How should a startup company do marketing?

Abstract: In this paper our main interest is to measure the effects of creative advertising campaigns and efficient advertising campaigns to find out which of these strategies performs the best, and to investigate their effects in the short and long term. Modig et al (2014), stated that creative ads will be effective in the "long perspective", however this term can be very vague. Consequently we are interested in investigating whether startups can gain positive effects of creative ads within one month in an attempt to concretize the term "long perspective". Therefore, in this paper, we have aimed to investigate if engaging in creative ad campaigns is an effective route for a startup with budget constraints to take. Since Oscar Hegelund, one of the authors of this thesis, has a startup - we used his company to conduct field experiments on social media. Firstly, we ran efficient ads for a month, following that, we ran creative ads for a month and lastly, we ran efficient ads again for a month. Afterwards we repeated the same cycle to verify our findings and increase the validity of our findings. We measured and defined the effectiveness of these two different types of ad strategies through hard metrics such as revenue, add to carts and cost per add to cart. To theorize our hypotheses and results of our analysis, we used research and studies primarily conducted by; Modig et al (2014), Binet and Field (2007) and Smith et al (2009). Our findings showed that creative ads underperformed when measured in hard metrics such as revenue, add to carts and cost per add to cart. However one particularly interesting finding was that it seems as they have a multiplier effect on effective ads when run in preparation for them.