SmartBug Media® Named 2024 HubSpot North American Partner of the Year.    Learn More

Skip to content
Let's Talk

Strategic Spending: AgeTech GTM Strategies for Paid Media Success

Host Name

Lorem Title

SmartBug Media

Guest Name

Director, Account Strategy

SmartBug Media

man-confused-on-laptop

Subscribe Now

Back to All Episodes

How AgeTech Companies Can Maximize ROI from Paid Media by Targeting the Right Audiences, Prioritizing Channels, and Spending Strategically

Strategic Spending: AgeTech GTM Strategies for Paid Media Success
2025-05-13  33 min
Strategic Spending: AgeTech GTM Strategies for Paid Media Success
SmartBug on Tap
Play

Welcome to SmartBug on Tap. In this episode, "Strategic Spending: AgeTech GTM Strategies for Paid Media Success," SmartBug's Senior Sales Executive Tonia Speir and Director of Paid Media Briana Greer dive into how AgeTech companies can build effective, ROI-driven paid media campaigns—even with a lean marketing budget.

Explore how to prioritize platforms, optimize spend, and avoid common pitfalls in early go-to-market (GTM) efforts. Whether you’re targeting adult children, seniors, caregivers, or B2B buyers such as healthcare professionals or senior living execs, this conversation offers a blueprint for smarter advertising decisions.

📚 What You’ll Learn:

  • When AgeTech companies should invest in paid media (and what to do first)
  • How to avoid budget-wasting ad campaigns with poor landing pages or unclear messaging
  • The top paid channels for each stage of the funnel
  • How to segment audiences such as adult children, caregivers, and physicians
  • The power of remarketing and first-party data for long-term ROI
  • How to use frequency caps, budget pacing, and A/B testing to stay lean and effective
  • The recommended starting budget ($5K per month) and what it should deliver

💡 Key Highlights and Moments

[00:14] Why paid media isn’t a quick win (and what it is)
[02:38] The importance of defining campaign goals before launching
[05:07] What makes a landing page effective (and what causes people to bounce)
[06:38] Prioritizing channels for awareness versus lead generation
[08:57] How to approach GTM if you're targeting both B2B and B2C
[10:36] The power of influencer marketing in senior tech
[13:23] How to plan a $5,000 per month paid media budget
[16:23] What remarketing is and how to use it effectively
[19:40] The keyword strategies for short versus long-tail terms
[22:21] How to pass HubSpot data back to ad platforms for better optimization
[24:53] Low-cost A/B testing tips for startups [26:23] Which KPIs matter most by funnel stage
[28:30] Top tips for avoiding rookie mistakes in paid media

🚀 Ready to Scale Your AgeTech Company?

👉 Contact SmartBug: https://www.smartbugmedia.com/contact-us
👉 Contact Tonia: tspeir@smartbugmedia.com
👉 Contact Briana: bgreer@smartbugmedia.com

Relevant Resource

Tonia Speir (00:14)
Hey everyone, welcome back to SmartBug's podcast where we're gonna dive into the strategies and innovations that are shaping the future of marketing in the age tech space. I'm your host Tonia Speir Senior Sales Executive of Enterprise Services here at SmartBug and your go-to resource for all things age tech. Today, we're tackling a challenge that nearly every age tech company faces, how to get the most out of paid media when you don't have an unlimited budget. So whether you're launching a go-to-market strategy for the first time,

or you're looking to refine your paid media approach, knowing where to invest and how to maximize that ROI is critical as you're getting off the ground. So to help us break it all down today, I'm joined by Briana Greer, Smart Bugs Director of Paid Media and an expert in building high impact data-driven ad strategies. Briana has helped companies big and small find the right mix of paid media tactics to drive real business results. Today, she's going to share with us her insights on prioritizing channels.

making smart budget decisions and avoiding common paid media pitfalls in the senior tech space. So if you're wondering how to stretch those marketing dollars to generate leads and revenue, this episode is designed just for you. So Briana, I want to kick it off first with talking about the role that paid media plays in an age tech go to market strategy.

So when should a company start investing in paid media and is there a certain stage where it makes the most sense?

Briana (01:40)
Yeah, that's a great question to kick things off. I think truly paid media is an opportunity to amplify everything else that you are doing in your marketing efforts. I think one of the biggest mistakes that people often make is looking at paid media as an opportunity for a quick win. That's a term that we often hear and it really isn't. It's not a quick win. It can be if you have everything set up, but you want to make sure that you have

your landing page really optimized, you wanna make sure that your messaging is really clear, you know who your audience is. And once you have those things in place, then it's the right time to go ahead and start looking at what paid media can do to amplify all those other things that you already have established.

Tonia Speir (02:23)
I know some people think of it like a chicken and an egg, right? Like where you have to turn on paid degenerate leads and it can get kind of tricky. So in your professional opinion, like what is the best time? What are the pitfalls? What should people have ready to know that it's the right time for them?

Briana (02:38)
I think the biggest, having an understanding of what the goal is, right? So is it an opportunity? Are you at the moment where you want to drive awareness? Are you at the stage where you need leads and you need to get people in the door? Because those are two very different strategy approaches and we need to set different KPIs to support each of those. So if you are in a position where you need leads and you have a budget that you need to stay within to do that,

you need to look at your landing page. You need to make sure that your messaging is clear to address the concerns that would influence somebody to complete a form and get in touch with you.

Tonia Speir (03:16)
And I know we talk about, you in our world, it's very clear to us, you know, you have to have your landing page and it has to be, you know, right for your audience. Can you give us some examples, of what a bad landing page is and what makes a good landing page? Like, what's kind of the recipe that people should, you know, kind of be prescriptive with?

Briana (03:35)
Yeah. So one of the there, there's no one way to do it, but some of the mistakes that I feel I often run into are unclear messaging, unclear outcomes, unclear on what I am getting when I complete this form. People. the user. Exactly. Yeah. If I have a need and I have completed a Google search, you know, and I landed on an ad.

Tonia Speir (03:53)
And you mean you as the user, like the recipient, okay.

Briana (04:04)
and I go to a specific landing page and now I'm here and I'm wondering, should I, is this the right solution for me? If it doesn't immediately answer that concern, if it doesn't tie back to what I initially searched, it's an opportunity for me to bounce. It's an opportunity for me to not feel like this is the right fit for me. so messaging is important, making sure that you're.

Capturing also from the marketing side, make sure that you're capturing the information that you need to be able to follow up with the customer. Whether that is like first name, last name, email, phone number, things like that. Lowering the barrier of entry. Oftentimes we do want to get a lot of information through a form, but what is absolutely necessary for us to be able to follow up with this customer? And so on the bad side, just to kind of sum this up, on the bad side,

unclear messaging, unclear outcomes. On the good side, what people need to do to make sure that you are driving those leads and getting that conversion is making it really easy to complete the form, make it really clear on what it is that the customer is going to get.

Tonia Speir (05:07)
And is there such a thing as form fatigue for the user? Is there a balance of, know, know in today's world with markers, we want to personalize everything, right? But there comes a time when a form can sometimes feel invasive or it's too time consuming. How do you usually give clients advice on where to find the right medium for personalization versus overkill?

Briana (05:32)
Yeah, that comes down to audience segmentation, right? Like I do think that in this demographic or this industry, you need to personalize it. You need to draw on that emotional pull that a lot of the customers are feeling. And so if you're talking to the caregiver, the adult child, there's a certain number, there's a certain amount of information that you need to get, but the messaging needs to be clearly aligned with what the concerns are.

And so just get the bare minimum of what you need and then grow from there. And test and learn, it really is a matter of testing and learning and understanding what information you need to be able to nurture that lead down the line. But that's a good starting point.

Tonia Speir (06:10)
And you touched on taking us down a great path, which is that you've got the adult senior themselves, you've got the adult child that's maybe helping influence the decision, and you also have caregivers. So when you have multiple audiences like this, let's talk for a minute about prioritizing paid channels. Not all paid media channels are created equal. And if you had to rank the top channels for age tech, where would you start? If it were your business and it your age tech company, where would you begin?

Briana (06:38)
Again, it goes back to the goal. So am I at the stage where I want to drive awareness? If I'm at the stage where I want to drive awareness, I'm on Meta, I'm on YouTube. If I'm at the stage where I want to drive bottom of funnel conversions, I'm on Google, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm going after high intent keyword searches. I'm going after very specific job titles in the healthcare space, know, executives, et cetera. So it really boils down to what is the goal and how do I want to

that goal through the different channels and the ways that the different channels operate.

Tonia Speir (07:09)
So even if you mentioned healthcare professionals, so if I'm going after healthcare professionals and I'm the early awareness stages, would you still start with more like social type platforms like Meta and YouTube for awareness as opposed to going straight direct? Because I think that's maybe a misconception that a lot of people have that like, I'm going after these targeted professionals. I'm only, I'm going to start with LinkedIn or I'm going to start with Google. So would you still in the awareness stage start with the reverse of that?

Briana (07:38)
Yeah. And I think there's a world where you can do both, right? Like there is opportunity to drive awareness on meta. I mean, excuse me, on, on LinkedIn, there's an opportunity to drive awareness on Google, but those platforms perform really well. and our position really well for lower funnel conversions. But if somebody is in the research phase and they're doing those searches on Google, we can show up and we can make sure that we're showing them content that speaks to their concern. If we're in, on.

on LinkedIn and it's that same concern, we can reach that audience with video content that again, that addresses that very specific concern. So there's opportunity across all the platforms to be bottom of funnel and top of funnel. But again, it goes back to understanding who that customer is and what your ultimate goal is.

Tonia Speir (08:26)
it. We have an interesting mix here because some are going to be B2B where they're going after, you know, maybe senior living communities or they're going after physicians, whereas others are more B2C. And sometimes they can be both, right? But we don't have an endless pot of money to deal with, especially when we're in those early go-to-market stages. So with such a broad audience, how do you see the effectiveness of this when, you know, where do you start when you have so many

areas to cover or where do you prioritize rather?

Briana (08:57)
Okay, I'm gonna, this is a place where I'm gonna pause and ask you to rephrase the question.

Tonia Speir (09:03)
Okay.

I'm thinking like down the lines of where people, you've got B2B, you've got a business that has to go B2B and they have to go B2C and they've got limited dollars to work with. So how do they know, like where are they going to be able to put their dollars to have the most impact? Is it in a, do they do both at the same time, a B2B and a B2C strategy? Do they start with one over the other? Like where, how do they prioritize those campaigns?

Briana (09:29)
Got it.

Got it. Yeah. So if you are in a position where you have to strategize around how to reach B2B customers and how to reach B2C customers and how you diversify those efforts across platforms, you want to understand if you have the budget to do both, you can do both. However, I think it makes more sense to really start with the opportunity that drives the highest return.

So if you're seeing a higher return on your B2B side of the business, that's where you start and you understand what content is engaging with them or

What content they're most engaged with and really how it's performing, right? Like you pick one, you test, you learn, especially if you're on a lean budget, and then you expand into the other audiences through those learnings that you've garnered.

Tonia Speir (10:19)
And what about influencers? mean, that's kind of the new thing of taking on a life of its own, right? And being able to spread by word of mouth, influencers. So how do you manage those networks and getting them to talk about your product or service? How does that fit into a paid media plan?

Briana (10:36)
Yeah, think influencers is kind of an untapped thing in this market or in this industry. There's trust is huge, right? Trust is so important in this industry and being able to leverage influencers to drive that trust, to do the storytelling, to really, you know, draw people in in an engaging way and in a way that doesn't feel like an ad or

it's great. And so there's a lot of different platforms. There's not a partner that we specifically partner with here at smart book. However, there, are lots of platforms like upfluents and Mo dash. And you want to look at influencers who have a smaller audience and a really engaged audience and are really doing that storytelling who are having testimonials or telling about their experience. so, you know, it could be.

caregiving storytellers, can be older creatives who are kind of like advocating for their own independence, or professionals say there's a potentially like a law attorney or something that's giving advice on, you know, how you should approach a decision. So lots of opportunity and definitely an untapped opportunity that would be great for someone with a smaller budget to tap into.

Tonia Speir (11:45)
Got it. And just so we understand like the differences between like a TikTok and Instagram and a YouTube, how do they differ in the audiences that they're attracting?

Briana (11:55)
A lot in a lot of ways, they're very similar, right? So TikTok typically runs a little bit younger, but there is a there's a there's a large older demographic on TikTok. And I don't think that people really understand that, especially in the format of content that feels very it feels unproduced. It feels really relaxed. It feels like an opportunity to really gain that trust.

And then similar on Meta, there's a lot of opportunity there. Meta is the largest ad platform in the world. And so everybody is really on there. And especially, you've got both the caregivers, you've got the professionals who are spending time on it in their downtime that you want to make sure that you're showing ads to. There's a lot of opportunity to reach customers across the board on both of those platforms.

Tonia Speir (12:36)
And what about YouTube? Who's living on YouTube these days?

Briana (12:39)
Also, a lot of people living on YouTube, and YouTube is great because people are willing to engage with content. They're sitting down. They are ready to consume content. so they want to learn. A lot of times they're doing research. And so it's a great opportunity to, again, reach a lot of people across ages and across demographics.

Tonia Speir (12:59)
So now that we've talked about all the opportunities and where all these audiences are living, let's get down to the dollars and cents of it. If we're working on a go-to-market strategy and we're trying to do this bootstrapped, how much should someone spend or if I'm starting a new age tech company, how much should I spend, especially when I have to hit multiple audiences? How do I create that budget or how do I even know where to start?

Briana (13:23)
Yeah, that's a great question. And this is a question that we get often. $5,000 is kind of our rule of thumb to get started. That allows us to learn quickly. That allows us to test multiple audiences and potentially span our budget across different platforms. When you start with a smaller budget, it takes longer to learn. And so you want to learn as quickly as possible so that you can double down on those learnings that have

performed well, get rid of anything that hasn't, and scale towards stronger performance and continue testing. So 5,000 is typically our rule of thumb to get started. And then you can continue to scale beyond that.

Tonia Speir (14:05)
How long is that $5,000 gonna last me,

Briana (14:07)
So that's our recommendation per month. As I the learning period typically on a cross platform is about 30 days. And that's why we want to start that. So, know, 5,000 in a 30 day period allows us to test, learn, get those learnings and double down on what's working to continue to scale.

Tonia Speir (14:09)
Okay. Good, good, good. Good to know. so when you go ahead.

And then is it possible that I might not need to spend $5,000 every month from those learnings or is it, should I be prepared that it's going to grow? know with our, particularly with our startups that maybe have third party funding, an investment partner, whether it's a PE or a VC, you know, we're looking to put together budgets and present to them like, here's, how I'm going to allocate my budget across the next six or 12 months. And here's how I'm going to approach each one of these audiences.

caregivers, healthcare professionals, adult seniors, and then adult children. So how do I prepare for what that budget should mean or will that $5,000 help me understand that?

Briana (15:09)
Yeah, the audience tools inside of the platforms are great because a lot of times you understand what the audience size looks like. And so if I know that I really want to go after adult caregivers and I want to focus on health care providers, you know, you can build that audience within the platform. You understand what the audience size looks like and then you can back into a budget to support that. And then again, going back to prioritization, understanding

who is the customer that if we get in front of them today is more likely to yield a return, to engage, to talk to us. so allocating that budget goes back to goals, goes back to who you wanna reach and at what stage in the funnel you wanna reach them. If you're really focusing on like retargeting and you already maybe have had a website up and running for the last six months.

and you have a thousand users visiting your website every single month. You've got a good foundation for some retargeting. So you could potentially start there. understanding your goals, understanding the audience will allow you to better understand how the budget can fit into that.

Tonia Speir (16:14)
So just to back up for two seconds for our non-marketers that may be with us, can you explain remarketing for them and how that works?

Briana (16:23)
Yeah, remarketing is an opportunity to re-engage customers through our ad efforts. On average, it takes six to eight times for someone to see your ad or see your business, for them to really have that level of trust, for them to feel like they understand or trust you enough to be able to want to engage, want to fill out a form or download a piece of content.

in order for us to get to that six and eight goal, we need to retarget. We need to get back in front of those customers with ads. And in some cases, just through nurturing, we can get customers into a funnel through a content download and reengage them.

Tonia Speir (17:03)
And do you have the ability to control the cadence of that at all? Because I know that some people get a little, especially in this audience, they may get a little shy because they feel like they're being stalked. So how do you, what's that fine line between retargeting and making your customers feel like you're watching them, you know, when their computer's off?

Briana (17:15)
Thank you.

Well, we are watching you, but not when your computer is off. But, you know, there's frequency caps. We can keep an eye on frequency. We can see exactly how many times our ads are getting in front of people. That's something that we monitor, especially in the awareness phase, so that we can really be in that sweet spot. And we can draw it out, right? Like if we want to draw that six times,

you know, across two months. That's something that we can, you know, lever. We can pull the budget up, push the budget back down to make sure that we're hitting that frequency target.

Tonia Speir (17:58)
Got it. And so what does that, you when you talk about pulling the budget up, down, and, you know, kind of making those controls, I would imagine that for a company that doesn't have a large marketing spend to allocate towards this, does that factor into some of the ways that they can make the most of their paid media spend? And maybe what are some other tips there?

Briana (18:18)
Yeah, absolutely. So again, going back to remarketing and re-engaging those customers who have engaged, if we know that this is our goal is to reach these customers, you know, six to eight times, we push the budget to make sure that we're doing that. And it can be a small audience. And so that allows us to be really nimble, really targeted and ensure that we're hitting the right audience. We're hitting a meta-frequency that we know works and we're not wasting any ad spend.

going too broad or on efforts that may not yield the results in the timeframe that we would want to.

Tonia Speir (18:48)
And I would imagine that like focusing on high intent keywords is a part of that too. ⁓ And how do you decide what those are?

Briana (18:53)
Absolutely.

Research. So there's lots of tools out there for us to understand what people are searching. We definitely lean on longer tail keywords so that we can make sure that we're reaching the right people. There's tools like SEMrush and Moz and all of these tools, HubSpot that we can really understand and do market research around who the customer is, what they are searching and how often they are searching it.

and build our content around those specific keywords and make sure that we prioritize those first. Keyword optimization is paramount. It's a huge part of our strategy and making sure that we're reaching the right people at the time that we need to meet the most.

Tonia Speir (19:40)
Sabrina, can you give us just a real life example of maybe what it doesn't have to be, like we don't have to name a client by name, just generally speaking, like what was a broader search term that was expensive that maybe a client wanted to go after versus what you were able to, you know, kind of get a little more granular on that made it more valuable, high intent for them?

Briana (19:44)
Thank

Ahem.

Yeah, I can think of one specific client who one of the terms that these artists really high traffic on was knee surgery. It was for a device that was supporting people who had potentially gone through a knee surgery. And so that was the search term that we saw very frequently. And so at one point we tested it with a broad targeting.

broad match targeting strategy and we saw a lot of traffic. However, the conversions didn't quite match and the conversion rate didn't quite match what we wanted to see. And so we created longer tail keywords where it was knee surgery information, knee surgery tool or knee surgery support or knee surgery clinic near me or things like that that really

help define more around the intent or the context in which that term may be searched to allow for stronger performance.

Tonia Speir (20:55)
And are there any other, know, I want to touch a little bit on how you leverage first party data and ways that you can reduce wasted ad spend. Is there anything else that you would kind of earmark for folks who are just getting started? Things, you know, I like to always point out the roadblocks, right? Or pitfalls, like no surprises. What should I be looking for?

Briana (21:16)
Yeah, I think the biggest mishap is doing too much too quickly. Having really broad targeting. You need to understand your customer. You need to understand what their concerns are. You need to understand where they're hanging out across platforms and meeting them where they are. so broad targeting, it doesn't always work. And especially if you're working with a really nimble budget. so making sure that the targeting is really tight, making sure that the message is really clear.

making sure, going back to what we talked about in the beginning, making sure that your landing page experience is really streamlined. And if you are at the stage where you're nurturing them, that you're nurturing them with content that makes sense. If you follow that kind of formula, you're going to see success.

Tonia Speir (21:58)
And so would you recommend like tweaking and monitoring those types of things before you just ultimately just go and pull the trigger to increase spend? know a lot of people want to, you know, see, I need more leads, right? That's the instant is like turn up your ad spend, but are you telling us that there are other ways, other opportunities to optimize before you go straight to the dollar?

Briana (22:21)
Absolutely. So one of the ways that we leverage because we are one of the premier, the premier HubSpot partner is passing back offline data into the platform. So if somebody were to convert and complete a form and say they are an SQL, a sales qualified lead, we pass that information back into our ad platforms to help optimize towards really strong conversions. So not only are we trying to optimize towards just leads in general,

But now we're telling the platforms, call it Google, that not only do we want to optimize for traffic, but this type of traffic. This is our customer, and we want to get more of these customers. And so that's an opportunity to make sure that we are leveraging the data that we have to support stronger learnings and platform. There's a term that's like trash in, trash out, right? So if your campaigns are getting spammy leads, they're just going to get more spammy leads.

So you really need to get to a place where you're getting really strong qualified leads because you will continue to get more of those strong qualified leads. We have seen cases where people will kind of like see that performance go off the rails a little bit. Maybe they launched a performance max campaign, which some people might know what that is. Yeah. So performance max is a Google campaign type that essentially runs.

Tonia Speir (23:30)
Tell us what that is for those of us that don't know.

Briana (23:38)
ads across all of Google's ad inventory. So it includes YouTube and Gmail and Google Search and Display, Discovery. And so it's a broad campaign. If you can get a really strong lead volume and really strong lead quality within that campaign, it's a really great campaign to run because it's really great and easy to scale. However, if you launch that campaign and you start to get some spam leads in the beginning,

you're going to continue to get more spam leads because Google doesn't know that they're spam. It knows that it got a conversion for you and that's the goal that we've set. passing back that information from a platform like HubSpot that says not only do want to get leads, we want to get this type of lead, it really helps to prioritize what we really want and optimize towards performance that drives a stronger ROI at the end of the day.

Tonia Speir (24:28)
So before we get into performance, because that's definitely next on our list, like what we should be measuring and monitoring, I want to ask one question off of what you just said. that's, know, when we talk about optimizing, a lot of that comes with doing some A-B testing, trying out different creative, that can get expensive. So if you're working on a budget, seems like it's a catch-22, right? Like that's a must have, that experimentation, but also...

Briana (24:33)
Thank

Tonia Speir (24:53)
it can get costly. So how do you manage that to make sure that things are optimized and that you are getting the right message in front of people and that we are maximizing those conversions?

Briana (25:04)
Yeah, so with A-B testing, there are lots of things that you can test that really don't require a big lift. We could test the call to action. Maybe on the form, it says submit. Maybe on the form, it says get in touch. Maybe on the form, it says talk to an expert. That's just a change of words that can make a big impact. And so those are really low lift.

opportunities for people to test and learn against. And the budget is just split. You run it for a short period of time. And typically, and again, going back to that $5,000 budget recommendation, with that $5,000, you have a good amount to be able to really truly split test to get those learnings. So landing page optimization is key. Also headline testing and actual ads, ad copy testing.

These are all really low lift things that really just require, you know, changing the copy. And then if we're getting into like creative testing, if we're talking about meta, of course, there's some, you know, it can get expensive in terms of building creative assets. But I wouldn't prioritize that as a first step if there's all these other opportunities to test before that.

Tonia Speir (26:11)
So when we talk about testing, now we're back to ROI. What are some of the KPIs metrics, things that we should be looking for monitoring to understand how to put all these pieces together?

Briana (26:23)
Yeah, so paid media, as I mentioned, is an opportunity to amplify. It's an opportunity to get in front of the right customer. And so we build our metrics and our KPIs around that specifically. So how often are we getting in front of people? we're looking at our frequencies on social. What is our efficiency costs or our CPM costs? How much is it costing us to get in front of 1,000 people that are in our audience?

How many, what is our cost per click? Is it really expensive to get in front of this customer? And in some cases, it's fine. Like we are okay with a higher cost per click because we know that this customer is exactly the customer that we want to reach. So it really depends on the ultimate goal of the campaign. If we're looking at awareness campaigns, our KPIs would be impressions, total CPM costs, and potentially our frequency.

If we're bottom of funnel and looking at conversions, we're looking at the total number of conversions we're able to reach and our cost per conversion or our conversion rates.

Tonia Speir (27:21)
And knowing that this is a, you know, up and coming industry, age tech, where it's blending particularly for us here at SmartBug having experience both in the senior living space and the B2B SaaS space, where it's like a marriage of two worlds. So what industry standards or what benchmarks seem healthy in this type of audience or industry?

Briana (27:45)
Yeah, benchmarks are going to be per platform. so, know, CPM cost of I don't have the specific benchmarks per platform, but there are lots of tools that you'll want to lean on that are provided by the platforms that are industry specific and they change and they change. I would look at them, you know, on a biannual basis. And you but you want to be looking for, you know, a 10 percent, 20 percent.

margin between what the benchmarks are at any given time and where your performance is. Once you reach the benchmarks, that would be a level of efficiency. And that's the opportunity for you to continue doing what you're doing to continue to scale and drive that performance.

Tonia Speir (28:30)
So Bri, help us. We're starting a brand new age to accommodate skeletons in the closet. What do we need to avoid? What are the top mistakes that you see? What advice can you give to those of us out there that are starting up and getting ready to branch into paid media?

Briana (28:33)
Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. The biggest advice that I have is understanding that paid media is not an opportunity for a quick win. It is an opportunity to amplify all of the things that you have done to lay the groundwork for reaching the right customer and getting them to convert. So messaging is first. Audience.

Well, I guess audience would be first and then messaging is second, right? Who are you reaching? Who do you want to reach? And once you understand that and have a really clear understanding of that, then you can invest in paid media and your paid media dollars will learn faster. You'll be able to grow faster, scale faster. Paid media is not first. You understand all of those other things and then you invest in paid media.

Tonia Speir (29:34)
And if it's not working, what do we do?

Briana (29:36)
Well, working is we need to give it time, right? And so we have to define what is working and what's not. So if we are, what are our goals? Are we reaching our goals? And if we're not, how far off are we from our goals? And then understand what do we need to do to get to our goals? If it, based on the KPIs, if it's a matter of us spending more, if it's a matter of us redefining our audience, if it's a matter of

testing, continuing to test. If it's not working and you're not driving leads or you're not driving the awareness at the rate that you want within three to six months, then I would reinvest in other tactics. But it does take time, especially in an industry like age tech, where it's such a considered decision. There are a lot of decision makers and we need to really build that trust for customers to feel comfortable to engage.

Tonia Speir (30:29)
So you're prescribing patients.

Briana (30:32)
Patience. Yeah.

Tonia Speir (30:34)
Excellent. So Bri, any tools, resources that you recommend companies should be using or trying out to optimize their paid media on a budget?

Briana (30:44)
Yeah, I would say lean into the tools that are available for free or for really low cost. So I had mentioned Moz is a great one, Webstream, SEMrush. These are all really great tools for you to understand what your competitors are doing, how you are performing against the market, how much market share you own. Use these tools to your advantage.

and dig into those and understand who your customer is and how they're engaging with this content across multiple platforms before you really take the plunge in and dive into paid media.

Tonia Speir (31:16)
Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Bri. You've given us some great insights and we appreciate it so much. That's a wrap on today's episode of SmartBug on Tap. Huge thank you to Briana Greer for sharing her expertise on paid media and how age tech companies can make the most of their marketing budgets in the early days. So if you found this episode helpful, be sure to like this video and subscribe to our channel so that you don't miss our future conversations on all things age tech.

And if you're looking for more insights or need help optimizing your paid media strategy, you know where to look. Feel free to reach out to us here at SmartBug Media. Visit us online, smartbugmedia.com, or our contact information will be down below in the description. So thanks for tuning in and we'll see you next time.