Paid Media: From paying up to paying off
To expand your reach and convert potential leads into customers, organic communication is sufficient by itself.
To effectively connect with new audiences, you must engage them where they are most active. That’s where paid media comes into play.
What is paid media?
Basically, paid media involves investing money to extend the reach of your content.
Paid media refers to promotional efforts in which a company or brand pays a fee or spends money on advertising and marketing channels to reach a targeted audience.
It involves investing financial resources to amplify the reach and visibility of content or advertisements.
Paid media can take various forms, such as paid search ads, social media advertising, display/banner ads, sponsored content, influencer collaborations, native advertising, and more.
The key benefit of paid media is that it offers greater control and precision in targeting specific demographics, interests, or geographic locations. By paying for advertising space or exposure on platforms, businesses can strategically position their content in front of potential customers who may not be reached through organic means alone.
Paid media campaigns are typically designed to generate brand awareness, attract new customers, drive conversions, and increase overall visibility in a competitive marketplace.
By utilising targeted paid advertisements on social media and other paid platforms, you broaden your audience and generate fresh leads. The concept of paid media may seem overwhelming as it requires an investment and the options available can make it challenging to decide on the best approach.
However, the investment of both time and money yields fruitful results: paid media surpasses the limitations of organic communication, enabling you to reach new customers or reignite interest among existing ones.
To ensure that your resources are not wasted, follow these recommended strategies when initiating and scaling your paid media efforts.
Paid media best practices
1. Set goals: When starting with paid media, it’s important to 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.
2. Identify your audience and choose your channels: This is key. To choose your channel and content correctly, you must first 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 pay to be a top search result on platforms such as Google or have your ads embedded in social media feeds and/or across browsers.
Whether bringing traffic through search and keywords or taking your ad directly to potential clients on social media, it’s important to narrow the targeting so that you connect with the relevant audience.
3. 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 a lot of 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, and 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. This 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.
4. Measure and optimise: 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 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.
5. 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 in paid media will pay off.
Learn more about Agillic’s paid media offerings
How to synchronise Agillic data with paid media channels
Combine Agillic first-party data with your Facebook audiences and synchronise the data, reducing manual work and ensuring 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 first-party 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
