How to Master the Technique of Paid Marketing

Since the onset of the pandemic, brands have reinvented the wheel and are now massively shifting to digital marketing to create awareness and grow. Based on eMareker’s projection, digital marketing will account for 54% of marketing budgets and grow by 36% between 2020 and 2022 translating to enterprises requiring the services of a PPC Specialist on a consultation or permanent employment basis. Traditionally, organic marketing has worked well in building brand awareness and engaging with audiences over time. However, combining organic marketing with paid marketing can drive tremendous results within a shorter time. 

What is paid marketing?

By far the greatest benefit of digital advertising is that it offers businesses and brands the ability to reach the target audience at a fraction of the cost. Digital marketing tools have enabled businesses to analyze customer needs and custom their products to meet these specific needs. 

Paid marketing, also commonly referred to as paid digital advertising, is a popular form of business advertising. It is an online marketing approach in which a brand purchases advertising that targets a specific audience based on their interaction history with the brand, intent, or interests. 

Paid marketing is used on various platforms for example social media platforms, websites, and SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Paid marketing tools such as Google ads and Facebook ads allow marketers to define the target market for their products, services, or content on the basis of their demographics, geographical location, interest, and other detailed criteria.  

Why is Paid Marketing Important?

Today, most businesses have an online presence, and creating awareness for their brands is one of their most important goals. Essentially, brand awareness is how well a brand remains in the minds of the target audience. Customers today are highly likely to search for businesses online before making their purchases. A strong online presence is not only a channel for engaging with an audience but also converting them. 

In addition to creating brand awareness, paid marketing helps a business 

• To engage with its clients or audience at a personal level
• Know its customers, segment them, and develop granular targeted marketing
• To create marketing campaigns with measurable ROI

Mastering the Technique of Paid Marketing

Ideally, search marketing is a broad term that generally encompasses the techniques used by brands to increase their visibility online by appearing in search results more frequently. This includes both organic SEO and paid search marketing. 

1. Understanding paid marketing

The term paid marketing has often been used to refer to SEM. However, paid marketing refers to any form of digital marketing that involves the purchase of ad space to promote a brand. 

SEM, on the other hand, has oftentimes been used interchangeably with the term PPC (Pay Per Click). SEM techniques are digital marketing activities that use paid ads that appear on SERPs and web pages. Marketers bid on specific keywords used by their audience on search engines so that their text-based and image ads will appear on SERPs based on the keywords. The business is only charged upon the user clicking on the ad. 

Other types of paid marketing are: 

• Social media ads
• Banner ads
• Native ads
• Influencer marketing

SEM is not only an effective approach as it attracts only the users with intent, but it is also a cost-effective strategy. 

2. The right paid marketing approach

Each of the paid marketing approaches listed above serves its unique purposes. Different brands will adopt different approaches based on their business needs and the phase of their buyer’s journey that plan to target. Most businesses will employ a combination of paid marketing approaches to reach a broader audience. 

3. Optimizing paid marketing

Paid marketing is not merely setting up and ad and forgetting. Here are a few points to bear in mind when setting up your ad campaign. 

• Your SEM platform. The most common SEM platforms are Google Ads and Bing Ads. However, there are others like Yahoo! Gemini, WordStream, and SEM rush that can be considered for a paid marketing campaign. When selecting an SEM platform consider workflow, reporting, performance, cross-channel integration, and optimization capabilities.
• Keywords. These are words and phrases that users frequently search on search engines. Marketers place these keywords on their Ads so that when users search for the keywords, they see the ads. There are several types of keywords including:

• Broad match keywords that target similar phrases including singular, plural, synonyms, misspellings, and stemming.
• Phrase match keywords that target the exact phrase together with other words or phrases appearing before or after the phrase.
• Exact match keywords that target the target term and its close variations including its plural, singular, abbreviations, acronyms, and misspelled forms.
• Negative match keywords that prevent an ad from including irrelevant search terms in the ad. It is usually indicated by including a negative (-) sign on the keyword.
• Localized bidding. These kinds of ads are optimized to target audiences that may want to visit the store physically or target locations with the most conversion rates. Thus bids will be modified to target certain geographical locations.

4. Understand paid marketing pricing models

The PPC marketing approach comes with flexible pricing to suit various users. Here are four paid marketing pricing models. 

• Cost-per-Thousand

Also known as cost-per-mille (CPM) is a pricing model that bills a flat rate on, as the name suggests, every a thousand impressions an ad receives. This is a common advertising model used by video and display advertisers. 

• Cost-per-Click (CPC)

Also known as pay-per-click, this pricing model attracts charges only when an ad is clicked. This model is commonly used by marketers for social media ads.  

• Cost-per-Lead (CPL)

Also known as online lead generation, this pricing model is one of the most popular among advertisers as it charges only for genuine leads that match predefined criteria. For instance, a user who fills out a form or registers their email. 

• Cost-per-Action (CPA)

In the COST-per-Action model, the cost is applicable to specific ad actions such form submission, sale, or ad click. In a sale, for instance, the advertiser is billed upon a credit card transaction. 

5. Conduct Analytics

Once an ad campaign has been launched and it has run for some time, employing tools like Google Analytics to analyze their impact on the website and see how users are navigating the site and interacting with content. This will help you know which pages/areas to focus your PPC efforts on. 

Pro tips

• Engagement holds significant value for any campaign. Hence ads that drive engagement will achieve the highest ROI for your ads. Craft your ads in such a way that they will initiate conversations especially on social media platforms.
• While you may want to promote your brand on multiple platforms, it is necessary to evaluate and focus your efforts only on the platforms on which your brand yields the greatest engagement.

Conclusion

The digital space is very competitive owing to so many online businesses advertising and lower advertising costs. Paid marketing can be the difference between a brand that stands out and one that doesn’t. For starters, brands may have to invest in both organic and inorganic marketing approaches to get their brands noticed. Even so, it is important to assess the impact of their choices regularly.