Implementing Paid Advertising Strategy In Digital Marketing
Paid digital advertising is the most cost-efficient form of media. Not all platforms have media but as each year passes, more major platforms announce, launch and expand their ad platforms. Every media channel offers different value on the plan. Let’s detail some of the characteristics of each:
- Display advertising is predominantly bought by Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM). Through the Google Display Network (GDN), you can quite flexibly control your budgets and targets. Google also offers tools to help you build your assets if you have no creative. Through Google, it can be bought Cost Per Click (CPC).
- Search, like display, is predominantly bought through Google. Search is bought on a CPC model so you only pay for an ad if someone clicks on it. This is so you know that each ad click is driving traffic to your site.
- Facebook works with an objective buying bid model so you can pursue specific actions with your target audience. It is one of the most cost-efficient channels, and given its scale, offers access to target 1.2bn people a day globally. Facebook continues to innovate and launches new creative platforms regularly. The strongest performing formats on Facebook are video.
- Twitter offers a media platform that is best suited for real-time events but also campaigns that require driving conversation. Twitter should be about instant engagement and as a result, formats like video and images aren’t necessarily best used. Activities on Twitter should be focused on driving hashtag usage and conversation amongst your community.
- Instagram is owned by Facebook and as a result, formats are similar and ads are managed from within the Facebook ads platform. Instagram should be reserved for delivering high end, professional content to your users. Consider that Instagram should be reserved for targeting influential individuals with your creative messaging. Creativity and innovation in creative are normally rewarded with engagement.
- Snapchat is predominantly a younger platform but every day is becoming more powerful. Snapchat can be utilized as an organic platform with no ads but also a growing number of advertisers are using the platform.
- LinkedIn offers a range of more standard IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) formats – these are the international standard for digital advertising. For Sponsored Updates, it’s important to remember where you are and that LinkedIn is your company’s polished, professional persona.
If you are looking to make a smaller budget go a long way, the best platforms to use are Facebook and Instagram as they are the lowest Cost-Per-Action sites. Particularly with video, Facebook significantly drives the lowest Cost-per-View across the whole digital plan for the video.
As previously outlined, Display has become a more challenging environment with brands concerned where their ads are appearing and what content is next to.
Search is a highly effective conversion platform. Consumers who are inputting direct search are clearly further along the purchase journey and in consideration mode. TV and Search work very effectively together as TV has been proven to increase search volumes.
A media plan is essentially a blueprint for how ads are going to be bought against campaigns and creative. It involves listing detail by platform along the left-hand side with specific formats. Next to this, the total budget is listed. From here you have the ability to decide how to break up spends across the time period by item line.
A media plan serves as a guide to planning how you will spend your ad budget but then also serves as a way to track expenditure. At the end of each month, a plan should be ‘reconciled’ which involves putting actual spends in the columns. This allows you the ability to carefully monitor spending levels.
The benefit of detailing each platform line by line is that now you can determine how much content you have versus how much support they will each receive when campaigns are being set up.
Once followed carefully, implementing means following the plan. Checking in daily becomes part of the routine of seeing if it is working and if changes are required. The changes might be mistakes made in spend or budget, or changes because of performance. Mistakes are made. The problem is not catching them. If you’re not checking in every few days, or daily if it is a smaller operation, you have the ability to overspend because of a mistyped budget e.g. $100 can easily become $1000.
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