Big Ambitions Marketing Guide: Is It Worth It?

Marketing in Big Ambitions is one number: promotion. A store’s promotion score starts equal to its building’s traffic index, and marketing closes the gap toward 100%. At 100% promotion you are pulling the maximum potential customers the location allows.

The Two Agencies and What They Cost

Two things to internalise from that table. First, these are daily costs, not one-off purchases — a large billboard is $6,000 every day it runs. Second, the cheapest CityAds option costs the same as the most expensive eMarketing option, so the agencies are not interchangeable tiers of the same thing.

The Rule That Governs Everything

The maximum promotion change from marketing is +50%, and promotion change is half of the marketing percentage. Add the promotion change to your building’s traffic index to get the final promotion score.

The consequence: a building with a traffic index of 50 or above can reach 100% promotion through marketing. A building with a traffic index of 20 cannot reach 100% no matter how much you spend — you will top out at 70%.

This is why lease-hunting beats ad-spending. Traffic index is fixed and free; marketing is variable and permanent.

Different Store Sizes Need Different Marketing

Larger buildings require more marketing to reach the same promotion score, because the requirement scales with customer capacity — retail units at capacity 15, 30, 40 and 75 sit on different rungs, as do offices at 4, 8, 10 and 50. An M1 unit with capacity 75 is expensive to promote as well as expensive to furnish.

The community wiki maintains a grid mapping store type and marketing package to promotion change, with the most cost-efficient combinations highlighted. It is worth consulting before you commit to a package, because the efficient choice differs by building size rather than being one universally correct answer.

Is Marketing Worth It?

Yes, when:

• Your traffic index is decent and marketing closes a real gap to 100%
• The business has the fixtures and staff to actually serve the extra customers — promotion brings people in, capacity serves them
• You have chosen the efficient package for that building size rather than the biggest one

No, when:

• The traffic index is so low that even +50% leaves you far from 100%. Move.
• The store cannot serve its current customers. Adding demand to a queue is not growth.
• You are running it out of habit. It bills daily and there is no natural end date.

Cancelling Marketing

Marketing is an ongoing daily expense, so cancelling matters as much as starting. 1.0 added a convenience here: clicking “Call Marketing” from a business’s BizMan page automatically connects that store to the marketing dialog, so you no longer have to work out which store you are editing. If you are running campaigns across several businesses, audit them periodically — a campaign on a store you have since closed or moved is pure leakage.

Promotion Is Not the Only Cap

Promotion controls how many potential customers arrive. Two other systems control what happens next:

• Customer capacity — the building’s ceiling, only reachable with enough capacity-bearing fixtures placed. See blueprints and layouts.
• Customer satisfaction — driven by customer service, pricing and interior. See pricing guide.

Spending $6,000 a day to drive traffic to an understaffed, overpriced shop is the most expensive way to lose money in this game.