Where should a small store spend its first marketing budget?

On finding out whether anybody wants the product, at the smallest scale that gives an answer. Not on brand, not on reach — on a test with a checkout at the end of it.

In more detail

A few hundred dirhams against one product and one audience tells you more than a month of content. Once something converts, the budget has somewhere to go; before that, spending more only buys a more expensive version of not knowing.

What to do about it

Paid traffic is rented and gets more expensive every year. Every channel you own — email, notifications, your own audience — gets cheaper as it grows.

Attribution is harder than the dashboards suggest. A customer sees six things and the last one takes the credit.

The cheapest customer is the one you already have, and most budgets are spent as though that were untrue.

The mobile app angle

Push notifications sit on the owned side of that line, which is the whole commercial argument for an app.