Digital marketing: what to do first

What digital marketing is

Digital marketing is marketing in channels where you can follow the customer from ad to purchase: search engines, social media, video, email and your website. What sets it apart from an ad in the local paper is that you can see what every krone brought in. But only if you’ve set up measurement that counts sales and inquiries.

The channels do one of two jobs. Some capture existing demand: people type “flyttevask Oslo” (move-out cleaning Oslo) into Google, and you’re there. Others create demand: people scroll Instagram without looking for anything, and your ad makes them want it. Which job you need most decides where you should start.

The channels compared

Google Search: where most service businesses should start

When people search for what you sell, they’ve already decided to buy. You just need to be the one they choose. That’s why Google Search is the first choice for most of the service businesses we work with. For Utvendig Renhold (facade and roof cleaning), we run separate campaigns in nine regions. That produced 549 leads in 90 days (June–September 2026), and the cost per lead ranged from NOK 145 to NOK 341 between regions for the same service. If everything had been in one national campaign, the budget couldn’t have been moved to where leads were cheapest. How to get started with Google.

Google Shopping and Performance Max: for online stores

If you sell products online, Shopping is often the channel with the highest return, because the customer sees the image and price before clicking. Mokki (sunglasses for kids) advertises with Google Ads in Norway, Germany and Denmark, and the client reports +127% profit year over year. Performance Max now has a channel report, search terms and campaign-level negative keywords, so it’s no longer a black box. But you actually have to read the reports. More about Shopping.

Facebook and Instagram: when demand has to be created

Meta ads interrupt people who weren’t looking for you, so the content has to be good enough to stop them. Here you win on content and testing more than on audience settings. Meta needs around 50 conversions a week per ad set to exit the learning phase, and that should determine how many ad sets you split the budget across. We make Meta ads for clients including Badstugutta, Utvendig Renhold and a dental clinic in England. How to set up Facebook advertising.

Snapchat, YouTube and TikTok: the second layer

Snapchat is often dismissed as a channel for teenagers. In Norway it reaches widely, including people between 30 and 50. When we ran the ads for Leid.no (trailer rental), we ran Snapchat alongside Google and Meta, and the account ended up at 4.73x ROAS across channels. YouTube and TikTok give cheap reach, but are harder to measure on sales. Test them once the first channel is profitable, not before.

LinkedIn: only when customer value is high

LinkedIn is the only channel where you can target by job title, and the cost per click reflects that. For B2B sales where one customer is worth hundreds of thousands, it can be justified. For most small and medium-sized businesses, Google Search on what the customer calls the service is a better place to start. More about B2B marketing.

Email and organic content

Email is the cheapest channel you have, because you reach people who already know you. But the list only grows if the other channels fill it. Organic posts on social media build trust over time, but are rarely what brings a small business new customers this month. Use them to support the ads, not as the main plan.

Online visibility: start with search volume

Before you choose a channel, check how many people actually search for what you sell. Keyword Planner in Google Ads is free and shows the approximate number of monthly searches for “[service] [city].” If a few hundred people a month search in your area, there’s demand you can buy your way into. If the number is close to zero, the demand has to be created, and then Meta is a better start than Google.

Three things give you visibility without an ad budget:

• A Google Business Profile with services, opening hours, photos and reviews. That’s what shows up on the map when someone searches locally.
• One page per service on your website, with a price or price estimate and what people want to know before they get in touch. In practice, that’s most of local SEO.
• Social media content that shows your work, with real photos from the jobs.

All three take months to work, and they don’t scale like ads. The combination is what works: ads bring in customers now, organic visibility makes them cheaper over time.

The order we follow

1. Tracking first. Conversion tracking in Google Ads, the Meta Pixel with the Conversions API, GA4 and call tracking. It should count sales and inquiries, not clicks. When we took over Leid.no, the tracking counted far more purchases than actually happened. Everything we did afterwards depended on fixing that first.
2. One paid channel until it’s profitable. Google if people search, Meta if they don’t. The full assessment here. Measure against your breakeven ROAS. If you report conversion value including VAT, multiply the breakeven by 1.25 (25% Norwegian VAT).
3. Landing pages per service or area. The conversion rate on the page is often the biggest lever you have. For Utvendig Renhold, we’ve built separate landing pages per location, so someone searching in one city lands on a page about that city.
4. Retargeting. People who visited the site without getting in touch are the cheapest to bring back, on both Google and Meta.
5. The next channel. Only once the first one is profitable and you know what a customer can cost. The channels reinforce each other: Meta creates searches that Google captures.

What it costs

Google and Meta have no real minimum price. But smart bidding needs data: Google needs around 15–30 conversions in 30 days in a campaign to set bids well, and Meta around 50 a week per ad set. Work backwards. If an inquiry costs NOK 250 and you want 30 a month, you need around NOK 7,500 a month for that one campaign.

The other cost is management. The accounts need a review every week: search terms, negative keywords, budget and new ads. If you do it yourself, set aside 2–3 hours a week. If you buy it, you pay either a fixed fee, hourly, a percentage of the budget, or a share of the results. How the models differ. We take a share of the value we create, not a fixed monthly fee. It pays off for us when the share comes to around NOK 20–30,000 a month, so we work with established businesses with a monthly ad budget of at least NOK 30,000. How it’s calculated.

The mistakes we clean up most often

• Every channel at once. The budget is spread so thin that no campaign gets enough conversions for the platform to learn.
• Measuring clicks and impressions. Google and Meta optimize for what you ask for. Ask for clicks, and you get clicks from people who don’t buy.
• The Boost button as the whole Meta strategy. It’s fine for spreading a post, but gives you little control over audience, placement and testing. The difference explained.
• A new website before tracking and ads. Without traffic and measurement, you don’t know what the site needs to solve.

Small business? Here’s what to do yourself, buy and skip. Service business? Channel choice, industry by industry.