Before you spend on paid advertising

Try explaining your offer in one sentence: what you provide, for whom, and why people choose you. Show the sentence to someone who does not know your business. If they do not follow it, neither will a person scrolling past your ad in two seconds.

Make sure, too, that you can deliver what you advertise if demand rises. Promoting a service that cannot take on more customers produces complaints rather than growth.

"Everyone" is not an audience. Decide who you want to reach: where they live, what problem sends them looking, which language they use, and whether they are searching for a solution now or need introducing to one. These questions point to the platform as well:

A common mistake is sending every ad to the home page. Better to have one page that matches the ad's promise, in sound Arabic, working well on a phone, with one clear way to get in touch. Before launch, open it on your phone over an ordinary connection, fill in the form yourself, and confirm the enquiry arrives.

If you do not measure, you will not know what worked. Prepare the following before launch, not after:

• Analytics connected to your site, in your own accounts rather than anyone else's.
• Tracking for the actions that matter, such as a form sent or a tap to call.
• Links that show each visit's source and campaign.
• A list recording each enquiry, where it came from and how it ended.

Keep ownership of your ad accounts as well. They should be in your company's name, with access granted to whoever works with you, so your campaign history stays yours if the person running it changes.

This is where most spending is wasted. An enquiry goes cold quickly if the reply comes late. Agree with your team before launch: who receives enquiries, how soon they reply, what they say, where they record the outcome, and what happens to those arriving after hours. Then play the customer: submit an enquiry through your own ad and see what happens.

Set an amount you are willing to treat as the cost of learning, knowing it may not come straight back. Then test a few things:

• Test one message at a time, so you know what caused any difference.
• Try more than one image or video for the same message.
• Give an ad enough time before judging it, rather than changing it daily.
• Write down what you learned, so you do not repeat the same experiment.

Keep the seasons in mind, since people behave differently during Ramadan and the Eid holidays than in the rest of the year. Respect the advertising rules in your field and each platform's policies, and ask a specialist when you need to.

Impressions and clicks are useful early signals, but they are not the goal. Keep asking how many real enquiries came in, how many became customers, what it cost to reach each one, and whether that is worth what a customer brings you. Then you can decide whether to spend more, change the message, or stop.

If you would like someone to work on this with you, the marketing team at GenAI Hub offers a media buying service, from reviewing these basics to following the campaigns with you.