One of the most common questions I see come up is around where to invest first with advertising. Founders know that they should be doing more, but there are so many channels and tactics and so much differing advice regarding which is ‘best’. 

After experimenting with first channels for several companies across the ACV spectrum, my advice is to start with paid search. Google Ads specifically is a great place to test paid marketing for a few reasons.

First, if there is already demand for your product category you can immediately get in front of your audience immediately. There’s no need to design ads or think through persona messaging. You sell ‘X’. Users are looking for ‘X’. Pay for some clicks and get a pulse on performance.

Second, you get a short feedback loop on messaging. You can see which variations of messaging or keywords resonate most and can use those learnings to evolve messaging elsewhere on your website and sales content. Maybe you call your product a ‘copilot for X’ but the market responds better to ‘AI for X’. Those small changes can be hard to uncover without the sheer volume of in-market impressions that paid search presents. 

Lastly, you can test your offering at various stages of the intent ladder. I’ve seen paid search convert profitably for lower intent searches (i.e. troubleshooting a related issue) to higher intent (comparison searches - “Hubspot alternatives”). 

For lower intent searches, a strategy that I’ve seen work well is using comprehensive blog posts detailing how to solve a particular issue. If your API, for instance, saves users weeks of implementation time, write the best guide on how to solve the problem without your API. In a few strategic places in the post, link to your product. Then run paid search campaigns for this common issue. As a bonus, this will likely rank well organically too.

On high intent searches, a common tactic is to create landing pages with comparison tables highlighting why you’re better in a few areas that matter. An easier option (and one a lot of customers prefer) is an editorialized version that is simply describing why a customer should pick you over the alternative. Use a personal tone, preferable from the founder, describing why you built the product, why you did it and why it solves the problem better. 

All these strategies can work, but you can also just pick one keyword, set it to exact match, point it to your homepage, dial up a $50/day and start running it today. That is the beauty of paid search.