It has been 6 months since I joined CompareEuropeGroup now, so I thought of recapping what I learnt in what feels like a short time.

My first months in digital marketing taught me a few things: a) digital is too different than traditional channels, being the latter skills hardly transferable to the former; b) there is so much data that getting lost in it is the easiest part; c) it’s an immersive course into your consumer’s mind, completely supported by numbers.

I decided to collect the few initiatives that are crucial to bootstrap the marketing channels of a start-up/small digital unit. Most of them are addressed for resource-constrained situations, which (not surprisingly) applies to 99% of organisations. My idea is to focus on the quick wins, which I have seen to be driving most of the value creation.

Define your channels

As already mentioned in my previous article, it is crucial that you pick your marketing strategy carefully before deep-diving. Get together with your founders/product managers/sales guys and check their views. Follow your gut feeling too, let it fail or succeed.

Define how to do you want to build your brand. Do you already have a brand you can leverage? If so bet on it, if not start your PR efforts from day one. Your brand may not be what you have in mind, let your customers help in that by looking at the data.

Start by using channels that show greater purchasing intent. Are you selling a product that is highly searched for? Stick to AdWords. Is your product targeted to a nice market? Get inside the right communities.

When you have been successful in one channel, streamline it as much as possible (we will cover part of this in the third section), then move on to the next.

Get your data and evangelise it

Any company needs a strong data infrastructure. Any digital company dies without it. Data is what will let you decide your every move, so get it right.

Don’t fall in the trap that you need a super-expensive tool to get you the data you need. Even a simple Google Analytics can get most of the value done for starters.

Moreover, evangelise everyone on the data capabilities you have. Show them how to extract data and analyse. Use free tools like GA Spreadsheet Add-on to build automated reports for you and your teams. Teach everyone around you on how to work with this. Data reporting should not be a human’s job, only decisions based on the data should.

Also, get familiar with APIs. Every advertising platform has one (Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, etc), so exploit to the best you can. There is a very interesting script called importJSON that queries APIs and transforms the data into a nice Google Sheets table. Get data hourly through those APIs and look at it frequently.

Automate everything possible

Still on the lines of the previous point, not only your reporting should be automated but also your performance and configuration auditing. Again use APIs and scripting capabilities. AdWords has a very powerful Scripts function – and no, you don’t need to take coding lessons for these. There are plenty of scripts online for you to copy/paste, use the 100 Google AdWords Scripts You Should Be Using article as a starting point. Aim for 100% of automated auditing, it’s much more efficient than having someone to do it (and less prone to error).

I would even go one step further: automate some decision making. Is that Facebook ad under-performing? Setup up rules to stop with the same decision process you undertake manually. Digital marketing is all about KPIs: you pause a bad ad because it has a low click-through rate (CTR)*, you change the button colour to yellow because it ups the conversion rate (CR). Get your rules straight and put a machine to take decisions.

I particularly like to act “automatedly” on keyword bidding. The profit margin I aim for decides the max cost per acquisition I can afford. Since cost per acquisition (CPA) is a slow-moving variable, to define the max cost per click I simply need to know the conversion rate of a specific keyword (which is much less slow-moving than CPA). So all in all I simply need to set out my bids based on conversion rate, making it possible to automate quite simply such procedure. Be mindful that this tip is simply a bootstrapping one, in due time you should rely on proper tools that applies more intelligent algorithms into the bidding.

*by the way, don’t ever stop an ad just because of its CTR. Always look at CR too, since a click-bait ad may improve your CTR but decrease also your in-site CR.

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Summing up, the juice of this article is in focusing on automating as much as possible your reporting and auditing. Don’t be fooled into thinking you need expensive externals tools – I believe you have the means to do it in-house, simply using your own resources. Moreover, be transparent about your data. Your data should be accessible by everyone. This is will turn more into a strength than into a weakness – another person looking at your data may mean someone spotting that thing you’ve been wondering about, or even new insights. Good luck fellows!