Marketing has a bad reputation. There are an endless amount of platforms you supposedly should be using and at least as many strategies that you should be following. It can be a fulltime job to make sense of it all, but the good thing is that you don’t have to make a career change to get a positive return from your marketing.

The reason it can feel as if there’s so much out there that you should be doing is because there are a lot of people that have specialised in one specific platform or tool and they tend to think of solutions from that perspective. A Google Ads specialist will recommend Google Ads as the best way to get leads. A Facebook Ads specialist will recommend Facebook.

It’s the classic ”if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail”.

The reality is that as long as you stick with the big names, there generally is no wrong choice which platform you choose. The only wrong choice is to go with multiple at the same time.

There is no wrong choice because digital advertising is an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It is an incredibly competitive industry where tons of very smart people are constantly trying to find new ways to get people to engage with ads. As a result there is a lot of overlap in functionality between all the big platforms and at the end of the day they all do effectively the same thing: They give you the tools to get your message in front of people.

The actual challenge to solve is to use the available tools to get the right message in front of the right people at the right time, but unless you have some very niche product, that challenge is the same regardless of platform.

That’s why the only wrong choice is to go with multiple platforms at the same time. 

It’s unlikely your messaging and targeting is perfectly on point on the first try and saying the wrong thing to the wrong people on multiple platforms at the same time does nothing but blow your ad budget. Spray and pray doesn’t work.

Instead focus on a single platform and hone in your messaging and your targeting there first. That way you have one less variable to worry about, more budget available to test for longer and less time wasted making ads optimised for multiple platforms.

The goal is to extend your runway and give yourself an opportunity to dial it in before you run out of money or energy. Once you have the right message and the right targeting, it becomes easy to find ánd evaluate new platforms to advertise on and repeat the success you got on that first platform, because you did the hard work already.