Reasons to consider paid advertising – Tips from a marketing agency Dorset
If you’re looking for new ways to expand your existing small business marketing strategy, you might have heard about paid advertising, often referred to as PPC (pay per click). Among other benefits, it allows you to almost instantly increase your reach, targeting and generally drive greater results.
If you’re interested in trying it out but you don’t know where to start, our guide will give you a rundown on the basics, as well as reasons why you should consider investing in it.
Types of paid advertising
A good place to start is to establish all the different types of paid advertising that are available nowadays. The vast choice means that there will certainly be something suitable for your strategy and budget.
- Search – Google Search campaigns are one of the most popular forms of paid online advertising. They allow you to display advertisements in the search listings of a Google results page. The top 3 ads will appear above organic search rankings.
- Display – This is a method of attracting the audience of a website or social media platform to take a specific action. These are often made up of text-based, image or video advertisements that encourage the user to click-through to a landing page and take action.
- Shopping – This campaign type helps promote your products by giving users detailed product information before they even click your ad. Ads in Shopping campaigns show users a photo of your product, plus a title, price, business name and, if applicable, customer reviews.
- Social media – There is a range of paid social media advertising campaign options to choose from including page likes, landing page visits, increased engagement, lead generation and more.
- Remarketing – These are used to show ads to people who have previously visited your website or used your app. These campaigns provide you with extra settings and reports specifically for reaching previous visitors and users.
Reasons to consider a paid advertising approach
1. Increase your reach instantly
Paid advertising gives your brand instant visibility. The huge volume of posts being delivered on social every day, and the vast amount of online search queries makes connecting with your audience relatively quick and easy. If you’re willing to pay for it, you’ll almost be guaranteed a place in the user’s feed which gives a direct window to drive leads, website traffic, and sales.
2. Customise to fit any budget
Paid social media advertising and advertising on the Display Network are typically very cost-effective ways to promote your business. Each platform uses the same pay-per-click (PPC) payment model, which means that you pay only if the user actually engages with your ad. Unlike with traditional advertising methods, this lets you engage with niche markets, for an affordable price. You can decide on your daily or lifetime budget to assure you never go over it.
Facebook can let you boost your posts for as little as £1, meaning that paid advertising can fit even the smallest of marketing budgets!
3. Enhance targeting
Paid advertising gives you complete control over who sees your ad as each platform offers multiple types of targeting. Beyond basic user demographics (such as age, gender and location), you can choose from psychographic factors such as interests, hobbies, and personality types. This is a powerful way to both expand and engage your ideal audience at once.
Facebook, Google, and Microsoft Ads also let you retarget users who’ve already visited your website, but perhaps didn’t make a purchase or fill in a form, through a simple ‘remarketing campaign’. You’ll just need to set up an audience on Google Analytics to get started.
4. Increase brand awareness
The aim would be to serve ads that are both informative and memorable to increase the chance of people converting. If your business appears in news feeds regularly or has good organic rankings, people will start to recognise it on their own. This will help to increase your credibility, drive engagement and encourage purchasing behaviour.
5. Maximise content marketing on social media
According to Social Sprout, 73% of users follow a brand on social media because they’re interested in the products or services they’re offering. This means that boosting your existing social content with paid advertising will not only help you create new leads, but it will also help you to drive web traffic, boost engagement on social media, and improve the ROI of your current content marketing.
Top tip – create a low-cost ‘page like’ campaign on your Facebook page. This will help encourage new people to like your page, which can in turn increase reach and engagement!
6. Easy access to mobile users
Pew Research claims that 80% of time spent on social media is on a mobile device. This means you can easily target users through paid campaigns even when they aren’t even thinking about your brand. A paid advertising campaign will help you to reach your audience at that moment, and even allows you to add higher bid adjustments for if you notice a trend in mobiles performing better than other devices.
7. Gather marketing insights
Almost every marketing programme or platform comes with its own analytics tool which can help you discover how well your posts performed. This data will allow you to narrow your targeting parameters to most effectively drive conversions and impressions to your paid advertisement.
8. Effectively track your audience
With paid marketing, every ad, every keyword, and best of all, every pound spent can be tracked. This allows for very accurate ROI and makes paid search marketing much more essential for any business.
Contact our team for help
Our expert team of in-house marketers are all Google Ads certified and are happy to help you. Whether it’s training to get you started, or full campaign creation and delivery, our marketing agency in Dorset can do it all.
Get in contact with a member of our team to discuss your marketing requirements. Either fill in a contact form on our website or phone us directly on 01202 888200 to speak to our team.