What Is Paid Marketing?

PAID MARKETING

Paid marketing, also known as digital advertising, refers to any strategy in which a brand targets potential customers based on their interests, intent or previous interactions with the brand.

Paid campaigns can utilize one or more digital channels, including search engine results pages (SERPs), social media platforms and websites. In addition to the display advertisements you’ve likely seen in SERPs and web pages, paid marketing can also take the shape of sponsored social posts and guest blogs.

Benefits Of Paid Marketing

Today, it’s highly likely that new customers will first encounter your brand online. In fact, 87% of retail shoppers begin their searches on digital channels, regardless of whether they ultimately make a purchase online or in a brick-and-mortar store.

Meanwhile, research from Google indicates that 67% of B2B purchases are influenced by digital content and advertisements.

Without a digital presence, your potential customers may never find your brand. Paid marketing can benefit your growth strategy by:

• Building brand awareness.
• Encouraging customer engagement.
• Allowing you to target specific audience segments.
• Giving you the ability to measure and optimize your campaigns.

Paid Search Marketing

It only takes a matter of seconds to get a paid search campaign up and running. By following a few prompts, your search ads will be ready to reach thousands of search users across the web. However, optimizing your search campaigns takes a little more time, care and finesse.

Since it’s the most popular platform, let’s assume you plan to use Google Ads – formerly known as AdWords – to run your paid search strategy. Here are a few steps you can take to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns:

Improve Your Quality Score

Only Google knows the secret sauce that is the algorithm determining an ad’s quality score. However, Google has provided a few hints. To lower your average bid cost and improve your ad rankings, try A/B testing your ad copy and stick with whichever gets the highest click-through rates. Grouping keywords into separate ad groups may also improve your score. Finally, creating relevant landing pages for your ads encourages longer site visits, which is a signal of high quality.

Use Location-Based Bidding

After you’ve run a campaign for a period of time, check out your geographic metrics. These will tell you where your visitors live, broken down country, region and city. Use this information to modify your bids to more heavily target areas that have already shown higher conversion rates.

Paid Social Media Marketing

First of all, if your brand isn’t on every social media platform under the sun, don’t panic. Maintaining multiple social media pages can be very time consuming, especially when you have a limited amount of resources.

Consistency is the name of the game. Maintaining a steady stream of high-quality posts is one of the best things you can do on social media. Therefore, you may want to focus on just one or two platforms.

Focus On Conversations

As with SEM, the positioning of your social ads is determined by an algorithm. Each platform has its own algorithm and they are not made public. However, one thing they all value is audience engagement. Posts that spark conversations among real people are the most valuable

With every paid social ad you produce, your goal should be to start a conversation. Pose an interesting question or make a statement that begs users to add their own opinion. Bear in mind you may want to moderate these conversations, which can be resource intensive, but can also encourage further engagement.

Display Marketing

Display networks and paid search use many of the same technologies, so the same advice applies to both strategies.

If you want to retarget your site visitors as they browse the web, keep your main objective in mind: bringing those people back to your site. You can encourage that behavior in several ways:

Optimize your ads with negative keywords. Ad networks allow you specify the keywords for which you don’t want your ads to appear. For example, specifying “free” as a negative keyword will prevent your ads from appearing on web pages listing free versions of your products.

Remind visitors of your value proposition. You have limited space for copy, so make sure it counts. Reminding visitors of your value proposition can encourage them to return to your site.

Use a call to actionUsing action verbs and phrases can increase engagement with your ads. “Click to learn more,” is an example of a simple phrase that can lead to great results.

Influencer Marketing

If there’s one thing you take away from this section, it’s that you should always research your influencers. There are plenty of fake influencers online who claim to have a long reach but actually inflate their follower counts. Use the tools listed above to look up influencers you’re thinking about working with.

Once you choose a legitimate influencer, don’t try to direct every aspect of the relationship. After all, they know their followers best, and they’ll know what type of content is most appealing. Listen to their ideas and keep them in the loop about your campaign goals.

Influencer marketing may not produce immediate results. It’s important to build a relationship with influencers and give them some time to find the best way to collaborate with your brand.