A Guide To Paid Media
One way that we see massive success for our clients is through paid media. Advertising across platforms where your audience hangs out can be hugely beneficial for brands if you have a goal for the campaign.
We help our clients determine a budget, set goals, and plan the creative they will need, too, whether that’s photography, video, copy, or a lead magnet.
Paid media is so POWERFUL and so vast, but you need to make sure that it ties back into what you are trying to achieve.
What is Paid Media?
Paid Media is a method where you can pay to promote your content across social media, display ads, paid search results, pop-ups, and influencer marketing.
Sponsoring your content allows you the opportunity to generate more traffic to your website, increase your brand awareness, and get in front of your target audience.
If you’ve ever seen an influencer recommend a product using ‘AD’, seen a sponsored post on Facebook or Instagram, seen ads when reading the news, or watched a video ad on YouTube, this is ALL paid for by the brand.
What businesses can use Paid Media?
Honestly, ANY business can make the most of paid media across social media, influencers, and display ads.
To use paid media, you’ll generally need a Google Ads account, a Facebook Ads Manager account, and a Facebook pixel embedded in your site.
What are the benefits of Paid Media?
The opportunities of paid media are enormous; by using paid media correctly, you can achieve business objectives set by your marketing team or senior management.
Using paid media across platforms that your audience is hanging out on can get great results when you are specific about WHO you want to target.
Paid media is a great way to launch a new product, increase your brand awareness, build your customer base, sell products to existing and new customers, and ultimately get more customers behind your brand.
If you want to get one up on your competitors, paid media is a great way to ensure your products are getting in front of your target audience in a place they already are.
Why should you use Paid Media?
If you are looking to get in front of your target audience, then paid media is for you! You can break down your paid media goals into four key areas:
Creating awareness
Driving traffic
Pushing conversions
Customer retention & engagement
You need to remember that you always need a goal when creating any paid media campaign. I’d advise you to not focus on vanity metrics and instead focus on conversions for maximum return on ad spend (ROAS).
Ask yourself, what is your objective, and will this campaign help us get there?
Types of Paid Media
Display Ads
Display ads are a great way to increase brand awareness and recognition, and honestly, they are EVERYWHERE. As far as ads go, this is probably the most recognisable and traditional form of advertising through paid media. Have you ever visited a news outlet site and seen an advertisement on the page for a product or service that you’ve recently been looking at? This will all be part of that brand’s strategy, you may have visited their website or may be in their target demographic.
Some more prominent brands will just do a blanket targeting and simply target EVERYONE. Great if you’ve got a never-ending budget, but if you have a limited budget, being specific about your targeting is vital to ensure you get the best value for your ad spend.
Influencer Lead
Influencer campaigns can be highly successful when done correctly! The opportunities here are endless, and the great thing about influencers is often they have a clear niche. There are influencers for a huge range of interests including, fashion, home, lifestyle, travel, music, art, fitness, food, drinks, the list goes on!
For example, if you are a chocolate brand and want to influence your audience to use your product in home baking, you’d look at baking influencers with a large following. Take a look at this example below of Milky Bar working with baking influencer @janespatisserie.
Don’t forget timings and current trends; during lockdown, home baking was hugely popular because people had lots of free time. The food shops were still open, and baking became massively instagrammable.
Working with influences can be tricky to navigate if you haven’t done it before. At Firebelly, we work on your behalf to create contracts and deliverables with influencers to ensure your influencer lead campaign succeeds.
Depending on your budget, you can work with micro or macro-influencers. Of course, don’t expect to work with the likes of the Kardashians unless you have hundreds of thousands (and maybe even millions) to spend. Be realistic and be on brand, don’t just work with an influencer because you like them; work with influencers that work with your brand, audience, and objectives.
Advertising on Social Platforms
The one thing to remember when deciding where you will undertake your paid media activities is that you don’t need to be advertising on every single platform. If you’ve researched your audience and know about your ideal customer, you’ll likely know where they hang out. I’ve got a blog here that may be useful to choose your platforms.
Understanding your audience can help you determine where to allocate your budget. Are they more likely to be influenced by a well-placed advert with an offer, or are their purchasing decisions heavily influenced by the creators and influencers they follow?
Don’t forget that while influencer marketing is highly successful, remember that just because a creator has a considerable following on TikTok doesn’t mean they have a large audience on Facebook or Instagram. This is something to bear in mind when undertaking negotiations with the creator, which platform you want to use.
Each platform offers different advertising methods, which allow you to get in front of your audience in many different ways.
Across Facebook, you can do a HUGE range of ad types and arguably, the most out of any platform. Facebook is a great platform to advertise on as you have a massive range of ad types; you can do single images, videos, stories, carousels, slideshows, messenger buttons, app download buttons, lead generation forms, and so much more.
An example of a carousel Facebook Ad you may see below. They slot in so nicely to the feed it’s almost disguised; they have used call to action buttons, and you can tell from this that their objective is to get more signs ups by offering a deal and having the sign-up button in the post.
Find out more about Facebook Ads in my blog here.
You’ll probably be familiar with the range of ads you’ll see on Instagram; they typically vary from advertisements on your feed and stories, but most are in the form of influencer lead paid media. Since the Advertising Standards Agency stepped in, influencers have to declare an AD clearly stating AD in their story or caption for absolute transparency. Check out this example below of a sponsored feed post on Instagram by Marks and Spencers.
TikTok
Arguably the most prominent platform at the moment and has taken a huge leap from dancing videos to short snappy videos about just about anything, and with that has come an influx of ads and sponsored posts! When you open TikTok, you’ll get an ad straight away that includes call to action buttons within the caption, as you can see in the screenshot below of an AD between influencer Anastasia Kingsnorth & TK Maxx.
YouTube
If you’ve ever watched a YouTube video (who hasn’t!), you’ll have probably been frustrated by how many ads pop up before you watch a video and sometimes in the middle of a video.
Across LinkedIn, you can use different methods due to the nature of the platform, sponsored InMail is a great way to get in front of decision-makers, and of course, you can do sponsored feed posts.
Like the other platforms above, Pinterest sponsored pins and stories fit in SO well to the feed that it doesn’t feel intrusive; sometimes, you may even notice you pin something without realising it is an ad!
Paid Search
Google is undoubtedly the most popular outlet for paid search and highly effective to get in front of potential clients who are actively looking for your products or services. There are many ad choices available, including dynamic search, video, product, image, and so much more.
Things to remember for paid media
You can’t out-market a bad website or a bad offer/product.
Your creative & copy are SO important; you need to grab attention and make sure the ad spend is worth it!
Ensure the link you use are for the product you are advertising.
Make it as EASY as possible for the user to find what they need on your landing page.
And that is Paid Media (in a nutshell!)
Of course, there are endless possibilities with paid media, and I could go into so much more detail about it (and will do very soon!).
I REALLY hope that this blog has given you an insight into paid media and how you can use it for your business.
At Firebelly we specialise in paid media and have created amazing campaigns for our clients, and we are seeing some great results from social platforms, specifically TikTok!
If you need some help with your advertising across social media, please reach out, and we can help you. Drop me an email enquiries@firebellymedia.co.uk, and I can send you some more information on how we can help.
Remember, there are SO many opportunities available with paid media, set some objectives, allocate a budget and try it out!
Mary-Anne.
p.s if you would like to check out more marketing tricks that I’ve been sharing on TikTok, you can view ALL of my videos here.
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