Advertising Your Business: Spend Less, Choose Better

Advertising your business means paying to put a message in front of people who might buy from you. Done well, it accelerates growth you already have the foundations for. Done badly, it burns money while the underlying problems stay exactly where they are.

Most businesses don’t fail at advertising because they chose the wrong platform. They fail because they haven’t decided who they’re talking to, what they want those people to believe, or what action they’re trying to drive. The channel is almost always the last decision that matters, not the first.

Why Most Advertising Advice Starts in the Wrong Place

The standard advice on how to advertise your business goes something like this: define your audience, pick your channels, set a budget, create your ads, measure results, optimise. It’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete in a way that tends to cost people money.

What that framework skips is the question that should come before any of it: is advertising actually the right tool for the problem you’re trying to solve right now?

I’ve worked across more than 30 industries over two decades, and one pattern repeats itself regardless of sector or company size. Businesses reach for advertising when growth stalls, when a new product launches flat, or when a competitor starts gaining ground. It’s the reflex. And sometimes it’s the right call. But sometimes the issue is a product that doesn’t quite solve the problem it claims to, pricing that doesn’t match perceived value, or a customer experience that’s losing people at the point of delivery. Advertising can’t fix any of those things. It can make them more expensive.

If you genuinely delight customers at every touchpoint, word of mouth, retention, and referral do a significant portion of the growth work for you. Advertising then becomes a way to reach people that organic channels can’t. That’s the right order. Most businesses invert it.

This article is built for businesses that have the foundations in place and want to use advertising deliberately, not as a substitute for a strategy they haven’t written yet. If you want to go deeper on the broader commercial context, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the thinking that should sit behind any paid activity.

What Should You Decide Before You Spend Anything?

Three things. Who you’re talking to, what you want them to believe or do, and what success looks like in a number you can actually measure. Everything else, including which platform, what format, and how much to spend, flows from those decisions.

Audience definition is where most businesses are shallower than they think. “Small business owners aged 35 to 54” is not an audience. It’s a demographic. An audience is a group of people with a specific problem, in a specific context, with a specific reason to consider your offer over the alternatives. The more precisely you can describe that person, the better your advertising will perform, because precision in brief produces precision in creative, and precision in creative produces better results.

The message question is equally important. Most advertising tries to communicate too much. A single ad that lands one clear idea is worth more than five ads that each try to land three. When I was running agency teams, the briefs that produced the weakest creative were almost always the ones with five or six “key messages” the client insisted on including. The creative team couldn’t make a decision because the client hadn’t made one first.

On measurement: decide in advance what you’re trying to move. Revenue, leads, website visits, brand recall, store footfall. Each of these requires a different measurement approach, and conflating them produces numbers that look fine but tell you nothing useful. Market penetration strategy requires different success metrics than a retention or upsell campaign. Be specific before you start, not after.

How Do You Choose the Right Advertising Channel?

The right channel is the one where your audience spends time and attention, where your budget is sufficient to compete meaningfully, and where the format suits what you’re trying to communicate. That’s the framework. Now the practical version.

Search advertising (Google, Bing) captures demand that already exists. Someone types a query. You appear. If your product solves what they’re searching for, the conversion rate tends to be relatively strong because intent is already present. The limitation is volume. You can only capture as much demand as people are actively searching for. If you’re in a category where search volume is low, or where your competitors have driven cost-per-click to a level that makes the economics unworkable, search alone won’t get you where you need to go.

Social advertising (Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest) creates demand rather than capturing it. You’re interrupting people who weren’t necessarily thinking about your product. That requires stronger creative, a clearer hook, and more tolerance for a longer path to conversion. LinkedIn is expensive on a cost-per-click basis but reaches professional audiences with a precision that other platforms can’t match. Meta is broad and powerful for consumer brands with visual products. TikTok skews younger and rewards content that doesn’t look like advertising.

Display and programmatic advertising is often where budget goes to disappear quietly. The reach numbers look impressive. The attribution rarely holds up under scrutiny. I’m not saying it has no place, but for most small and mid-sized businesses, it should come after search and social have been properly exhausted, not alongside them from day one.

Out-of-home, radio, and print still work in specific contexts. Local businesses with a geographic catchment area often find that a well-placed outdoor campaign or local radio spot outperforms digital channels that technically reach the same area but with far less environmental salience. Don’t dismiss traditional channels because they feel old. Dismiss them only if the evidence says they don’t work for your audience in your context.

The honest advice here is to start with one or two channels and do them properly before adding more. I’ve seen businesses split modest budgets across six channels simultaneously and wonder why nothing’s working. Nothing’s working because nothing has enough budget or attention to work. Concentration beats distribution until you have proof of return.

How Much Should You Budget for Advertising?

There is no universal answer, but there are useful anchors. The most honest starting point is to work backwards from what a customer is worth to you, not forwards from what you can afford to spend.

If a customer is worth £500 in lifetime value, and you retain them for two years on average, and your gross margin is 60%, then you have roughly £300 of lifetime gross profit per customer. What can you pay to acquire one? That depends on your growth stage, your cash position, and how confident you are in your retention assumptions. But it gives you a ceiling. Work from the ceiling down, not from a percentage-of-revenue rule of thumb that was probably invented by someone who didn’t know your business either.

For businesses just starting to advertise, the practical minimum on most digital platforms is higher than people expect. You need enough budget to generate statistically meaningful data, which typically means enough clicks or impressions to see patterns. Running a Google Ads campaign on £5 a day and drawing conclusions after two weeks is not a test. It’s noise with a budget attached.

A more useful framing: what’s the minimum spend that would give you enough data to make a real decision? Run at that level for long enough to see a pattern, evaluate honestly, then scale or redirect. That discipline, running real tests rather than token experiments, is one of the things that separates businesses that learn from advertising from those that just spend on it.

What Makes Advertising Creative Actually Work?

This is the part of advertising that gets the least attention in tactical guides and causes the most variation in results. Targeting gets you in front of the right people. Creative determines whether they stop, pay attention, and do something. The creative is the work.

Good advertising creative has a clear job. It’s not trying to be clever for its own sake. It’s trying to make one idea land with one type of person in one context. The best briefs I’ve worked on were the ones that could be summarised in a single sentence: “We want [audience] to feel [emotion or belief shift] so that they [action].” That constraint forces clarity, and clarity produces better creative.

I remember sitting in a creative review early in my agency career, watching a client reject a campaign that was genuinely strong because it didn’t feature the product prominently enough in the first three seconds. The instinct to show the product is understandable. But people don’t stop scrolling because they see a product. They stop because something catches their attention, makes them curious, or speaks directly to something they recognise in themselves. The product earns its place after you’ve earned their attention.

A few things that consistently improve creative performance: a single clear message rather than several competing ones; a visual or opening line that earns attention before asking for anything; specificity over generality (concrete details are more persuasive than broad claims); and a call to action that matches the stage of the buying process you’re targeting. Asking someone who’s never heard of you to “buy now” is a different ask from inviting them to learn more or compare options. Align the ask to where they are.

On format: test more than you think you need to. In digital advertising especially, the difference in performance between two versions of the same ad can be significant. Not because one is objectively better, but because one happens to resonate more with the specific audience you’re reaching in that specific context. The only way to know is to test, measure honestly, and act on what you find rather than what you hoped for.

How Do You Measure Whether Your Advertising Is Working?

With more scepticism than most platforms would like you to apply.

Every advertising platform has an incentive to show you numbers that make it look valuable. Last-click attribution, view-through conversions, assisted conversions: these are all frameworks that tend to inflate the apparent contribution of the platform reporting them. That doesn’t mean the advertising isn’t working. It means the numbers you’re seeing are a perspective on reality, not reality itself.

The most useful thing you can do is establish a baseline before you start advertising, and track the metrics that matter to your business, not just the metrics the platform surfaces. If you’re a local service business, track inbound calls and quote requests. If you’re an e-commerce business, track revenue and repeat purchase rate, not just conversion rate on the first visit. If you’re a B2B company, track pipeline created and deals closed, not just leads generated.

Incrementality testing, running advertising in some markets or periods and not others, is one of the most honest ways to measure whether your advertising is actually driving results or whether those results would have happened anyway. It’s more work than reading a dashboard. It’s also significantly more useful. Research from Vidyard on go-to-market complexity highlights how the proliferation of channels and touchpoints makes clean attribution harder than it’s ever been. The answer isn’t to stop measuring. It’s to measure the right things and be honest about what you can and can’t attribute with confidence.

One thing I’d push back on: the idea that if you can’t measure it precisely, it doesn’t count. Brand awareness, category salience, and the cumulative effect of being consistently visible in your market are real and commercially valuable. They’re just hard to measure in a spreadsheet. Honest approximation is more useful than false precision, and false precision is more dangerous than most people acknowledge.

What Are the Most Common Advertising Mistakes Businesses Make?

In roughly the order I’ve seen them cause the most damage.

Advertising before the offer is ready. If your landing page is weak, your pricing is confusing, or your product doesn’t deliver what the ad promises, advertising will accelerate your churn, not your growth. Fix the destination before you drive traffic to it.

Spreading budget too thin. A £2,000 monthly budget split across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and display is four underfunded campaigns. It’s better to run one channel properly and know whether it works than to run four channels badly and know nothing.

Optimising for the wrong metric. Click-through rate is easy to improve and often irrelevant. Cost per lead looks clean but ignores lead quality. Revenue per pound of ad spend is messier to track but it’s the number that actually matters. I’ve seen agencies (and I include some of my own early teams in this) present impressive CTR improvements to clients whose businesses were flat. The metric was moving. The business wasn’t.

Stopping too early. Most advertising needs time to find its rhythm, particularly on platforms with algorithm-driven delivery. Cutting a campaign after two weeks because it hasn’t performed is often the moment before it would have started to work. Set a realistic test period before you start, and commit to it.

Ignoring the competitive context. Your advertising doesn’t exist in isolation. If your competitors are all running the same type of ad with the same type of message, doing the same thing puts you in a sea of sameness. Understanding the competitive landscape before you commit to a creative approach is worth the time it takes.

How Does Advertising Fit Into a Broader Growth Strategy?

Advertising is one tool in a system. It works best when it’s coordinated with what’s happening in the rest of the business: the sales process, the product experience, the customer retention activity, and the positioning work that defines how you want to be known in your market.

The businesses I’ve seen get the most from advertising are the ones that treat it as part of a commercial system rather than a standalone tactic. They know their customer acquisition cost and their lifetime value. They know which customer segments are most profitable. They know what happens after someone clicks an ad, and they’ve optimised that experience as carefully as the ad itself.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to over 100, the advertising we did for ourselves was always secondary to the quality of the work and the relationships we built. Word of mouth and reputation did more for us than any paid campaign. But when we did advertise, it was targeted, it was specific, and it was tied to a clear commercial objective. Not brand awareness in the abstract. A specific type of client, in a specific sector, with a specific problem we knew we could solve.

That specificity is what makes advertising productive rather than just expensive. Forrester’s work on intelligent growth models makes the point that sustainable growth comes from a disciplined understanding of where value is created, not from reaching the broadest possible audience. Advertising at scale is available to any business with a budget. Advertising with discipline is rarer and worth considerably more.

For businesses at the stage of building or refining their go-to-market approach, the broader thinking on growth strategy and go-to-market planning is worth working through before committing significant advertising spend. The channel decisions become much clearer when the strategic foundations are solid.

What Should You Do If Your Advertising Isn’t Working?

Before you change the channel, change the diagnosis.

Most businesses that conclude “advertising doesn’t work for us” have actually discovered one of three things: the offer isn’t compelling enough, the audience targeting isn’t precise enough, or the creative isn’t stopping people in the context where it’s appearing. Those are fixable problems. Giving up on advertising entirely is usually the wrong conclusion from the right observation that something isn’t working.

Work through the funnel systematically. If impressions are high but clicks are low, the creative or the relevance of the placement is the problem. If clicks are high but conversions are low, the landing page or the offer is the problem. If conversions are happening but the customers aren’t staying or buying again, the product experience or the audience targeting is the problem. Each of those has a different fix, and conflating them produces solutions that don’t address the actual issue.

One thing worth checking: whether the people clicking your ads are actually the people you want as customers. Broad targeting on digital platforms can generate plenty of activity from audiences that look engaged but don’t convert to revenue. Tightening your targeting often reduces volume and improves results simultaneously. That feels counterintuitive but it’s one of the more reliable patterns in paid media.

If you’ve genuinely worked through all of that and advertising still isn’t producing a return, it’s worth asking the harder question: is the problem the advertising, or is it something upstream of the advertising? Pricing, positioning, product, customer experience. Vidyard’s research on revenue pipeline points to how much potential revenue is lost not in advertising performance but in the handoff between marketing activity and sales or conversion processes. Advertising can only take a prospect so far. What happens after the click matters just as much.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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