5 Things You Have To Do Before You Run Ads Online

If you've ever launched a paid ad campaign and watched the budget disappear without the results to show for it, you're not alone — and you're probably missing one (or more) of five foundational pieces that have to be in place before you ever turn on a campaign.

On a recent episode of the EIC Podcast, hosts Mike Patterson and Dustin sat down to break down exactly what those five pieces are. Their argument is simple: running paid ads is really just having a sales conversation at scale. And like any good conversation, it only works if you know who you're talking to, what you're going to say, and what happens after they respond.

Here's the full breakdown of the five buckets every marketing team needs to check off before spending a single dollar on ads.

1. Know Your Audience

The first — and most foundational — bucket is audience. Before you write a single ad or pick a targeting option, you need a clear, detailed picture of exactly who you're trying to reach.

That means going beyond a vague sense of "our customer" and actually building out audience avatars: Where do they shop? What's their income bracket? How old are they? Where do they live? What does their day-to-day look like?

As Dustin puts it, marketing is fundamentally a sales conversation, and the more you know about the person on the other end, the better that conversation — and the more likely you are to close them. Modern ad platforms allow for incredibly granular targeting, from household income to location to the specific technology a business uses internally. But all of that firepower is wasted if you haven't first done the work to define who you're actually trying to reach.

There's a popular idea floating around marketing circles that you can simply "cast a wide net" and let the ad platforms figure out who your audience is. Mike and Dustin push back on that firmly. Even if you're not manually building out granular targeting parameters, you still need to know who your ideal customer is — because you'll need that definition later, when you're evaluating whether the leads coming in are actually the right ones.

2. Build a Content Engine, Not Just Content

Once you know who you're talking to, the next bucket is figuring out what you're going to say to them — and doing it consistently.

This isn't about publishing the occasional post and seeing what sticks. It's about building an actual content engine: a content schedule, a content calendar, and an ongoing system for producing creative that speaks directly to the audience you defined in step one.

Dustin makes a pointed observation here: most companies fall into a pattern of creating one round of ads and running it to the same audience over and over, wondering why performance stalls. That's not a strategy — that's the definition of insanity. Effective marketing requires the same principles as a good sales pitch: a clear handshake, a compelling value proposition, real benefits, and trust-building elements like testimonials.

And because your understanding of your audience will keep evolving as you test and learn, your content has to evolve right along with it. That's why this needs to be a system, not a one-time project — with a dedicated person or team responsible for continually producing new creative as new audience segments and messaging angles emerge.

3. Equip Sales With What They Need

The next three buckets all live at the intersection of marketing and sales — the handoff point where a marketing-generated lead becomes an actual sales conversation.

It sounds obvious, but it's one of the most common breakdowns in the entire funnel: marketing turns on lead generation, leads start coming in, and then nobody follows up. The leads fall into what Mike calls "an empty chasm."

Avoiding that starts with genuinely equipping your sales team. That means:

• Giving sales visibility into what marketing efforts are running and what volume to expect
• Having the tools in place to route and manage leads as they come in
• Making sure sales has access to supporting assets — landing pages, case studies, ROI calculators — that prospects may have already seen

Dustin frames this as a matter of consistency. Marketing teams naturally generate a lot of creative ideas and test many different offers and messages. But if sales isn't looped in on what's actually being communicated to prospects, you end up with mixed signals — the prospect was told one thing by an ad, and hears something completely different from a sales rep. Keeping sales and marketing tightly connected on messaging ensures prospects have a consistent, effective experience from first click to first call.

4. Agree on What a Qualified Lead Actually Is

This bucket builds directly on the first: once sales and marketing agree on the target audience, they also need to agree on what actually counts as a qualified lead.

Without that shared definition, marketing can end up handing sales a raw form-fill with a name, email, and phone number — and nothing else — leaving sales to figure out on their own whether the person is ready to buy, can afford the product, or actually has the pain point being solved.

Instead, Mike and Dustin recommend defining clear parameters upfront: What does a prospect need to know or have engaged with before they're handed to sales? What information needs to be captured during the nurture process? A widely used framework for this is the MQL / SQL / Closed Lead structure — Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, and Closed. Tracking and improving the quality of leads moving through each stage is a strong signal that this bucket is working as intended.

When both teams are aligned on this definition, the entire sales and marketing relationship gets smoother — because everyone is working from the same standard of what "the right lead" actually looks like.

5. Set Up Reporting and Measurement — Before You Need It

The final bucket is the one that ties everything else together: measurement.

To calculate true ROI, you need two pieces of data: when a deal closes, and how much revenue it generated. Without both signals, it's impossible to know which campaigns, channels, audiences, or creative angles are actually driving results.

Dustin is candid that this is often the hardest bucket to execute — not because it's technically complex, but because it depends on people (usually sales reps) consistently reporting when deals close and what they're worth. But when that feedback loop is in place, it becomes possible to trace performance all the way back to specific campaigns, audiences, and messages — and to feed that data back into ad platforms so they can find more high-quality prospects automatically.

If this isn't set up yet, that's okay — it's something that can and should evolve over time. But the earlier you build the habit of tracking and reporting, the sooner you can start making decisions based on real ROI instead of guesswork.

Putting the Five Buckets Together

To recap, here are the five things every marketing team needs in place before running paid ads:

1. Audience — Know exactly who you're trying to reach.
2. Content Engine — Have an ongoing system for producing creative that speaks to that audience.
3. Sales Enablement — Keep sales equipped and aligned on what marketing is doing.
4. Lead Qualification — Agree with sales on what actually counts as a qualified lead.
5. Reporting & Analytics — Have a mechanism in place to measure ROI down to the campaign level.

None of these buckets need to be perfect on day one — they're meant to evolve as your marketing engine matures. But having each one in place, even in a basic form, is what separates teams that scale profitably from teams that burn budget without knowing why.

Ready to See Where You Stand?

These five buckets are the same rubric used to evaluate whether a business is truly ready to scale with paid ads — and they're a central part of every discovery call.

Book a discovery call to walk through where your marketing stands today, or watch the full episode of the EIC Podcast for the complete conversation between Mike and Dustin.

Watch or Listen to the Full Episode

Catch the full conversation between Mike and Dustin on your preferred platform:

• Watch on YouTube
• Listen on Spotify