How to Boost Your Brand with Paid Media

To amplify brand presence and build relationships with customers, businesses must push out digital content on a regular basis. That content tends to split into two categories—organic media and paid media. 

Marketers often view organic media as the softer, homespun fare that serves mainly to poke existing audiences with hey-remember-us reminders. (Your hairstylist posting headshots of her clientele post-haircut on Instagram is an example of organic content. So is a New Orleans law firm that blogs about matters of Louisiana jurisprudence.) Whereas paid media—as the name might suggest—costs money, and it’s more results-driven: an investment in reaching new audiences and generating leads and conversions.

A worthy media plan should incorporate both organic and paid, but it needs to be said: Organic is often slower than paid, and it can take a lot of time and tinkering to calibrate what’s working and what’s not. Plus, the average reach of an organic post on major platforms is fairly low, in part due to the complexity of ranking algorithms. (For Facebook, it was 5.5% last year—and it’s on the decline.) Hence the usefulness of paid media, which allows you to target audiences and measure the results of your endeavors more precisely. So if you’ve got some extra money in the budget, here are a few tips on how to boost your brand with paid media.

 

Research Your Audience

Before you go about purchasing ad placement, run some analytics on your target audience—their ages, interests, languages, locations, and spending patterns, to name just a few metrics. Knowing who you’re talking to and which channels they frequent will help you craft your messaging in a way that resonates with them, and gets their attention in the first place.

Let’s say that you’re a senior living company. You can spend as much as you want advertising TV infomercials at 3 AM, but if your research reveals that your primary demographic—an adult in her mid-50s—is clicking around on Facebook at 3 PM, you’ll end up misfiring an entire digital marketing strategy onto the wrong channels.

So figure out how much money you want to spend and set the marketing goals that you want to accomplish, which might include chiseling off people who follow the social media accounts of other brands in your market niche. Serve them paid ads that direct them to well-crafted landing pages that offer subscription or membership discounts sweeter than the competition’s (if you’ve got any, that is).

 

Tailor Paid Media to the Platform

Once you know which platforms your audience is on the most, leverage those platforms’ paid media resources. With Facebook, you can purchase targeted advertising that bubbles up onto users’ news feeds and place your ads across any of Facebook’s portals (Marketplace, Right Column, Suggested Video, or Messenger Inbox). Twitter has its own ads center that gives you the power to fine-tune campaigns so that they drive toward certain goals—promoting offers, boosting your brand awareness, increasing the number of your followers, or getting people to install your app and click around on your site. YouTube’s paid media options might include bumper ads, Google Preferred, TrueView Action and InStream, all of which basically vary according to how long they are and whether or not you can skip them.

If your audience doesn’t spend a lot of time on social platforms, you can also try pay-per-click ads, AKA the blurb at the top of a search results page with a green “Ad” icon next to it. Imagine that Pinterest buys a pay-per-click ad on Google. Each time someone clicks on that ad, Google charges Pinterest. That’s the downside (for Pinterest). The upside is that its place at the top of a search page enhances the brand awareness of the buyer in that transaction, which comes in handy. (When was the last time you clicked past the first page of a search, anyway?)

 

Decide What Needs to be Paid For

In advertising, as in life, just because you’ve paid more for something doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to get what you want out of it. Organic media tends to reach the customers you already have, so if your research shows that you need to expand your reach or increase impressions, paid media it is. But if you just want to create some viral word-of-mouth, launch a campaign custom-made for your existing audiences and let it ripple through the internet.

With all of us isolating in 2020, people have been scrolling through their social channels more than ever. At the same time, many companies have paused their ad spend during the pandemic as cost-saving measures. But ad prices seem to be staying consistent—even becoming slightly cheaper. Point being, if you do want to buy paid media, you probably won’t have to shell out a fortune. Start with an initial budget of a few hundred dollars, see what results come in, and scale up (or down) from there.

 

Convert Organic to Paid

Paid media is an investment, and one way to gauge whether you’ll get a return on your investment is to boost your organic content that’s performing well. Because you already know that people like an ad or a post, the risk here is low—it’s most likely going to do even better with some money behind it—so the real question becomes how to calibrate which posts are successful and which aren’t.

Look at the number of likes a piece of content gets, for sure, but also how many profile views and conversions it leads to, and how many times people have read and reshared it. Tracking who’s responding to your organic media can help you get into the virtuous cycle of sketching ever-more-granular profiles of your loyal customers (ages, interests, languages, locations …) so that you can better target them—and audiences similar to them—as your brand evolves.

While you’re at it, try various iterations of ads on different audiences. (Do 18-year-olds like a post more than 65-year-olds? Do people in cities share it more than their rural counterparts? Why?) Swap around the CTAs, the copy, the design, to test which version is most effective—and to whom. Evaluating your consumers’ preferences will supply even more of the data that you need to achieve a bird’s-eye perspective of how your brand should continue to invest in paid media.

 

Make it Seamless

Running any of the tactics that we listed above can get time-consuming. Overseeing multiple campaigns that interweave a bevy of those tactics can be nearly impossible. So if you can, automate your paid media campaigns. That doesn’t mean you should blast out content willy-nilly. Instead, use tools like Adobe Advertising Cloud or Google Double Click to fire off ads according to a preset schedule and spend a designated amount of money boosting your posts. Automating your content helps it flow out into the world in ways that can get you the results you deserve. After all, you paid for it.