ICN, leading paid advertising agency (among our other digital marketing services), guides you through finding the best Paid advertising marketing strategy for the specifics of your business. Find out where your marketing budget can be smartly allocated and tracked through innovative user acquisition software.
What is Paid Search?
Paid Search advertising is a digital marketing strategy that involves paying a platform such as Google Ads (previously Google AdWords) or Meta Ads Manager (for Instagram and Facebook Paid Ads) for a broader reach of messaging toward your audience who may click on your ad and eventually become a customer.
On Google AdWords, PPC (Pay Per Click Advertising) is based on bidding on certain keywords that your target audience searches. These may be priced based on if they are niche or broad, but always depend on how reliable Google judges your website to be. Research into Google Ads PPC finds that Paid campaigns are responsible for 65% of Google Ad clicks, so investing in this paid marketing strategy may improve your site traffic drastically.
Paid Social media ads follow a similar PPC principle that presents a creative ad copy to your audience, targeted to certain demographics, geolocations, and interest groups that make up your audience.
With the ever-changing landscape of social media user trends, carefully choosing your platform and ad design are perhaps the most important decisions as part of your optimised social media strategy. This needs to be relevant to both your audience and reflective of the content and products you provide on your business site to have the most positive ratio of ad investment per user gained.
As a digital marketing agency, ICN has developed a unique perspective on how to strategies your Paid ad spending. We prefer to focus on cost per acquisition, or cost per conversion rather than cost per click.
Combining a paid ad strategy with quality content through content marketing is the best way to make those clicks and subsequently, that investment count! A click is not worth it if the content that follows isn’t there, for advice on how to do this take a look at our previous blog on lead generation, retention, and conversion.
Are you B2B or B2C?
Depending on which target audience your paid marketing campaign is looking to reach and influence, your approach should change.
For a B2B (Business to Business) company, PPC campaigns through Google Ads are more likely to be seen by potential client businesses querying your specific industry or service looking for the top few results that are judged as most reliable by Google. Generally, social media marketing is not the place many companies go to look for other businesses to work with, an eye-catching social media ad is unlikely to go viral among businesses on, for example, LinkedIn, unless the messaging is an incredibly good deal or a unique service.Whereas B2C (Business to Customer) targets are generally engaging with your Paid marketing material in a more dynamic way. Social media marketing spending accounts for $1 in every $3 spent on digital marketing and is only predicted to rise further in the coming years. Being a consistent brand face on your audience’s social media feed is key to building your brand as genuine and recognisable, an incredibly important marketing method for customer-facing businesses whose competitors are targeting the same audience.
These are, of course, broad rules for how to engage with Paid Marketing. Your specific B2B sector may thrive on social media, or you are looking to receive a majority of your traffic from Google searches as a B2C company providing a niche service or product.
Being aware of which marketing platform works best for your business is important for success in the Digital Marketing World, testing out different strategies and analysing your Google Analytics or ICN SQUID data as a reflection of each campaign’s click-through rates can tell you a lot about the receptiveness of your audience.
What is the Purpose of Your Campaign?
In any PPC medium, the cost for each keyword differs depending on a lot of factors, intent is a huge factor in this. Commercial intent keywords, focused on ready-to-buy users can have higher bid costs. Therefore, unless your campaign is focused on creating a user funnel towards e-commerce conversions, these may not be worth the acquisitions you will get for the cost.
For raising awareness of your brand, general, high-volume keywords in your sector can be lucrative areas for Paid Search investment, especially if you are so far unsure who your core audience base is.
A campaign like this can be more costly due to the higher visibility it can provide but may be worth it as a data collection exercise rather than for pure acquisition. Comparing the attached demographic data of clicks to conversions can help identify which geographies, age groups, and interests would make the most effective target base for your next campaign or even re-targeting.
How Big is Your Brand?
The current size of your online presence, and how general or niche your audience is matters when deciding where to target your ads
Through Google Ads there are many techniques smaller businesses with fewer resources to market can use to select their targets to get the best conversion rate optimisation from click to purchase.
Experts recommend you include the names of your competitor brands in your paid keyword list, or better yet, specific product names that are currently popular, or on sale. If you appear in the searches for users who already have the knowledge to look up specific industry brand terms, they are more likely to become customers as they are closer to the centre of the user funnel.
However, Paid ads for some keywords, especially for larger, popular brands can be expensive, so your other option may be to rest on the talents of your PPC marketing agency and the unique selling points of your brand in creating viral, eye-catching social media ads. Brand building can be difficult when just starting to break in, so investing in paid social media advertising with a unique message for your industry can make your audience more familiar with you.
Competitor research is the star of any digital agency’s paid ad strategy. Looking into the platforms larger companies find success in and how they use language, imagery, and calls to action in their ad content can benefit your strategy greatly. You can even jump on trends started organically by your competitors through Facebook and Instagram Retargeting methods where interests and search terms on the social media sites related to your sector, although originating from viral posts by your competitors, can become targets for your ads. However, be careful to not violate copyright by including these keywords in the ad copy itself.
Which Strategy is Right for You?
For any Digital Marketing strategy, patience is key. Being consistent over time in both your messaging and in measuring your analytics benefits you in the long term to develop a dependable strategy.
If you are looking for a partner in kick-starting your journey into paid search or any other aspect of digital marketing, including B2C and B2B SEO, don’t hesitate in contacting our experts at ICN. Simply fill in our contact form or give us a call at +44 (0)115 8244 448.
