Are you planning on kickstarting your marketing campaign? If yes, you should include paid media in your repertoire of marketing tools. Extremely powerful and capable of generating immense visibility for your brand, paid media can help your new brand succeed in this competitive market.
Paid media: What it is
Paid media refers to the marketing tools, techniques, and content that brands sponsor. Here, a third-party is hired to generate conversation and engagement for you.
You purchase an ad, bid on a keyword or sponsor promotional content, and publish your advertisement. This ad is placed in high-traffic and highly-visible sections of the website or social media platform, where thousands of prospects will be able to see it, click on it, and visit your site, thereby generating leads and conversions.
Paid media is very different from organic/earned media, where customers proactively share your content (without your intervention) and generate site visits. In earned media, your post’s placement depends on how much engagement it receives from prospects and if it doesn’t receive much engagement, it doesn’t generate high traffic for your site.
How paid media can help your business
Compared to organic media, paid media offer immense benefits to companies:
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They increase your brand visibility and recall
Since you pay for this media, you can have them displayed on all those platforms where your prospects are; and do so multiple times. Constantly seeing your advertisements or posts on their news feed will increase their awareness of your brand.
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They can be targeted to any audience
Paid media can be customized to target and engage specific types of prospects, at varying stages of the purchase lifecycle. Such a focused and concentrated strategy yields faster results. You can even re-target prospects who are teetering at the edge of indecision and push them to purchase your product.
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They help you get qualified leads
By using paid media across multiple touchpoints (i.e. social media platforms, search engines, eStores, and websites), you’ll be able to nurture the interest that prospects have in your brand by sharing informative and entertaining content. This can help you get qualified leads.
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They can be used to generate audience/marketing insights
Paid media campaigns can be easily tracked and evaluated using analytics tools. You can see how well your paid media is performing, which channel is working the best and which the worst. You can also identify which audience group is the most-lucrative. You can use this information to further-customize your campaigns.
Additionally, paid media come with A/B testing tools, where you can keep tweaking your ads to suit the audience’s taste, until you finally develop an ad that converts.
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They can be mobile-optimized
Did you know that 50% of customers who view an advertisement on their mobile phone visit the retail store within 24-hours of seeing the ad? Additionally, 70% of customers click the call button on Google ads when they view an ad on their smartphone. Paid media, as a mobile-optimizable marketing technique, can be very helpful in increasing your customer base.
Types of paid media you can use
There is no one single type of paid media. In fact, paid media constitutes multiple marketing tools and channels, making this a very versatile marketing strategy. The types of paid media include:
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Social media advertisements
These refer to the paid adverts you can publish on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
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Search engine advertisements
These ads come up on the first page of the search engine during your search. You see a small symbol “Ad” next to them. You pay to get your business listed on the first page of the search engine results.
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Search engine optimization
SEO refers to bidding for keywords and using the most-used keywords on your site to make your site more frequently visible and searchable to prospects who are looking for your type of business.
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Banner advertisements
Banner ads refer to image-based ads that you normally see displayed on websites when you browse online. These ads are clickable ads that take you to the website/eStore where the product/service is being sold.
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Native advertisements
Native ads are adverts that are native to the site where they are being displayed and which follow the same editorial guidelines. For example, if you visit sites like Entrepreneur.com or Medium.com, you’ll see ads that look like the content on the site, but are actually ads. Native ads can also be “Sponsored content”, where an article promoting the brand’s product is sponsored on the site.
How much does paid media cost?
Paid media is priced according to three models:
- Cost Per Click (CPC) – Where the brand pays for each ad click it receives.
- Cost Per Mille (CPM) – Where the brand pays for every 1000 views of the ad.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) – Where the brand pays for every lead conversion that is generated from the ad.
The cost of a paid ad (this includes search engine ads, SEO, banner ads, and native ads) depends on your:
- Geographic location
- Ad quality (i.e., how optimized it is)
- Budget set for each ad click
- Industry competition
- Market size
- Placement of the ad (which page of the search engine)
However, on average, the cost of paid ads ranges between $1 and $3. If you were to use the services of advertising platforms like the Google Display Network, you’ll get even more competitive prices purely because of the large volumes of business the platform generates.
Coming to social media, paid social ads are just as budget-friendly. Facebook charges, on average, $7.19 per 1000 impressions and $0.97 per click. Promoted tweets on Twitter cost between $0.50 & $2. Instagram ads can start at $0.50 per post and go all the way up to $5. On LinkedIn, you may have to pay around $0.80 for each Sponsored InMail you send. YouTube has one of the lowest ad rates at $0.10 to $0.30 per ad.
So, contrary to popular belief, paid media isn’t really expensive. You can easily set aside a small budget and still benefit greatly.
Choose the experts at Outlasted Data for end-to-end paid media campaign management
At Outlasted Data, we are a reputed marketing services provider based out of Israel. We have extensive experience helping brands jumpstart their paid media campaigns. We will work with you to develop a fully-optimized paid media campaign that suits your business needs and audience profile.
We follow a very comprehensive campaign management process, where we research your niche, your business, and your prospects before creating a personalized campaign. We have in-place state-of-the-art testing and analytics tools that we use to track your paid media performance and modify them to perform better.
Contact us for more information.
