How your company can get started with paid media.

Most businesses want to grow their audience, get more traffic, and eventually make sure that this traffic converts. Between Corona and the ongoing potential of our social media generation, it would make only sense to start building this through online platforms.  

In my last article, “3 reasons why organic has dipped its toes into paid media” I explain why paid media is the way to go when using socials. In this article, I am going to explain how your business can start with paid media so you can start working on your desired number of R.O.I. 

Setting up a strategy 

Having a well-thought-out strategy is the foundation of a successful ad campaign. Your strategy should contain an overview of the different platforms you are going to use, what funnel strategy you will use per campaign (TOF, MOF, BOF), and working your way down. 

Knowing your process is important. This means discovering the different phases in your project. These are my recommendations; discovery, restructure and stabilize, test and refine, and scaling.  

I. The discovery phase 

This is the learning phase of your strategy. In this phase you will learn everything about your target audience, competitors, your keywords, the gaps within the market, and which platform is best for you to advertise on. The more you know the better. It is about understanding your own market, and how valuable your ads are for your target audience. 

TIP: Start making campaigns based on the funnel strategy; TOF, MOF and BOF (Top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel)

II. Restructure and stabilizing phase 

This phase does not apply to everyone. But when it does it is very important. Restructuring and stabilizing your brand can mean the difference between converting or staying stuck in the traffic phase, because there is a lot of trust involved. Ask yourself these questions when you are restructuring and stabilizing;
Would I shop here?
Is my check-out process easy?
Is contact info clearly presented?
Does my branding look professional/ attractive?  

If they are all a yes, then good job. But remember, be critical and ask other’s opinions. 

TIP: Ask 10 strangers to look at the home page of your website for 5 seconds. If they can tell your brand name, what you sell, and what you stand for, it’s a good-looking landing page that has potential of converting well.

III. Test and refine phase 

Once you got all your information ready, build a killer creative ad, and set-up all the tools in your ad’s manager. It is time to launch your new ads. In the first few weeks of running your first set of ads, you can start to test and optimise to find-out which CTA (call to action), keywords, placements, etc are working best for your ads. Take your time with this.
In the beginning you will notice that they might not be performing as you expected. This is normal because all the ads have a learning phase. This means that the ads need to gather more information during the process of running. The more information your ads manager has about your target audience, the better they will perform. You gather some of this information yourself in the discovery phase, but once you start running the ads, Facebook or Google or any other platform you use, will receive more information. Further into the process, you will start to notice that your ads will be perform better once you start using tools like look-a-like audience and/or retargeting ads. 

 IV. Scaling phase 

Let’s start scaling your ads. This is where the real money is involved. Looking at the opportunities here is important.
When running video ads, you can retarget the people who viewed more than 50% of the entire video. This will allow for a high-quality score on your ads and conversions.

When running traffic ads, you will send your potential clients to a landing page that captures their interests. A great scaling opportunity for this is to retarget the audiences that perform high quality actions within your landing page.

Lastly, conversions. When running your ads on Facebook, the effect of building a look-a-like audience can be valuable. Facebook can track similar people who already performed a conversion action. When doing this you will watch your performance grow and your cost per conversion drop. 

Reflection  

Now that you have written out your strategy you can get started with your campaign set-up within the platform(s) of your choice. It is important to keep reflecting and to ask for others opinions. Testing and refining in the process is really the key. Do the research and keep on optimizing. The optimising part can be tricky, considering there are many tools and ways to do this on the ad platforms. If you don’t want to stretch your time to learn about all of this, hiring a paid media marketeer is your best option. They know the ins and outs of most of the platforms, help you set-up a strategy, do the research for you, and they can help you reach your desired R.O.A.S.  

Questions? 

E-mail me to floor@floordigital.co and get a free discovery call.