The world of advertising has transformed significantly since the days where drinking whiskey and smoking cigars were acceptable standards for a regular Monday in the office. The blatant Mad Men references aside, new platforms within the digital environment have given small businesses a variety of tools at their disposal for capturing inbound traffic. Even within the last 15 years, we have seen a significant shift in marketing spending from traditional campaigns to full-cycle programmatic and social campaigns. While conventional advertising remains a viable strategy to support your overall marketing initiatives, the development of technology has introduced cost-effective platforms that allow you to adjust budgets and targeting in real-time.
Whether it’s within Google search results or news feeds on Facebook, a near-infinite number of businesses are vying for your attention, sometimes desperately hoping to generate a couple of conversions to stay afloat. Hyperbole aside, the competition for impressions and reach is tremendous, especially if your business is within a highly competitive niche.
However, all that said, the world of digital media buying can be just as complicated and overwhelming as its traditional counterpart.
Benefits of Media Buying
I’m already ranking well. Why should I invest in PPC Advertising?
Organic reach can only go so far, especially with the amount of competition that exists online. Just think about your daily routine: how many websites do you visit, and more importantly, how many mobile applications do you use? To maximize your reach, you cannot solely rely on organic traffic, especially with Google enriching SERPs with knowledge panels and featured snippets, in addition to flooding search results with sponsored products and a myriad of ad units. Fortunately, pay-per-click advertising and other media buying initiatives provide an instant opportunity to capture traffic immediately, generating inbound traffic in minutes.
Establishing your web presence is easily facilitated by harnessing the power of media buying. While SEO campaigns generally take months to see substantial results, particularly in competitive niches, pushing your brand to the forefront with digital advertisements is ridiculously easy with self-serving ad platforms. Another critical benefit of setting up pay-per-click advertising campaigns is having full control over all mechanisms within the marketing process, ranging from the creatives utilized for your campaigns to the budget you dedicate to advertising. By paying only for the traffic you receive and optimizing your campaigns for lower CPMs (cost-per-thousands views on display platforms), you retain control of your budget and the traffic you receive. Campaigns that produce superb results can be scaled by merely increasing daily budgets, a testament to the effectiveness of media buying.
Data gathering in the digital era is critical to determining how you scale your marketing efforts in the long-term. Setting up media buying programs on Google Ads or Facebook Ads allows you to collect valuable first-party data, allowing you to learn more about your targeting audience. Additionally, if you’re unsure of which type of conversion funnels will yield the best results, split-testing inbound traffic via highly segmented paid media campaigns will give you actionable data from which you can draw sound conclusions.
Lastly, the abundant targeting options available on all media buying platforms allow you to retarget lost traffic or reinforce your message to custom audience lists, providing immense flexibility in spending your budget. Retargeting is a highly effective marketing tactic that seeks to re-engage users that visited your website, which means you can set up campaigns to target users that abandoned your conversion funnel. Businesses that invest heavily in SEO and other marketing channels can benefit from the retargeting options available on platforms like Facebook and Google, pinpointing the focus of bottom-of-funnel campaigns to re-engage previous website visitors.
Why do I need a Media Buying Consultant?
After spending a considerable amount of financial resources and extra hours fine-tuning my skills for different media buying platforms, I have realized that not everyone has what it takes to be a tactical conversion specialist. As an agency operator, I have seen media buyers of all kinds miss out on the vital aspects that can turn campaigns from duds into money-making machines. My data-driven approach to campaign optimization is prevalent in all tactics, but far more visible in the world of media buying, where hacking campaigns to pieces and segmenting as much as possible is critical to increasing conversion rates.
How to Build an Effective Media Buying Plan
Additionally, there are some essential elements to consider in developing a successful media buying plan:
- Who is the target audience?
- Which platforms does my target audience use?
- What kind of funnels do my competitors utilize?
- How is my audience searching for my services/products online?
- What elements does my target audience react to best?
- When is the best time to advertise to my audience?
By answering all of these questions, you’ll be able to adequately understand what advertising mix will galvanize your target audience into making a purchasing decision. Let’s analyze each item in more depth:
Who is the target audience?
Defining the target audience is by far THE most important element that dictates how a consultant crafts a media buying plan. While there is the ability to broadly target everyone on all platforms, understanding your target audience will allow you to make efficient use of your advertising budget. Why spend $10,000 on random reach campaigns when you can deliver a far better return on ad spend (ROAS) with a $5,000 website conversion campaign?
Which platforms does my target audience use?
Once you have a thorough understanding of the people that will be hammered with your ads online, the next step is to curate a media buying plan based on the leading platforms they use daily. In most cases, search advertising will be at the heart of any marketing plan. Yes, it will undoubtedly carry the highest cost-per-click on average, but I’ve yet to come across a type of marketing that provides as much intent-driven traffic as search advertising on Google.
There are niches where social advertising, particularly Facebook & Instagram, does outperform traditional search. Ecommerce brands thrive on serving products dynamically via strategic Facebook & Instagram retargeting, whereas SaaS businesses have far more potent targeting options prevalent on LinkedIn. A strategic PPC advertising consultant will prepare a media plan that exhausts your budget quickly on one platform, but rather test bits and pieces of various digital entities to gather enough vital data.
How is my audience searching for my services/products online?
At the crux of any pay-per-click advertising program is uncovering the ideal keywords to target. Based on my experience, having an in-depth knowledge of SEO proves to be beneficial when conducting keyword research. Well-rounded media buyers can adroitly assess the intent behind various keyword phrases, and SEO wizards are masters of extracting long-tail phrases from core segments. Blending the arts of SEO and PPC advertising provides the most potent concoction: the ultimate marketing strategist that unlock profitable baskets of keywords that will not hemorrhage your bank account.
Please excuse the grandiosity of this my prior statements.
What elements does my target audience react to best?
Equally as important as knowing your ideal customers’ search habits is understanding which creative elements will elicit the desired response. In terms of ad copy, do fear tactics work better than the feature-benefit combo? Will a happy-go-lucky ad format translate to a stable click-through rate (CTR) on native ads compared to clickbaity content? While I go more in-depth on split-testing in my overview of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), the most effective tactical media buyers utilize split-testing best practices. Mastering the dark magic of media buying requires devising campaigns that actively test various attributes against each other and letting the data dictate the best path to increasing conversion rates.
What kind of funnels do my competitors utilize?
Without delving too deep into the analytical realm that is CRO, formulating the ideal funnel for your traffic will require an immense amount of experimentation and analysis. However, a cursory glance at your competition can unveil a myriad of quintessential details. These include the type of funnels other advertisers utilize and the remarketing activities deployed to increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
Types of Media Buying & PPC Advertising Platforms
While the media buying environment is quite comprehensive, the leading digital tactics derive from the following buckets.
Search Engine Marketing
Most commonly referred to as PPC Advertising, paid search engine marketing is where you’ll typically make your most significant investment when venturing to the mystical realm of media buying. Search engine advertising platforms such as Google Ads & Microsoft Ads allow users to create a myriad of campaigns based on their core objectives, such as call-only ads, product listing ads, and mobile-app install campaigns in addition to regular text advertisements. The flexibility and comprehensive coverage within the Google Ads environment provides a diverse toolset of advertising options, allowing businesses of all kinds to extend their reach to Google’s Display Network and YouTube.
You can bypass millions of organic listings and secure your spot at the top of the Google mountain by paying for clicks. Novel concept, right?
Depending on the keywords you’re targeting, you can exhaust a $1,000 budget in either minutes or days. A tactical approach to determining the required budget for your new campaigns is to understand how much revenue a new customer brings. Regardless of the type of business, whether it’s e-commerce SaaS, the amount you should be willing to pay for a click to your ad should be based on your conversion rate, initial return on ad spend, and customer lifetime value. The more premium the service or product, the more your competitors are likely bidding for precious intent-driven traffic. It’s essential to be mindful of all variables that impact your bidding strategy and remain calm when your competitive intel illustrates that the average cost-per-click is exorbitant. Your goal is to claw at the competition and steal traffic away from them, eventually increasing your market share and profitability.
Social Media Advertising
As a marketing practitioner for almost ten years, I’ve seen it all when it comes to social media advertising. Back in the day, purchasing ad space within the Facebook Ads environment was as simple as setting up a sponsored page campaign. The ad unit utilized social proof to encourage users to like specific pages. Fortunately, social media advertising has evolved beyond basic ad units to provide media buying wizards with a slew of competitive intelligence tools, targeting options, and audience matching capabilities. Whether it’s securing ad space on the most prominent social network (for better or for worse – sorry Zuckerberg) or siphoning traffic away from the competition on LinkedIn, there are immense opportunities to capture relevant traffic on flourishing social media platforms. As with Google Ads, there is a wide array of advertising formats, providing an assortment of rich formats and capabilities to execute highly-segmented campaigns.
Programmatic & Display
Display advertising remains, to this day, the most common type of digital advertisement. Whether you’re purchasing ad space via Google’s Display Network, private exchanges, global programmatic networks, or direct partnerships, placing a banner ad is the advertising equivalent to traditional forms of marketing. As with search platforms and social media, display advertising has become enhanced with machine learning technologies to provide a full suite of programmatic media buying solutions. Beyond traditional forms of remarketing, which targets users that have visited your website or originate from a customer list, programmatic advertising is fundamentally display marketing on steroids.
Why are businesses allocating an enormous amount of marketing budgets to programmatic? Having the ability to segment your campaigns into various funnels while leveraging the immense data available via third-party networks has vast potential if executed correctly. Pinpointing specific audiences for your campaigns reduces spending inefficiencies and limits impressions on unqualified traffic—win/win situation.
Video Advertising
Although video advertising campaigns can blend with programmatic advertising solutions, there’s delicate care required for executing effective video advertising campaigns. YouTube remains the go-to source for video content, acting as Google’s second most powerful entity in the digital realm. While the act of skipping video ads has become embedded in our brains, the marketers that have identified the critical strategies to generate leads can turn any pitiable campaign into an absolute lead generation beast.
Native
Native advertising has become a staple in the media buying mix due to the rather cheap CPMs successful advertisers can yield for their campaigns. Native advertising requires a more nuanced approach than the simple “ad –> landing page” strategy prevalent in most marketing plans. Ad formats on networks such as Taboola and Outbrain make it seem like you can continue reading similar articles. However, the ulterior motive here is to guide users into a funnel utilizing though-provoking copy as the weapon of choice. Full-fledged media buying consultants are also cognizant of the fact that you cannot replicate the funnels from search advertising campaigns for native strategies. Effective native advertising requires a multi-step funnel, typically starting with content-driven landing pages that feed off the social proof of testimonials and aggressive calls to action to generate conversions.