Paid Media: From paying up to paying off
To reach new audiences and convert your leads into customers, organic communication is not sufficient. You need to reach new people where they are most active; that’s where paid media comes in.
Simply, paid media means paying money to get your content further. Targeted paid ads on social media and other paid channels will expand your audience and help you create new leads. Paid media can be daunting because, well, it’s an investment. There are so many ways to use it that it can be hard to choose. But the investment of time and money pays off: paid media can reach beyond your organic communication – helping you reach new customers, or reactivate existing ones.
You don’t want to waste your cash, so follow these best practices to get started and scale up. Trust us – it’ll pay off.
Best practices
Set goals: When starting with paid media, it is important to clearly establish your KPIs so you can measure the success of your campaigns and adapt. Before starting, determine the impressions, reach, clicks and conversions required to make the campaign a success so you can measure your results against them later.
Identify your audience and choose your channels: This is key. To choose your channel and content correctly, you must consider your audience. Make a profile of your best customers, and find out where this demographic can best be reached. Check out Pew Research Center’s SoMe fact sheet to find out where different demographics live online. Use your data to create look-alike audiences based on your customer profiles and reach them on the channels where they are most active.
Determine whether you want to use a paid search option – where you pay to be a top search result on platforms such as Google – or a pay-per-click option – where you pay to embed ads in social media feeds or across browsers. The former helps new customers find you through search and keywords, whilst the latter brings your ads right to potential clients.
To learn more about paid search and Google Ads best practices, check out this article.
If using pay-per-click, choose your platform carefully. Your target demographic will determine which channels will be optimal, so be sure to align your chosen channel with your audience.
Nail the messaging: Different communication will land differently depending on where the recipient is on the customer lifecycle. This is where your data is key. With omnichannel platforms such as Agillic, you can synchronise your data from both owned and paid channels to segment your audience based on where customers are in the journey.
There are myriad formats that ad content can take – and different ones will, of course, be available and optimal on different platforms. Depending on what you are selling, who you want to reach and where, you could use photo ads, carousel ads, videos, story ads, message ads, and many more.
There are also many different ways to get your message across. You could use influencer content, customer testimonials, product images, among others. No matter how you choose to make your case, your content must be relevant, clear and attention-grabbing from the first moment of engagement. The internet is fast paced, and you’ll lose your chance if you wait too long to draw people in – or show them something they aren’t interested in.
Once you’ve gotten their attention, direct viewers to the next step – which most likely means back to your website. Do not send customers back to your front page. Instead, direct viewers to a landing page built to convert viewers of that specific ad. This way, you continue the interaction on your website instead of bringing them back to square-one.
Measure and optimise: This one is simple – check the analytics, measure your results against the KPIs and optimise! A/B testing both your content and audience is a great way to see what message is selling and to whom. Remember, you will have to tweak both your content and your target audience several times until you are sending the right message to the right people. Data is key in making your money work for you!
Make it omnichannel: Paid media should not be a standalone channel! It should be used to meet customers before driving them towards your owned channels such as email or SMS. Integrate your data between your paid and owned channels to create better content on both, and build loyal and lasting customer relationships.
It may take a few rounds of trial and error to figure out what works best, but if you listen to your data and keep optimising, your investment into paid media will pay off.
Synchronise Agillic data with paid media channels
Combine Agillic data with your Facebook audiences and synchronise the data, reducing manual work and ensure data quality. Target each contact based on where they are in the customer journey and maximise the impact and ROAS.
Google Ads
Reach customers across Search, Shopping, Gmail, YouTube, and Display. Audiences, based on Agillic data, can be included, bid adjusted, or excluded for a more efficient ad spend.
Adform
A unique, automated matching table combines first-party data with Adform’s vast pool of profile IDs. This combination enables you to build exceptionally granular customer audiences that can be targeted with highly personalised ads yielding high ROAS
