If you have been in the digital marketing industry for any amount of time, you already know that scaling is a huge part of making things profitable and worth spending your time on. Scaling campaigns involves more than just increasing numbers. It's about growing in a way that is sustainable, manageable, and doesn’t decrease your performance to a point where scaling becomes a negative thing.
If you want to properly scale your winning campaigns you need to do it with thought, intent, and some trial and error. But luckily we are here to help you out with the basics and help you understand what you need to do to make it work!
What You Should Have Before Scaling
Before diving into the scaling process, there are several crucial aspects to consider. These key elements will help you determine if you should scale and if yes, how you should scale.
1. Financial Stability
First and foremost, your business needs to be financially stable. This means having a solid cash flow, minimal debt, and a clear understanding of your financial health. Scaling needs you to be able to follow up financially, as once you start scaling it would be bad to pull back on it since you can ruin some performance doing so.
2. Demand and Metrics
You need to make sure that there is a higher demand for your products and services. If you are serving an extremely niche audience that you already have targeted fully, then scaling won't help you much.
If you want to scale, you need to make sure that scaling is something that your current metrics can handle. Scaling usually decreases the ROI by a bit, since you spend more money and target more users, some of which aren't interested in your products. Because of this, it's important to make sure your campaign has a solid ROI out of the gate with room to grow with scaling.
3. Scalability of Products or Services
Not all products or services are easily scalable. Digital goods have close to infinite scaling potential, but if you are selling physical goods, you need to make sure that you can deliver to your engaged audience.
Horizontal vs. Vertical Scaling
When it comes to scaling affiliate marketing campaigns, there are two primary approaches: horizontal scaling and vertical scaling. These both have a place in the industry, but usually for businesses, one works way better than the other, so let's see what makes them different.
Horizontal Scaling
Horizontal scaling, also known as scaling out, involves expanding your campaigns by targeting new markets, audiences, or regions. This strategy focuses on broadening the scope of your campaigns to reach a wider audience.
As an example, if you have great campaigns in the US that can be applicable in other GEOs, you might scale up to new countries like Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
Pros of Horizontal Scaling
- Market Diversification: By targeting new markets, you reduce dependence on a single audience, spreading your risk.
- Increased Reach: Expanding to new regions or demographics increases the potential customer base, which can lead to higher overall conversions.
- Reduced Competition: Entering less saturated markets can provide opportunities with lower competition, potentially resulting in better ad performance.
Cons of Horizontal Scaling
- Cultural Differences: Adapting your campaigns to different cultural or regional preferences can be challenging and may require significant localization efforts.
- Resource Intensive: Expanding into new markets often requires additional investment in research, testing, and advertising spending.
Vertical Scaling
Vertical scaling, also known as scaling up, involves increasing your efforts within your existing market by optimizing and enhancing your current campaigns. This strategy focuses on deepening your market penetration and maximizing the efficiency of your existing campaigns.
This could be something like adding more ad groups to your campaigns while increasing budgets and adjusting targeting.
Pros of Vertical Scaling
- Efficiency Gains: By optimizing existing campaigns, you can achieve higher returns on your ad spend without the need for extensive research or new market entry.
- Brand Authority: Focusing on a single market can help establish your brand as an authority within that niche, leading to increased trust and loyalty.
Cons of Vertical Scaling
- Market Saturation: There is a limit to how much you can scale within a single market before reaching saturation, which can reduce the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- Increased Competition: As you scale up, you may face more competition from other affiliates targeting the same market, which can drive up advertising costs.
- Diminishing Returns: The initial gains from vertical scaling can be substantial, but over time, the incremental benefits may decrease as you optimize further.
Planning for Scaling
Once you have decided how you want to scale, it's time to make a plan on how you will execute your scaling methods.
-
Setting Clear Objectives
Define what scaling means for your business. Are you looking to increase revenue, expand your market reach, or diversify your product line? Setting clear, measurable objectives will help you focus your efforts and track your progress. Usually, people just want to scale their revenues, but to do that you need to have a clear vision of how you might do that before you start.
-
Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Determine the metrics that will help you measure your success. These could include revenue growth, customer acquisition rates, retention rates, or other relevant indicators. You have to use these baseline KPIs to ensure that your scaling is going as planned. If your KPIs drop dramatically then you know you have a problem somewhere in the pipeline and that something is not working, so you need to investigate further.
-
Resource Allocation
Scaling needs resources. This means that you might have to pull your, or your team’s time and attention from other projects to that one. It also means that you will have to invest heavily (depending on how hard you want to scale) into your campaigns. Once you start scaling, it's hard to go back to normal spending campaigns as the algorithm will adapt and expect higher budgets for good results.
-
Risk Management
Identify potential risks associated with scaling and develop strategies to mitigate them. This could include financial risks, operational risks, or market risks. Having a risk management plan in place will help you navigate challenges more effectively.
Execution Strategies for Scaling
Now that you have some sort of plan, it's time to start executing!
-
Preparing Your Winning Campaigns
Now that you know that you are about to scale, you should take a look at your best campaigns and find what makes them successful. Is it targeting, creatives, or something else? Use the thing you found to be the key behind it and duplicate your campaign with a few parameters changed, a few different creatives, and higher budgets.
This will be like your first step to scaling, where you try a couple of approaches and then decide on a winning one. When increasing budgets, note that big jumps in the allocated budget can cause advertising platforms to revert your campaigns to be in a sort of “learning phase”. This can cause a dramatic fall in KPIs, so when scaling budgets, do it slowly, let's say 5-10% day, 40% week max.
-
Leveraging Technology
With AI being everywhere today, you can make sure to use it to your advantage. For your creatives that you want to scale, you can take them through some AI services and change them up so that they are still in the same style and pacing, but with different voices, presentations, and talking points.
Tools like ChatGPT make changing scripts super simple, and there are a lot of image and video tools that can help you make your ads unique.
-
Partnerships
Something a lot of advertisers forget is that you aren't alone in the industry. You can find partners to help you scale up with ease. You can find people in related niches who would love to cross-promote products and services, and together you can scale up easier and with less risk, as you are splitting the bill and the workload.
Conclusion
Scaling is hard even for seasoned marketers, but it's a part of the job that you need to get comfortable with if you want to make any sort of real revenue with your campaigns.
To scale properly takes a lot of time, money, and effort, but once you figure it out, it only gets easier! One thing you should keep in mind is that there is no such thing as infinite scaling. No matter how good something is for the time being, there is a point where if you scale past it, you will get worse results.
This also pushes marketers to always diversify with niches, products, and approaches!
What is your main strategy for scaling and what were your biggest successes? Share your experience with us in the comments below!
Please log in to Facebook to access the comments section