But, what really is paid advertising? Or also known as paid marketing...
Instead of waiting a long time for your target audience to find your brand organically, paid advertising allows you to reach your customers directly by purchasing the advertisements. Your purchased marketing ads are usually displayed either on social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter or directly on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Whenever you create any paid advertisement, you first need to choose an advertisement channel such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. Then you need to define your target audience based on their location, demographics, preferences, and much more.
As of January 2022, the most preferred social media channel for paid advertisement is Facebook, followed by YouTube, Whatsapp, and Instagram. Furthermore, the biggest provider of SERP paid advertisements with a whopping market share of 92% is Google.
Therefore, without a shadow of doubt, it is clear that paid advertising can help you achieve monetary benefits for your brand much faster than organic digital marketing! Let's dive a little deeper into the details of paid marketing and how it can help your brand reach new horizons of success!
What is Paid Marketing?
Paid marketing can be defined as any digital marketing strategy that helps you to directly target your audience based on their interests and other interactions with your brand's website and social media handles.
Did you know? Nearly 87% of shoppers explore digital channels to find what they're looking for! Therefore, regardless of whether a potential customer shops from a brick-and-mortar location or from your website online, it is important to influence them with your digital content.
Without a robust online presence, your target customers may not be able to discover your brand. Paid marketing not only helps to get a word out about your brand, but also encourages customer engagement, optimize your digital marketing campaigns, and target specific segments of your audience.
As compared to organic digital marketing, paid advertisement can help you get quicker results through targeted granular capabilities. For example, by putting up a blog on your website with a targeted keyword can take months to show positive results. However, through paid marketing you can directly reach your target audience through their search queries and other interactions with your brand.
What are the Types of Paid Marketing?
Did you know? Pay Per Click potential customers are 50% more likely to convert into payable customers! Sounds unbelievable, right?
So, if you want to fuel your business value and generate more leads, Pay Per Click or paid advertising is the way to go! Let's take a look at the different types of paid marketing you can opt for to run your business!
- Paid Search Ads: The most common ads visible in SERPs are paid search ads. You’ll notice that these ads are also tagged with the word ‘ad’ to highlight that it is paid and they usually appear at the top and bottom of the search engine results pages.
- Social Media Ads: This type of paid advertisement is currently a favorite amongst digital marketers and is a great way to connect with your followers.
- Google Shopping Ads: These help generate leads for your products and appear in the form of a carousel at the top of Google SERPs. These ads also allow you to check the prices of the products before clicking on the website.
- Gmail Sponsored Ads: This is an excellent way for you to promote your brand to your target audience directly in their inbox. They usually appear at the top of the inbox of a user. Just like the paid search ads, these also have the “ad” tag.
- Instream Ads: These paid advertisements appear in a YouTube video in the form of a non-skippable or sidebar ad.
- Local Service Ads: This is an exclusive form of paid advertisement that is only available to a few local businesses such as locksmiths, plumbers, electricians, etc.
- Remarketing Ads: These ads help you to re-engage your target audience and give them time to convert into payable customers.
- Display Ads: These ads are visible on the partner websites of Google and they include a picture and text both.
Why Do Organic Posts Take Longer to Grow?
If you’re worried about whether or not you should incorporate paid advertisement as part of your digital marketing strategy or just go ahead with an organic post strategy, then this section will help you arrive at an answer!
Organic social media marketing involves utilising the tools that are already at your disposal with an objective to sustain the following around your brand. The organic posts can help you to generate more leads, retain existing customers, and also improve sales.
However, due to the complex growth cycles for various social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc. there is only so much you can grow through organic marketing. This is where paid advertisement comes into the picture.
Let’s take a look at what are the disadvantages of the organic marketing approach:
● Organic posts are extremely labor intensive and also consume a lot of your time to create.
● Achieving the desired growth through an organic marketing approach is time-consuming.
● Due to the complex ranking algorithms of the social media platforms, organic posts have far lower reach than paid marketing posts.
● Organic posts are not displayed to the target customers who do not follow you.
Because of these above-mentioned disadvantages of organic social media marketing, it is essential for you to have a paid advertisement strategy in your arsenal! Without any paid advertisements, your community reach will be limited and you’ll be unable to garner the customer traction that you desire.
What is the Importance of Paid Marketing for a Brand?
You’d be surprised to learn that the total money spent on paid advertisements is expected to reach approximately $873 billion by the end of the year 2024!
With so many businesses across the globe hopping on the train of paid marketing, it only makes sense for your brand to join the trend too.
Here’s why you must include paid advertisements as a part of your brand’s digital marketing strategy:
1. Excellent Reach
Organic posts are a form of unpaid distribution channel and allow you to reach your target audience base without setting up any budget. However, due to the emergence of the pay-to-play model of social media platforms, organic reach has been on the decline, especially over the past two to three years. In fact, the organic reach of posts on Facebook is estimated to be merely 5.20% today.
Therefore, to boost your distribution channels, you must set aside a spending budget and chalk out a plan for paid advertisements! Paid advertising guarantees you a much better target audience reach and generates qualified leads through specific targeting.
2. Ability of Granular Targeting
The primary reason why you must switch to paid marketing is because it enables you to specifically target relevant customers based on their interests, demographics, and geographic location.
For example: Let’s say that you own a bakery shop and you want to advertise your baking goods within a 3-4 km radius of your shop. This cannot be done through organic social media marketing or SEO because of how time-consuming and labor-intensive the process will be. In such situations, paid advertisements can prove to be godsend!
To create an effective paid marketing strategy, you must begin by analyzing your target audience across various social media platforms and gauge certain parameters such as interests, location, job titles, demographics, keywords, and common topics. All of these parameters can later be used to further refine your paid advertisements and generate better qualified leads for your brand.
3. Measurable Results
A paid marketing campaign allows you to reach your specific target audience in a very short amount of time. The cost of such paid advertisements depend upon the type of advertisement you’re running and the objective behind it.
For example, if your goal is to enhance the online presence and awareness around your brand, then you will choose a cost per impressions model for your paid marketing strategy. Whereas, if your goal is to generate more qualified leads for your website, then the cost-per-click model is the better option for you.
For a paid marketing strategy that best suits your business, you can even hire a professional digital marketing agency that can help your business to grow by miles. Not only do such paid advertisements allow you to track your overall spending budget but also the daily money spent on various ad platforms. This also helps ensure that you don’t go out of your way and shell out unnecessary cash to reach your target audience.
4. Gain Important Business Insights
The best part about paid advertising is that you can test various models of paid advertisements on platforms like Google, Instagram, Facebook, etc. and measure their results to decide which one works the best for your organization. You can further go on and optimize the chosen advertisement as per the needs and wants of your target audience and their interaction with your brand.
The data collected through such a testing process will also help you to build a comprehensive understanding of the interests of your target audience and accordingly hone your messaging skills. Furthermore, paid advertisements also provide you the opportunity to interrogate the customer data and incorporate varying degrees of historical and current customer data to expand your target audience reach.
5. Customer Retention and Retargeting
A retargeting ad allows you to showcase your brand to a customer who has already engaged with your brand by clicking on a previous advertisement. These type of ads are highly relevant and provide a continuous customer engagement channel by building the interest of customers in the goods and services that your brand provides.
Running retargeting paid advertisements helps you stay relevant to the customer’s search results and improve your return on investment (ROI). When your brand stays at the top of your customer’s minds, it also helps with customer retention and builds a holistic community around the brand.
Furthermore, it is not necessary for you to run a retargeting ad on the same platform as your previous advertisements. For example, if you had earlier targeted your audience through a Google ad, then you can re-target them through a Facebook ad!
6. Multiple Broadcasting Channels
There are multiple social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter which can act as broadcasting channels for your brand’s message. Today, nearly every social media platform offers a paid advertising channel that you can make the most of! From Facebook to Snapchat to Twitter, paid advertisements are everywhere.
7. Better and Quicker Ranking
Doesn’t matter whether you’re a new small business or one that has been on the market for quite some time now, every business wants to rank at the top of Google SERPs much quicker. If your business is currently not ranking well on such SERPs, then paid advertisements can help you get a place on the first Google search page. You can use paid advertisements to fill the gap generated by organic marketing till the time the latter picks up pace!
Final Thoughts
Paid advertising is an indispensable part of your marketing funnel. Today, several platforms are offering paid marketing opportunities for you to grab and turn your business into success. A paid advertisement allows you to tailor your brand’s communication to customers based on what works best for them. With consistent optimization and hard work, paid advertising can surely help you to generate more qualified leads and develop a better website conversion rate!
