How to Build a Paid Strategy for Your Brand

Implementing a proficient pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategy enhances your ability to generate leads, elevate brand recognition, and set yourself apart from competitors.

What is Paid Media?

Paid media refers to a variety of digital marketing strategies that involve some form of media ‘buying’. This can include activities like boosting a Facebook post, purchasing an ad to appear among Google search results, or promoting a thought leadership report on LinkedIn.

Setting Your Goals

The initial step (and arguably the most crucial), involves establishing precise goals and objectives for your paid campaign. These should tie to the broader business objectives and can include specific aims and desired results, like:

• A business has entered a new geographical market and is looking to reach local customers by gaining brand awareness.
• A growing brand wants to increase their number of social media followers so they can organically reach more of their audience with engaging social content.
• An established company wants to allocate their marketing budget across multiple platforms to increase lead volume and increase sales.

Most campaigns include an element of goal crossover and a multitude of marketing aspirations, but it's crucial to have a defined view of success to guide your paid strategy.

KPIs: Measuring Paid Campaigns

A Key Performance Indicator (or KPI) refers to how activity will be measured against defined goals and objectives. Some examples of potential KPIs for a PPC campaign are:

• Reach of a social campaign.
• Click traffic to the website.
• A purchase, a booking, or generation of a lead.
• Views of an awareness video on YouTube.

Effective measurement should also take into account how channel-specific metrics like the above tie back to the business objectives. This helps paid teams demonstrate the value and ROI of their work, and can even help them secure additional budget for future campaigns.

Audience

Once your KPIs have been drafted, the next phase is to consider how, and who, to target. When it comes to paid search through platforms such as Google or Microsoft Ads, targeting is achieved through key phrases closely associated with your business's services or products.

When advertising across social media, video, or display platforms, the target audience must match the user personas who are most inclined to interact with your brand. This requires a blend of analyzing primary characteristics like age and gender, along with secondary and tertiary factors such as interests, behaviors, and employment details.

This granular approach to user audience definition is critical to ensure your paid efforts (and budget) reach the right people.

Platforms

Selecting the right platform is essential, and must align with your marketing goals. Often, when someone is questioned about paid marketing, the first assumption is to spend on  Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords). Given Google's integral role in our daily routines, its pay-per-click system has reached almost everyone who uses the internet. As of July 2023, Google had a global market share of 82% against other leading desktop search engines.

While using Google for advertising is probably a key part of many paid strategies, there are many channels in the paid world you can use to reach your target audience. 

Also in the search space, Microsoft's Bing presents a viable option with qualities quite close to Google's ad platform interface in terms of ease of setup, user-friendliness, and affordability.

Paid social channels also present significant opportunities to engage with middle-of-the-funnel users via precise targeting. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram all boast highly intuitive advertising interfaces that help brands reach their key audiences.

At the top of the funnel, when audiences are just finding out about a brand,  the likes of display advertising and YouTube video advertising dominate, offering broad exposure to nearly any target audience.

Budgets

Every paid plan should come with a predetermined and agreed-upon advertising budget. While the bulk of the  budget is likely to go directly to the media platform(s), it's important to also set aside funds for the following areas:

• Creative. From basic text ads to professional video compilations, depending on the purpose of the ad and the information it’s trying to convey.
• Management & optimization. Critical to campaign success is tracking its performance and tailoring and optimizing assets, copy and targeting accordingly to achieve optimum performance.
• Measurement. Paid marketing’s outputs help marketers collect a comprehensive data set including metrics like clicks, click-through rates, costs per click, and conversion rates. Analyzing and converting this data into actionable insights, tied back to campaign goals and business objectives, is essential for continual performance improvement.

Content & Creative Considerations

A comprehensive content strategy has the power to drive conversions and boost revenue and should  be developed with the following elements front of mind:

• Messaging: is it relatable to your target audience?
• Imagery/video: does it complement the ad text? Does it clearly promote the brand, product, or service that you offer?
• Brand: is everything on-brand and aligned across other platforms?

Measurement

It is essential to monitor performance and analytical data, particularly for campaigns that heavily depend on numbers and data.

Providing detailed reports on key outcomes, performance trends, results by audience segment, and recommended actions for enhancement, among other aspects, is vital.

Next Steps

Now that you understand the who, how, when, and where of deploying your paid advertising, you can map out your campaign.

A strategic and meticulously crafted plan will yield captivating, high-quality campaigns that drive exceptional traffic and results for your brand. So, what are you waiting for?

Find out more about how Clarity can support you to build successful paid marketing campaigns. Contact us today.