You can’t rely solely on organic channels to drive relevant traffic in this increasingly competitive and overcrowded digital world. 

Although organic marketing campaigns can be really fruitful, SEO strategy might take a lot of time, much more than you’re ready to wait. In contrast, paid marketing secures faster and more efficient results — your ads appear in front of the right audience at the right time. 

This guide explains how paid marketing works and how brands can leverage paid advertising to get leads as quickly as possible. Also, I’ll share our best tips on how to set up paid advertising campaigns even without extended expertise. 

Let’s get down to business.

What Is Paid Marketing?

Paid marketing is any form of advertising that you pay for targeted at specific audiences that are likely to become your customers. Of course, this can’t be achieved by just displaying your ads chaotically. Efficient paid advertising requires a well-prepared strategy and uses complex algorithms to show your ads to users that might be interested in your product or service.

Paid advertising strategies can be based on one or more channels, including SERPs (search engine results pages), websites, and social media.

Organic vs Paid Marketing

As I have already mentioned, paid campaigns are more effective in the context of prompt results. However, it doesn’t mean that you should ignore organic marketing led by SEO (search engine optimization).

Although SEO takes more time to generate traffic compared to paid methods, organic marketing is a sure-fire way to strengthen your brand voice and facilitate authentic interactions with potential clients. Engaging blog posts or case studies can help you build a connection with the readers and eventually convert them into your customers.

Conversely, paid ads enable brands to reach their potential customers quickly and accurately thanks to targeting, so you don’t need to wait for folks to find your blog. Instead, paid marketing strategies help you put your products and services right in front of your target group. According to Techjury, PPC (pay-per-click advertising) drives twice the number of visitors than SEO.

The battle of ‘organic vs paid marketing’ has no winner — the most prominent results can be achieved by combining both of them.

Paid Marketing Types And How To Set Them

You might be overwhelmed by the wide variety of online advertising channels available, so I have shortlisted the most efficient types of paid marketing to help you get started.

Paid search marketing

What is paid search marketing? The answer is simpler than you might expect. These are adverts you see every time you search for something using Google that appear at the top and bottom of the search results page. In fact, search ads are the most common type of ads.

Here is a paid search ad example:

As you can see, the paid search ad examples above are marked with the word ‘ad’ to make people aware they’re looking at paid content.

How to launch a search campaign in Google Ads

1. For starters, sign in to your Google Ads account or create one if you don’t have it.
2. Go to Campaigns and click the plus button to launch a new campaign.
3. Next, you’ll have two options: choose the goal of sales, leads, or website traffic or skip this step and create a campaign without a goal’s guidance. Choose Search as your campaign type and follow further instructions — select your targeting, set your budget, and create ad groups and ads.
4. You can always come back and edit your settings, ad groups, and adverts.

Display marketing

Display advertising is advertising on web pages, apps, or social media through banners or other formats containing text, photos, video, and audio. The primary goal of display marketing is to deliver ads and brand messages to site visitors or app users.

A popular type of display advertising is sticky ads that stay fixed on the screen even when the user scrolls down the page. These ads can be highly effective in delivering brand messages and increasing ad visibility.

How to create a Google display campaign

1. Likewise, you need to start with signing in to your Google Ads account.
2. Select Campaigns and start a new campaign by clicking the plus icon. Again, choose your goal or go on with creating a campaign without a goal’s guidance.
3. Then, select Display as the campaign type and Standard display as the campaign subtype.
4. Next, you’ll be asked to provide the link to your business’s website and type in the name for your campaign. You’ll be redirected to the settings page.
5. As soon as you finish with the settings, you can create ads and publish them.

Paid social marketing

As its name suggests, paid social marketing involves running adverts on social media platforms. Social media advertising is the second largest market within online marketing, following only paid search ads. What is more, the 2021 global revenue of $153.7 billion is predicted to exceed $250 billion in the next four years.

The principle is relatively straightforward: people see your ads while browsing social media. With multiple social platforms offering paid marketing services, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok are undisputed leaders in terms of effective advertising.  

Social media ad types can be extremely versatile. For instance, Facebook offers images, videos, polls, carousels, slideshows, stories ads, and even more.

How to set up Facebook ads

1. First, log into Facebook Ads Manager and go to the Campaigns tab.
2. Next, click Create and select a campaign objective that is likely to best meet your business needs. The following steps involve giving your campaign a name, setting your budget and schedule, and building your target audience.
3. Then, you’ll be asked to select your ads placements, for example, Feeds, Stories, search, messages, or, as an alternative, you can go for Automatic Placements. You can adjust your ad bidding strategy and bidding type, or start with the default options if you’re a Facebook ads newbie.
4. Lastly, create and publish your ads.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is quite different from the three types of advertising described above. While paid search marketing, display, and social media advertising are all PPC (you pay only when the ad is clicked), influencer marketing means hiring an influencer for endorsing your brand.

How to start influencer marketing

1. To give your influencer marketing campaign more chances for success, start with identifying your primary goal. Most typically, businesses turn to influencers to help create and promote brand content around a particular product or service.
2. Next, define your target audience and do research to find influencers that are trusted and respected by that specific group of people. It’s essential to partner with an influencer who regularly shares high-quality content and has a style that relates to your brand.
3. What happens next depends on each particular influencer: some prefer creating content by themselves, others might want to work with you as a team.

Benefits Of Paid Online Marketing

When set up in a proper way, paid campaigns maximize your lead generation results. Here are four major benefits associated with paid online advertising.

1. Quick results

Promoting your brand with the help of paid digital channels brings instant results. For example, if you use Google Ads, your target audiences will see your ads right after approval, typically within 24 hours. 

2. Enhanced brand awareness

It’s pretty simple: users will start to recognize you if your brand regularly appears in the news feed or at the top of the search results page. Needless to say that they will consider your business when looking for the product or service you offer.

3. More sophisticated targeting

In contrast to organic marketing, paid ads give you full control over who sees your ads by allowing you to target specific audiences that are likely to buy your product or service. The same is true about influencer marketing: the influencer’s followers typically belong to a specific demographic.

4. Insightful analytics

Most paid ad channels give you access to detailed analytics. By closely monitoring KPIs (key performance indicators), you can easily identify areas for improvement and take steps to optimize your campaigns.

Some Hot Digital Marketing Tips to Boost Your Paid Ads Results

A paid advertising strategy is really worth giving a try. Below are some professional tips to make the success of your ad campaigns inevitable.

1. Start small

If you’re a digital marketing newbie, it’s a good idea to start with smaller budgets to test what kind of ads do their job best in driving customers.

2. Targeting, Targeting, Targeting

Don’t shy away from utilizing an insane range of targeting. Apart from applying basic characteristics such as age, gender, interests, and location, leverage behavior-based targeting like purchase history.

3. Elaborate on your landing page

Let’s say a user clicks on your ad that leads to your landing page. Congrats, but that’s not all. Keep in mind that the style and message of your landing page can make or break your conversion rate, so make sure your website is highly converting and looks attractive on any screen size.  

4. Consider retargeting

Retargeting means targeting users that have already visited your website. The good news is that most digital marketing platforms allow you to retarget users, providing you with the opportunity to bring those users back and convert them into customers.

5. Form a plan

Planning is crucial for a paid marketing strategy for business: it helps you define your goals, set your advertising budget, and make more informed decisions. You can find various templates of paid marketing plans on the web that describe their major parts. 

Still, in multiple sources, the templates of paid marketing plans typically boil down to the following points:

• Executive summary
• Mission, vision, and values
• Market and competitor analysis
• Target audience
• Marketing goals
• Marketing strategy
• Paid marketing channels
• Budget

Conclusion

With the obvious advantages offered, paid digital marketing is a quick and effective tool for gaining new customers and growing sales. However, to bring profitable results, online advertising calls for a solid strategy. 

If you need assistance in creating a highly converting paid marketing strategy that will align with your current business needs and budget, feel free to get in touch with the professional PPC management team at ReVerb.