What are your marketing goals? If like most businesses, you want to focus on elevating visibility, increasing traffic, and driving conversion, then you need a solid digital marketing strategy.
This can include paid advertising as well as owned and earned media. Think of them this way:
- Paid advertising puts you in front of new customers
- Owned media is marketing on channels you already “own” – including your website, social media platforms, and email list
- Earned media include media coverage (think industry or news sources) as well as partnerships, affiliate links, cross-posting, influencer marketing, retweets, mentions, shares, and glowing testimonials. They’re promotions you don’t pay for.
Most online marketing strategies incorporate all three—and, of course, there are benefits to each. Paid ads, though, have an important role to play in an effective online marketing strategy. Paid advertising can give your website and social media traffic a powerful boost. It puts your business in front of new customers ready to buy.
And it can give you access to better data to evaluate marketing return on investment (ROI). This is because you can track every ad, keyword, and penny. Let’s take a closer look at some common types of paid advertising and what you can track.
Paid search advertising
Simply put, paid search puts you at the top of search engine results. This is important because it’s a major driver of high-quality web traffic. High-quality web traffic is more likely to convert to site visitors—and ultimately to sales—so you want more of it.
Paid search is powerful because it puts you where customers are looking for exactly what you sell. Research has found that half of customers don’t (or can’t) distinguish between organic and paid rankings in search results. Because nearly 70% of buyers click on one of the first five results, it’s essential to achieve a high ranking.
Paid search marketing makes it easier to track performance and spend, putting an end to the “spray and pray” marketing approach many businesses once took. Setting limits on keyword and campaign spend can also keep your marketing budget in check.
Paid search can be complex to get right, so this is where digital marketing experts can help to properly structure, monitor, and resource your campaigns.
Paid Facebook advertising
Facebook has more than 2 billion active monthly users, so it’s a huge marketing platform. Yet it’s not Facebook’s size that makes it so attractive as part of an online marketing strategy; it’s the robust analytics.
Facebook gives you access to reports and analytics that take all the guesswork out of monitoring performance. You’ll be able to access data on conversion rates, weekly reach, post engagement, and page likes. You can track which posts performed best to analyze content, day, and time of day for optimal posting. All this data helps you tweak campaigns for superior performance and higher ROI.
With Facebook, you can also use powerful targeting capabilities to reach niche, local, and micro-targeted audiences. This insight can help you further refine your campaigns.
Just like paid advertising, Facebook advertising can be a challenge—digital marketing experts can ensure you’re pulling all the necessary levers and making the best use of data insights.
Paid display advertising
Paid display advertising includes website banners and ads. Like Facebook advertising, banner advertising includes options for images and animations. Here too, paid advertising can provide insight into ad performance across sites, markets and verticals, and audiences. This can help you adjust marketing spend and messages for higher-performing campaigns and increased marketing ROI.
Not all banner advertising opportunities are created equal, though, so it’s important to look for expertise in media placement to maximize marketing results.
Beyond the data and analytics, there is another benefit to paid advertising. You can use performance insight to test campaigns. This can be helpful if you’re trying to find the right “hook” for customers, or if you want more data on what products might appeal to a specific audience. With paid advertising, you can quickly see which ad performs best, driving higher ROI for your marketing spend.
Ready to make paid advertising a part of your effective online marketing strategy? We can help. Reach out to us to discuss.
