What is Paid Advertising in Digital Marketing?
- Declan Rix
- May 3, 2024
- 5 min read
What it is and how to make it work for you.
Introduction
Imagine finding thousands of your target customers in a click. Learn how Paid Advertising can put your business in front of them today.
This post is covering the Introduction to advertising in Digital marketing, Types of Paid Advertising, Benefits of Paid Advertising, Key platforms you can use and Challenges and Considerations for your Paid Ads.
By the end of this blog we hope you'll have a greater understanding of Paid Advertising in the Digital Marketing space and how it can help you.
Weekly Quote:
"Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time." - Henry Ford
Paid Advertising in Digital Marketing
Introduction to Paid Advertising in Digital Marketing
Paid advertising is simply paying for space on a platform to promote your ad to your target market.
Paid advertising in Digital marketing is an essential part of any modern businesses strategy plan. There is a wide selection of platforms that allow you to reach your target market and hit your goals. Whether you are a B2C (Business to consumer) or a B2B (Business to Business) business you can find success in Paid Advertising, you just need to identify where your industry finds success online. Whether that's through search, social media, or display networks etc.
Once this is identified you then have thousands of potential target customers for your business just a click away.
Types of Paid Advertising
Pay-Per-Click Advertising or PPC is used in search engines to promote your Business's website or your Business's geographic listing. The best part about PPC is that you only pay when your ad gets a click.
It works by competing with other PPC advertisers. The performance of your ad is based off two things, those being Ad Quality and the "Bid" (amount spent on advertisement). PPC uses a calculation so if you and a competitor bid the same for your Local Café PPC ad, then who comes out on top of the listings is based on the calculation of the quality/relevance of the ad.
Display Advertising are visual based ads that are either flat image, gifs or videos. These ads are displayed on designated areas of websites in the style of banners, sidebars and interstitials. Similar to PPC you will be bidding for the space against competitors and the Ad that comes out on top is the one with the highest score based, calculated by the highest relevance and bid. (This can differ based on display ad networks)
Social Media Advertising allows you to advertise where a large majority of people spend their time online, the platforms allow users to socialise and interact with what they enjoy. But for Advertisers we get to utilise the backend data and target users for our ads and campaigns based on their interests, demographics and behaviours.
& more, there are other forms of Paid Advertising in the online space that you can explore but we have highlighted the current "hot picks" that provide the best results across the board. The online space is forever changing. A new business could launch tomorrow, however unless it redefines how we use platforms in the online space these types of Paid Advertising will remain relevant.
Benefits of Paid Advertising
Measurable results, do you want see where your marketing budget is going. Then Paid Ads show exactly what is happening and where your ad spend is going. View your results with detailed analytics in real time and track your metrics like impressions, clicks, conversion rate and ROI.
Targeting capabilities allow you to reach your target market directly. For example you can have a budget of £100 for a run of weeklong ads. You can spend it on reaching 10,000 users online that are in your target market, or you can spend it on a billboard that has 10,000 random people see it in that same week. You don't need to be a genius to know the conversion rate on the targeted ad is going to be far more successful than that of the billboard.
Instant and scalable traffic works great for any scale business but especially those without an existing large following. Other strategies whether online organic or physical legacy without being established in your niche will be like throwing money to the wind. Paid advertising requires no momentum, you create the ad or campaign and assign the budget and it gets working towards your optimised goal. It allows you to scale up or down on aspects of your ads so you can boost the winners and stop the losers.
Reach your goals and push above them, The main goals are pushing sales, generating leads, increasing your brands awareness and increasing engagement. All of these goals will ultimately boost your business in the long run, your content needs to be optimised for your goals whilst utilising the right platform for your target market.
Key platforms you can use
Pay-Per-Click Advertising or PPC platforms:
Google Ads (Google takes up more than 90% of the online userbase)
Bing Ads (Allows for some great LinkedIn Targeting)
other search engines.
Display Advertising platforms:
Google Display network
Bing Ads
Amazon Advertising
AdRoll
Social Media Advertising platforms:
Facebook (Meta)
Instagram (Meta)
X (formerly Twitter)
LinkedIn
Snapchat
TikTok
Challenges and Considerations for your Paid Ads
Where is your target market? You need to advertise where your target market is. As an example if your a B2C Business selling headphones or a smartwatch you will find much more success using paid ads on platforms like Meta with Facebook and Instagram. But if you tried the same campaign on LinkedIn you would find little to no success, whereas a B2B Business using Software as a Service providing Data Tools or a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system will have a much better time on LinkedIn.
Maintaining relevance, ads like any form of marketing need to stay relevant to the consumer and accurate to the time. Ads need to be made for the now, you cant create a plan and schedule all of the content years in advance. Content needs to be rolled out weekly or monthly and then needs to be measured and managed appropriately. Keep up with the trends and stay on top of your budget distribution.
Ad Fatigue, Its safe to say the average online user has an ever decreasing attention span so your attempts to capture them are harder, you need to stay relevant but with variety. Posting the same style content week in week out with the same visuals and messaging will not interest users and result in less engagement.
Ad Plateaus, Imagine this, your latest Ad is performing insanely well and has effectively gone viral in the paid advertising space. So you throw more money at it in hopes it performs even more, to a degree it does but then it stops providing results. It has hit its plateau, even with platforms providing a very large userbase for you to advertise to there will be a correlation in ad spend and ad performance where regardless of money spent you wont see better results. You need to measure your ads and stop "pumping" them when they meet this area, they may still bring in results but not to the same extent as before.
Conclusion
Identify your target market, utilise platforms that work towards your goals, get established on platforms, monitor competitors, create unique ads, distribute and stay on top of your budget, stand out and stay relevant, measure your results and adapt and improve.
Perhaps all of the above is overwhelming to you or you merely don't have the time to invest into learning and applying the deep vast knowledge that is in Paid Advertising in Digital Marketing.
Well we can help you with that, book a discovery call today and we can help you venture into the online space of Paid Advertising.
Or call on 01502 819777
Best regards, Declan Rix
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