As previously decided, I’m now hard at work at my full-time, undisclosed occupation, saving up pennies to do cool things to this app. But another thing I’ve thought long and hard about is actually spending some money on promoting what’s here today.
I’ve delayed doing this kind of thing forever, mostly because I’ve worked in digital marketing for over fifteen years and I’m mind-bogglingly cynical about most channels. I’ve always told bosses/founders/etc. that they have to be prepared to light some money on fire if they want to get attention — the fantasy world of knowing exactly what we’re going to get for each dollar and then just only doing the things with an acceptable return on investment doesn’t exist today and never really has, certainly not in my lifetime. But it turns out that when I put myself in those (fancy, probably leather) CEO shoes I didn’t like that answer either, so I didn’t spend any money at all. This did not bode well for my user acquisition statistics.
However, now that I’ve been gainfully employed for a while, the idea of subsidizing a small bit of Resolution promotion is starting to seem more plausible, and less self-defeating. After all, despite many of the world’s power users earnest pleading that companies take the money they spend on various promotional efforts and put it into product development instead, the sad truth is that marketing is a lot less expensive than product development. At least the kind I’m looking at.
That being said, I’d like to know what I’m getting myself into. If I were to spend say, two thousand dollars on a variety of different marketing channels, what’s reasonable to even expect? What happens if I sponsor a newsletter and cut my YouTube spending in half? What if those YouTube clicks are more likely to create an account than people from search ads?
HOW CAN I GET MY ARMS WRAPPED AROUND THIS? WHAT KIND OF INSANE APPLICATION WOULD ALLOW ME TO ASSESS THIS KIND OF THING WHEN I’M NOT EVEN SURE WHAT I…
Oh, wait! I know!
Resolution Ad Blitz 2024/2025
Go ahead — look at this bad boy. It only took me… 30 minutes? (Yes, this is a shared copy of the actual model shown below, which you can copy and use/change/etc.)
In all seriousness, I really didn’t have to shoehorn Resolution itself into this question. It actually made the most sense, mostly because (as I mentioned) I’m not entirely sure what I want to do yet here, and because there are slightly different variables for each channel’s respective funnel. For instance, I can spend more money to increase the number of YouTube views I get, but I can’t spend money to increase the audience size of a newsletter sponsorship.
Display ads will give me impressions that may or may not turn into clicks, while paid search ads only charge by the click, so for that calculation, the impression stage doesn’t figure into my finances. Then, I end up with signups and those all get tallied as a group.
Finally, in classic Resolution fashion, I’m almost certain to want to go backwards, and see what my costs or rates will need to be to achieve certain numbers of signups from certain channels, and as stated ad nauseam, no spreadsheet is going to let me switch the direction of my logic back and forth like that (doubly so with multiple conversion rates that I may or may not be open to adjusting).
Coming Soon: The “I Should Have Bought a New Laptop Instead” Resolution Ad-stravaganza!
Trust me, it’s very weird to spend an afternoon trying to figure out a strategy for promoting a thing only to suddenly realize the best way to do that is by using the thing. This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve landed here, though.
So hey, if you’re like me, and you’ve got a budget to spend, and you want to think about where to put it (or see what has to happen for that budget to do anything), start modeling!
