Paid media is the most straightforward path to gaining exposure for your business – and in some ways, it’s true that you get what you pay for.
However, putting all your investment into paid media alone is not the most effective way to spend your marketing budget. Like all PR and marketing tactics, it works best as one tool in the box – one element in an integrated marketing strategy that helps build a picture of your business or organisation across multiple platforms and delivers the highest possible impact.
When we talk about paid media, we tend to think first about advertising – but in fact, the term covers a whole host of tactics in traditional, online, broadcast, social and out-of-home media.
In this guide, we’ll look at how you can optimise your advertising to get the most out of your spend – ensuring you gain maximum return on investment (ROI). We’ll examine the various forms of paid media and, importantly, how they can work together with other tactics in the marketing mix.
What is paid media? Understanding paid media in digital marketing
Paid media is one of the three main categories of media that we tend to talk about in PR. The other two are:
- owned media, which covers your own channels such as your website, blog and social media
- earned media, which involves coverage by journalists, influencers and social media shares that don’t involve payment.
The landscape of digital advertising
The paid media definition refers to any form of advertising or marketing where you invest budget in a piece of content with the aim of promoting your products, services or brand.
The most common examples of paid media are:
- advertising in physical magazines and newspapers or their online versions
- paid digital media, such as display ads, banners and video ads on websites
- paid search ads such as pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google and other search engines
- paid-for social media content, including boosted posts and ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Snapchat
- paid content marketing on digital channels – for example, sponsoring a publication’s e-newsletter to reach its readership or paid promotion through a blog with a relevant target audience
- out of home adverts, such as billboards, posters, bus stops and electronic displays.
Incorporating paid media examples like these into your overall digital marketing strategy helps build audiences, as long as you target carefully. A scattergun approach will do you no favours – you’ll be wasting your investment. Understanding which publications, websites and social channels reach your potential customers and intended audiences most effectively is essential.
As with any relationship, you have to put the effort in to make it work! Paid-for media is especially effective in reaching audiences who are not familiar with your brand, but it also serves to reinforce your relationship with existing or lapsed customers, driving conversion rates and boosting customer loyalty.
Integrating paid media into your marketing strategy
An effective paid media strategy fits into a wider marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy, which in turn must reflect the strategy and goals of your business.
Anyone can spend, spend, spend to increase their reach to an extent – but unless that reflects your wider messaging and reaches your target audiences, you’re just delivering noise, not impact.
A good PR agency will utilise programmatic advertising, social media advertising and other paid media channels as part of an integrated plan.
An example for a business-to-business client might be a three-month campaign with a whitepaper or piece of research at its heart.
- This may be spun off into earned media via press releases, perhaps supported by some advertising spend.
- It can be broken down into blogs on your own channels, and into a paid-for placement on a website relevant to your audience.
- You can blend search engine marketing tactics, such as organic SEO and PPC Google Ads, to further amplify your campaign.
- A mix of organic and paid social media posts on LinkedIn will reach your network and extend it.
In each of the above examples, we would use a mix of paid marketing integrated with other marketing tactics – together they are much more powerful and effective than each one alone.
Paid media supporting earned coverage
As a team that includes experienced journalists, we have a deep understanding of the types of paid and earned media as they relate to traditional print and online publications, and what works best for each.
National media coverage is hard to achieve, but obviously has a greater reach than regional and specialist media. An ad spend in these publications will be demanding on budget and is unlikely to influence the likelihood of news coverage, except for in supplements and online sections that are clearly marked as sponsored.
The regional press may well be on target if your customer base is local. Again, ad spend may not have much influence on coverage (depending on the publication), but you can buy advertising space and present it as editorial (sometimes called advertorial). You can also look at other ways to get a return on your financial investment, for example by sponsoring a publication’s business awards to support your profile and help with networking.
Specialist press, also known as trade press, can often blur the lines. Often, a trade publication dependent on advertising income will happily promote businesses that support it, so an investment in advertising can often be leveraged to make editorial more likely. Although this may seem like a mercenary and overly commercial approach, it does make some sense – if a publication’s audience is on target for editorial, why wouldn’t you also want to advertise to them?
Crafting your paid media approach
Before you launch a paid campaign, stop and think about what you are trying to achieve. Any marketing campaign should have clear messages, audiences and ways of measuring success, and a paid campaign is no exception.
Setting clear marketing goals
Define your marketing goals before you take any action at all. What are you trying to achieve? Are you seeking to raise general brand awareness? Reach a particular demographic? Show expertise and understanding of your specialist areas? Drive website traffic and generate leads or simply boost conversions and sales?
Make sure you know why you are doing it – and interrogate every part of your paid media plan to ensure it meets that purpose.
Identifying target audiences
Understanding your target audiences is crucial for any paid marketing strategy. As far as you can, use any GDPR-compliant data you have to create audience segments, tailoring your messages to each one.
If you’re using social media platforms, such as sponsored social posts and paid ads, use tools like Google Ads and Facebook Ads, which offer granular targeting options to help you reach your potential customers where they are spending their time online.
Likewise, a good PR agency or marketing professional will look carefully at the audience demographics of media outlets before targeting them with press releases or recommending an advertising spend. Often, coverage or advertising in a niche publication can be more effective than a bigger national spend – it’s far better to reach a small number of highly interested and engaged people than it is to shout meaninglessly at a large group who just don’t care!
Optimising for platforms and devices
Think about the social media platforms, websites, mobile apps and paid media channels you will be using, and how users consume media on each. A common mistake made by marketing teams is to use the same content in the same format across all channels.
The influence of social media platforms and formats
While it can be beneficial to repurpose content, you should think clearly about how to adapt it for each platform. Some, like TikTok, are purely video-based, while striking images work best for Instagram and LinkedIn is better for longer-form written content and text-based paid marketing. These differences may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many organisations pump identical content across a variety of formats and expect it to work.
Each platform has its own unique ad formats, tools and targeting options, and these are designed to help you. Use them – even if you have valuable content, you may not be using it to its full potential if you don’t adapt it in the right way.
Advertising formats and creative strategies
Display advertising includes banner ads, carousel ads and rich media ads that appear on websites and apps. Optimising these assets per platform is the most effective way to increase engagement.
Explore the varieties of display and video ads the various platforms have to offer – and use a mix of them to keep users interested and engaged.
Video marketing via platforms like YouTube and Facebook can be highly engaging and effective. Eye-catching visuals and compelling messages are essential components to capture your audience’s attention.
Appealing to the mobile user
Optimising your ads on websites, paid digital advertising and mobile content for the devices that audiences are using ensures that you engage with them effectively. Data shows that more than 60% of content is consumed on smartphones on browsers or mobile apps, with desktop computers next at 37% and tablets only used for around 2%.
However, this varies by region type, audience demographic and platform. For example, as a social media platform focused around work and networking, it’s perhaps not surprising that around 43% of LinkedIn’s traffic comes from desktop computers, whereas Instagram’s more life and leisure-focused user base is almost exclusively found on mobile devices.
So – think about the visual impact, size, accessibility and likely delivery method of your paid-for media content and native advertising, and adapt accordingly.
Content is king: message and design
High-quality, valuable content, including good use of search keywords, is the cornerstone of effective paid media marketing. Your search engine ad copy and visuals should resonate with your target audiences and clearly communicate your value proposition. Consistent branding across all paid media channels reinforces your message, builds brand recognition and gets people into your sales funnel.
Measuring and analysing performance
Measurement of PR success used to be an inexact science – many of its benefits were difficult to quantify and often intangible. Now we have powerful analytics, measurement and social listening tools that can track the fine detail of paid-for media campaigns and informative content to help determine their success and enable us to do more of what is working and less of what is failing. These tools can be refined to track campaign-specific goals and are an essential part of the content marketing toolkit.
Return on investment and conversion tracking
Tracking conversions is the most obvious way of measuring performance, particularly if the purpose of your campaign is a straightforward “I want a website visitor to do this”. Whether it’s booking a call, downloading a whitepaper, filling in a form or making an order, conversion tracking will give you a clear idea of what drives conversion, showing you the ROI of your paid media efforts in attracting the high value customers you want.
Tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel can give you comprehensive data on how users are responding to paid media that directs them to your website, allowing you to see what factors influence conversions, calculate the cost per acquisition (CPA) of each successful action and optimise your ads strategies and wider campaigns for better performance.
Don’t forget that it can take a few visits before a potential customer makes a decision to buy. If they have unpurchased products, remarketing in the form of a follow-up email, perhaps with a discount offer, can be effective.
Harnessing data for informed decisions
You can use data from your campaigns to make informed decisions about your budget and audience targeting. Examine which campaign types, ad strategies and existing posts deliver the best results and adjust your paid media plan accordingly.
If something is working, put more budget into it by clawing back spend from parts of the campaign that aren’t performing as well and are therefore not worth the investment. If your cost per conversion is too high, consider adapting the content to a more effective post type or trying another platform.
Maximising engagement through social media strategies
Spending on paid for social media campaigns doesn’t limit you to promoted (boosted) posts and ads. You’ll have probably seen collaborations on the likes of Instagram between brands and big-name influencers – but the good news is that these paid-for arrangements can often work on a smaller scale, especially if you have a B2C product.
Leveraging influencer and content creator partnerships
Collaborating with influencers and content creators can amplify your paid social media efforts. Influencers have established credibility and can effectively reach your target audiences – whether that audience is regional, national or a specialist niche.
As with any communications activity, it’s vital to ensure that the influential user you choose to partner with aligns with your brand values and audience interests. When it comes to followers, fewer but more focused and engaged followers are usually better than a large, more loosely defined following.
Effective social media campaign types
Your content should vary according to the social media platform you are using for your paid media. Examples of effective paid content include:
Sponsored posts
Some spend is put behind a social media post to get into people’s timelines and news feeds, even if they don’t follow your brand. This is helpful for building an audience with targeted users who don’t know you…. yet!
Stories
Most commonly utilised on Instagram. Users actively engage with these in a different way to the posts they can often scroll past on their feeds. Using stories instead of, or in addition to, feed posts can increase engagement levels.
Video ads
Particularly among younger audiences, but increasingly across demographics, we are seeing increased demand for video. Your video ads need to be carefully crafted so users don’t skip them, but work especially well on native video platforms such as TikTok, where users are already open to viewing content in this format.
Experiment with different formats to see what works best for your audience – and track metrics so you can see which tactics are resulting in conversions.
Beyond paid media: Integrating organic and earned channels
While paid media is vital, don’t neglect the power of organic content. As we have said, the most effective marketing mix comes from a blend of tactics, combining paid-for and organic methods to build a picture of your brand.
A really good example is Google search, where paid-for PPC ads and organic SEO articles that are optimised for particular terms users search for can work together with powerful results. Using both of these tools together is good budget utilisation and gives you an increased level of control over who finds your site and why.
The role of organic search and social proof
Social proof is a psychological term relating to the principle that people are influenced in their decision-making by the actions of others – they are more likely to do something if others are doing it or have done it already.
In marketing terms, customer reviews, testimonials and word of mouth are evidence that other people have purchased and enjoyed or found value in a product or service. Some platforms, like TripAdvisor, offer paid-for premium subscriptions that give hotels and restaurants more functionality, such as the ability to highlight favourite reviews and pictures and access deeper analytics tools that enable them to market more effectively to customers.
Even if you are on a restricted budget, you can encourage and incentivise customers to leave positive reviews online – a relatively easy and cost-effective way to build your profile if you are confident your product merits good feedback.
Synergy with email and affiliate marketing
Integrate your paid media marketing with other channels like email newsletters and affiliate marketing to maximise your results. For example, email banners can nurture leads generated from your paid campaigns, taking users to specific landing pages where you can promote offers, while affiliate marketing – where partners receive a small commission for referring their users to your brand – can expand your reach through partners who promote your products.
Frequently asked questions
What are proven strategies for enhancing the performance of paid advertising campaigns?
To enhance the performance of your paid advertising campaigns, focus on targeting the right audiences with the right messages, adapting content so that it works most effectively on each platform, creating compelling ad creatives, testing and optimising. If it works, do it more – and if it doesn’t, try something else.
How can I accurately measure the return on investment for paid media?
Accurately measuring ROI involves tracking conversions and calculating cost per acquisition of users. How much are you paying to secure a conversion – and is the amount they spend worth it? Use tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel to monitor campaign performance. Take your budget as a whole, and compare the revenue generated from your campaigns against the ad spend to determine ROI. If the primary driver for your campaign isn’t revenue, then measure whatever it is you were hoping to achieve – for example followers, sentiment, downloads, or enquiries.
What are the industry benchmarks for cost-effectiveness in various paid advertising channels?
Industry benchmarks for cost-effectiveness vary according to the paid-for tactics you are using. Search ads, such as Google PPC ads, typically have higher conversion rates but can be more expensive, while social media ads may offer lower CPA but require larger budgets for reach and engagement. Regularly compare your campaign metrics against your spend to assess your campaign’s performance.
How do you craft a paid media strategy that is tailored to specific business objectives?
Crafting a paid media strategy tailored to your business objectives involves setting clear goals, understanding your audience, selecting the right platforms and creating targeted campaigns, using content tailored for each platform. Align your ad creatives with your brand message and continuously optimise based on performance data.
What are the key considerations when allocating budgets across different paid media platforms?
When allocating budgets, distribute your spend based on the channels that are working best – and constantly keep this under review. If you “set and forget” campaigns, you will fail – even the smallest campaigns require constant monitoring and adjustment if they are to deliver the highest ROI and produce the results you are aiming for.
What are the emerging trends in paid advertising that can give businesses a competitive edge?
Emerging trends in paid advertising include the use of AI and machine learning for ad targeting, the continued rise of influencer marketing, and the growing importance of video content and visual content, including those generated by AI.
However, AI is still in its infancy, and it will be a long time – if ever – until it can replace the work of human creatives such as experienced video marketers, and even longer before it can devise integrated marketing strategies that deliver meaningful results.
