Getting website visitors to your site boils down to two methods. You can try to reach them via organic methods like optimizing web pages for organic search results and posting on social media. You can also get traffic by running paid media campaigns through the various media platforms available out there.
Running paid media campaigns can be very lucrative if done right. Paid media is an investment and you need to make sure you are validating that investment by ensuring the campaign you are accomplishing your goal. Whether it’s to gain more traffic or conversions to your site.
In this article, we will discuss the use cases of paid media and discover what paid media platform might be best for your business.
Why Should You Use Paid Media?
Starting a new business or a website is quite difficult. The reasoning is that getting visibility is not an easy task. Close to half-million websites are created every day so the odds of your website going viral and achieving millions of hits are very slim.
In the first few months, you might try posting on social media or following the best practices in search engine optimization to get eyes on your website. Building an audience organically is very difficult especially if you are trying to scale your business very quickly.
Implementing paid media campaigns is a great way to get around this hurdle. Media platforms allow you to pay your way into acquiring more traffic to your website. The traffic you bring to your site through paid media campaigns can be catered to match the target audience of those who most likely convert and purchase your product or service which is something you can’t guarantee with organic traffic.
Things to Think About When Running Media Campaigns
Audience
A unique advantage that paid media acquisition methods have over other organic methods is that you can control the audience.
When you perform search engine optimization, you are getting your website or landing page to the top of the search engine results. Ideally, you can assume that a fully optimized website will be attractive to users within your ideal target audience, however, the reality is that majority of the traffic generated through a tactic like this will expose your site to people outside your target audience identifiers.
In most paid media platforms, you can target individuals based on demographic data like their gender, occupation, and age as well as interest-based categories, like Facebook page interests or keyword search queries.
This is very helpful because once your start to run campaigns, you can become more selective in fine-tuning your audience. For example, if you notice more conversions are happening for a certain age or interest category, you can either devote more money to those selectors or remove ones that aren’t performing.
Budget & Timeline
One of the biggest mistakes that business owners make when running any form of media campaign has to do with the budget. If you’re a newer or cash-strapped business, paid media might not be for you. If you think sprinkling a couple of dollars here and there is going to get results for you, you’re wrong.
Based on experience, an effective media campaign needs a budget close to $3000 to deliver results. That calculates to about $100 per day. The reasoning behind this is that the algorithms need enough conversion data to show your ad to the right audience.
If you are constantly pausing campaigns early, the algorithm doesn’t have a chance to run its course. Your ad will be shown to people that most likely won’t convert. So are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t have the right budget to run a campaign.
Types of Paid Media and Their Platforms
Social Media
Most social media platforms have a paid media option. The most popular social media platforms for paid advertising are Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin.
Organic Marketing on Facebook’s social media platform is virtually non-existent anymore. With the addition of stories, organic marketing on Facebook is making a slight comeback, but if you want any success on this platform, you’ll need to use Facebook ads.
Facebook ads allow you to put an advertisement for your business in your target audience’s feed. You can do news feed ads and sidebar ads. Ad types include videos and photos, both can be accompanied by ad copy and a call to action.
Another great feature Facebook Ads include is Facebook Lead Forms. Instead of driving traffic to a landing page with a form to collect user data, you can create a form on the Facebook platform that auto-populates with user information of those who click on your ad. This helps increase the chance of someone converting to your ad.
Use Case
Facebook ads have a use case for every business. It will do exceptionally well if you have an eCommerce store that sells a great product. However, if you’re planning on running Facebook ads for B2B, you might struggle to gain traction on the platform. The key for Facebook is having compelling ad copy and ad “creative” that stick out to your target audience.
One drawback of Facebook Ads is that it can be quite expensive if your ads are not attractive to your audience. Also, social media platforms are losing popularity amongst the younger generation as there are more engaging platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok.
Instagram is a media-centric social network that gained popularity in the mid-2010s. They’ve since added a paid media component allowing advertisers to run ads on the platform.
You can place square ads in the user’s news feeds and on Instagram stories. These ads usually have calls to action to visit the profile of the advertiser or link back to a website or landing page.
Use Case
Instagram ads are great for all businesses. It will work very well for businesses that can show their product in action. Very much like its parent Facebook, Instagram won’t do well for business-to-business opportunities. However, if you are seeking the attention of a younger audience, Instagram is a great place to start.
Linkedin is a social media platform known for networking. People can make business connections and find jobs. They can also learn more about companies and who is behind their operation of them. Linkedin also has a paid media tool that serves ads to users of the platform.
Use Case
Linkedin Ads is very similar to Facebook as you can promote your content, and place ads in your target audience’s news feed. You can also send sponsored messages to the inbox of your audiences as well. The difference between Facebook and Linkedin is that Linkedin has a more professional vibe to it which makes it great for B2B opportunities.
If you’re a B2C brand, Linkedin may not be the best choice. Linkedin ads serve better as a platform to get B2B leads for your business.
Native Advertising
Native Advertising is beginning to play a major role in the advertising space. Native advertising is when you have ads placed on websites that are designed to blend into the webpage. This causes the user to think that the advertisement is an actual component of the webpage, and will click because it doesn’t appear like an ad. Most of the articles found on yahoo contain some form of native advertising.
With people becoming more aware of data privacy and conscious of the digital advertising they are being exposed to, native advertising is becoming a popular outlet for businesses to get viewers to their websites.
The most popular native ad networks are Taboola and Outbrain. Most native advertising networks function very similarly to both Facebook and Google Ads, sharing the same revenue models like cost per click or cost per thousand impressions. Taboola and Outbrain claim to have placements of millions of websites. It is up to you as the advertiser to identify which placements would work best for your ideal target audience.
Use Case
Native advertisements tend to be much cheaper than paid social and search engine marketing. Cost per click is in the dollar cent range and cost per impression is very reasonable as well. The platforms are much more lenient in terms of the verticals you can advertise to. For example, you are not allowed to run health insurance ads on Google without proof that you are an actual insurance carrier. Most affiliate marketers in the health insurance space turn to native advertising to get around that restriction.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing has been around practically since the birth of the internet. This is most commonly seen in practice when you use the Google search engine and notice that the first 3 results have the word “ad” associated with them.
In search engine marketing, advertisers are bidding on common phrases in the search results that will best fit the mold of what their target audience uses so the advertiser can get them to click on their search listing and visit their website or landing page.
The Google and Bing search engines are the most popular and rewarding search engine ad platforms.
90% of all searches on the internet are through Google. It makes sense that Google Ads is the most powerful ad network in the world. Google ads have a host of ad formats triggered by keyword searches such as text ads, display ads, and video ads (via YouTube).
Use Case
Competition on Google ads can be extremely high depending on the industry. Competitive industries like insurance yield extremely high rewards so trying to get an ad for keywords related can cost you as an advertiser upwards of $10 per click.
It’s imperative when advertising on Google that you do thorough keyword research and find low competition keywords that your audience might use to maximize your ad’s cost-effectiveness.
Google completely relies on keyword research. You used to be able to select demographic characteristics of your target audience but due to the privacy changes, your options are very much limited to age and region of the world they reside in.
Microsoft Ads
Microsoft ads run placements on the Bing search engine. Everything that applies for Google Search Engine also applies for Microsoft Ads for the most part, minus display and video ads.
Bing doesn’t attract as many searches in comparison to Google but it is a popular search engine for an older audience. So, if you’re a brand looking to reach an older demographic, you may want to devote a little bit of ad spend to Microsoft Ads.
Conclusion
Paid media can provide tremendous benefits for your business when done properly. You need to select the right paid media platform for your audience. You also need to devote enough budget to ensure that the algorithms are running at peak performance to make sure that your getting the most bang for your buck.