when it comes to your SEO.”
