By the last quota of 2021, the total worth of paid advertising in digital marketing was $705billion, from $634billion in 2019; the value is estimated to hit $873 billion by 2024. This growth in figures indicates that a paid ads strategy is highly profitable for businesses who use it; that’s why they keep coming back!
This article will reveal why it’s essential to incorporate paid ads in your digital marketing strategy. You’ll find relevant information to guide you, and learn how you can begin the paid advertising process for your business.
Free and paid advertising are the main ways businesses market themselves digitally in today’s world. While free advertising has a lot of benefits for your business, running paid ads drives your results to a whole new level.
Paid advertising is just like it sounds—online advertising that you pay for, as opposed to free advertising.
Also called paid media advertising, it’s a type of advertising technique that involves displaying your ads in different formats to a defined audience on an ad platform, and then you pay when members of your target audience, or anyone else, click on your ad.
Paid advertising has changed the game for tons of businesses worldwide; it’s an exceptionally useful marketing channel that can help you grow your business if well-utilized.
For instance, Facebook ads (known as Meta now) over the years have propelled a lot of brands, displaying their ads before billions of Facebook users, and making them household names worldwide—think brands like Netflix, Amazon, Airbnb, Nike, and so many others. In 2021, Facebook’s paid ads revenue was $114.93 billion just for the U.S community alone!
Aside from Facebook ads, some other paid advertising examples that exist are Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Programmatic advertising, Google Ads, Tik tok Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc. We’ll look at these in-depth further down this article.
Businesses that work with paid advertising strategies usually have so many great testimonials. Here are some of the benefits of paid ads they enjoy:
Paid Ads Amplify Consistent Organic Efforts
Organic reach (people who see your non-promoted content on social platforms) has been on a steady decline for a couple of years now. In fact, a 2020 survey shows that only 1 in 19 of your fans online can see your unpaid posts.
The solution to this is to boost your reach by using paid advertising for your social media marketing. It not only helps you reach a specific target audience but also has the potential to grow your brand and attract qualified leads.
They’re Affordable and Easy to Create
Firstly, you only pay based on the specific type of ad you want to run, or the aim you hope to achieve with the ad—whether boosting traffic, generating leads, or growing awareness. For instance, to generate website traffic, you can choose to pay per ad click.
You can also set a fixed ad budget for your campaign on your preferred paid ad platform, so you never overshoot your budget. Creating ads has become super easy as well, as there are tons of free tools that you can use to create attractive ads for your business.
Some ad platforms can even automatically adjust your ad size and format to fit any ad space on the Google Display Network, so you don’t have to create multiple ads for multiple ad spaces.
Helps Reach Multiple People on Multiple Channels
Even if your business only exists on one social channel, with paid ads, your reach is not restricted to this channel. Almost all social media platforms now offer paid advertising, from TikTok to Reddit, Snapchat, and the other social media giants.
Depending on who you’re looking to reach (your primary target audience), you can select any of the paid ads channels and your ads will be displayed on those channels.
Paid Ads Help Target, Test, and Improve
With paid ads, you can say goodbye to advertising to random people, hoping someone would be interested in what you offer. Instead, paid ads allow you to reach specific targets and relevant leads who are just looking for what your brand has to offer.
You can target your ads specifically to the demographic, geographical location, or buyer persona you hope to attract, so it’s a hit, almost every time—organic reach cannot offer you this.
Paid ads also allow you to test different types of ad formats and messages to see which one works best, based on the way the audience interacts with them. With the information you gather, you can decide how to structure your subsequent paid ads to give you the results you desire.
They Help Rank Organically on SERPs
If your website is not ranking on the first page of Google or other search engine results pages (SERPs), you can use paid ads to attract traffic to your website. How? By placing paid ads for specific keywords.
While it’s essential to build organic search rankings for your page, make the most of paid ads to bridge the gap while you wait for organic results to kick in.
Like we touched on earlier, there are various types of paid ads you can run for your business. A paid ads expert can give you better advice on the best ad type for your business, and help you set it up as well—but first, get familiar with your available options:
These ad types pop up in search results. They’re usually the first 2 or 3 results in your Google search and have an “Ad” tag to indicate that they’re not organic results. They often contain no visuals, only texts, and you can set them up on Google Ads.
2. Display Ads
These appear as images with texts on Google’s partner websites. They’re often tailored to people who are interested in your business; for instance, customers who have visited websites that are similar to yours.
3. Google Shopping Ads
If your business is product-led, then these types of ads can help you direct leads to your products. They appear in a carousel-like format above Google search results, with images of the products and prices that shoppers can click on to get to your website.
4. Social Media Ads
Most people have come across these types of ads on social media; they’re among the most popular. They appear like regular posts in social media feeds, making them easy to blend in. The major way to identify them is that they have a “Sponsored” tag above the image, and usually have a clickable button that leads targets to the desired website or platform.
5. Remarketing Ads
Ever visited a website once and suddenly start seeing the brand’s ads everywhere else? That’s remarketing or retargeting at work. Based on your previous interest in the brand, businesses that use remarketing ads, use your browser’s cookies to show you more ads about them and convince you to do business with them. Remarketing ads are effective for:
6. YouTube Ads/Video Ads
If you create a lot of video content, YouTube is a great place to advertise. Video ads can help you get your business in front of tons of people who don’t know about your business or who are not following you. With PPC advertising, you can display your video ads through Google Ads to the 2bn+ active users on YouTube.
Digital marketing is no longer something that businesses can ignore. Consumers are now digital-first, and so businesses that want to remain relevant must strive to put themselves out there in the digital space.
If you’re looking to incorporate paid advertising into your digital marketing strategy, then you should do it right. Even though I have explained the paid ads process as simply as possible for you to understand quickly, there’s definitely more to it than it seems.
This is why you need the services of a paid media buyer, A.K.A, a paid ads expert to help you scale your ROI and achieve your marketing goals. A paid media strategist understands the complexity of the paid advertising industry and has a good grasp of managing paid ad accounts.
Hiring an expert is essential for your business if you need help applying digital marketing strategies, specifically, paid ad campaigns, in your marketing operations.
If you’re ready to start enjoying more ROI for your ad campaigns or digital marketing strategies, then you should get in touch with a paid ads expert. How can you identify a good one?
Here are some things to look out for during your search:
Expertise or Experience
Since there are different types of paid ads, there are also diverse types of ad experts skilled in the different areas. When choosing a paid ads expert, ensure that they have the expertise or experience needed for the type of paid ads you want to run.
There’s no point in hiring a paid ads expert that specializes only in Facebook ads when you want to hire them for YouTube ads. Find out how much experience they have in the preferred field for your brand—the more they know, the better for your results.
If possible, get a paid ads expert that is skilled in more than one area of paid advertising, so that they can cover a wide range of ad platforms for your business.
Work Process
A paid ads expert’s work process tells a lot about how well they will deliver. Their work process should be detailed, clear, and easy for you to understand so that you know how they hope to provide the value they claim to bring.
For instance, at Felix Media Marketing, our personalized 3-step process is simple:
Availability
Many paid ad agencies or account managers have a ton of paid accounts that they handle, making it difficult to carefully narrow in and find ways to scale each individual account’s profits maximally.
A paid ad expert like me will personally work on your paid ad account, devoting time and expertise to providing your account with the best service and generating exceptional results for your business.
Affordability
How much are you willing to spend on paid advertising? Your budget largely dictates the type of paid ads personnel you can work with—whether an agency or a sole consultant. Get an idea of the services’ pricing structure and see how it aligns with your media budget before you go for it.
Is it suitable for you in the long run? Will the potential returns from the investment surpass the amount to be paid? Usually, a sole media buyer is less expensive than an ad agency, so if your budget is not very high, you may consider their services instead.
Paid advertising is not as straightforward as sipping a warm cup of coffee on a cold morning, even though that’s how it may seem. Imagine the long and winding behind-the-scenes production process that occurred to get you the end product you desire—that’s more like it.
If you stick with the paid ads process, you get the authentic results you want for your business.
If you would rather outsource this highly-demanding task of paid advertising to someone who already has a good grasp of it, then working with a paid ads expert might be a good option for you.
All you need to start your journey to a completely improved ROI is to book a FREE Discovery call with me now!