Unlocking Success in Paid Media: Insights for Marketers on a Budget

One of the biggest challenges for modern-day marketers, especially those of small-to-medium-sized businesses, is the management of marketing budgets.

Marketing budgets are often a lot more limited, so there is a lot of pressure around picking the channels that will return the strongest results. But as technology improves and consumer habits change, new channels arise, making older channels less relevant. In this article we will explore some of the key channels of paid media, giving marketers the insight they need when it comes to shaping their marketing strategy in the digital world. 

Paid Search

The premise of Paid Search is simple, get your ads appearing at the top of search engine results for specific keywords and audiences. The sheer size of paid search can be seen when looking at Alphabet’s (the 4th largest company in the world) revenue, with 57.3% coming solely from paid search, conveying how central this channel is to marketing strategies across the world.

When to use Paid Search?

The main strength of paid search is being able to target users when they are at different stages of the marketing funnel, but most importantly, when they are at the bottom of the marketing funnel, ready to make a purchase or contact a company for their services. Furthermore, the targeting ability of paid search is unparalleled to any other marketing channel, giving marketers the ability to target: location, demographics, and interests. This combination of strengths is extremely powerful, but it can get expensive, with each click on a paid search ad costing marketers money. In our experience, the average CPC for home & garden brands ranges between £0.50 to £2.00, and with CPCs increasing 10% year on year, having a strong paid search set-up is more important than ever to ensure that spend is being efficiently utilised.

Keys to Success in Paid Search

• Strong Keyword Research
• Streamlined Customer Journey
• Compelling Ad Copy backed by a strong brand

Shopping

Shopping is a unique paid media channel as it is very one-dimensional, showing off your products to users who are ready to make a purchase, but it is also one of the more complex and difficult channels to manage due to much of the work being done with your product feed, which can be daunting for some marketers. However, it is one the most powerful channels as you are able to show off the key attributes of your product, which isn’t possible with channels such as paid search, due to its structural limitations, being largely limited to text-based assets.

When to use Shopping?

One of the main strengths of shopping ads is the ability to make your products stand out on a search engine results page. You are able to show off features that regular search results can’t compete with, including product images, price, and specific product details. When starting with Google Ads, shopping is one of the hardest Google ads campaigns to optimise, due to the importance of managing the product feed, rather than managing the ads within the Google Ads Platform. Key areas to focus on are product images, product titles and product descriptions, with other fields such as colour and GTIN playing an important role in optimisation. The introduction of new campaign types, such as Performance Max, is causing many marketers to shift away from shopping, but optimisation methods remain the same, with the product feed being the most important factor for strong performance.

Keys to Success in Shopping

• Strong product images
• Competitive pricing
• Product Feed Management

Paid Social

Paid Social is an umbrella term for multiple social media platforms, and with social media being such a dynamic space these platforms are always changing and evolving. With there being such a huge variance between these platforms there is no one-size-fits-all way to run ads on these platforms, but there are some key concepts that marketers can follow in order to maximise the effectiveness of their budget.

When to use Paid Social?

Knowledge about your target audience is key when it comes to deciding whether or not you want to run paid social ads. If you have an audience, or product, that is oriented around business and the corporate world then LinkedIn ads may be the best platform to use, but if you are targeting younger users then you will want to run ads on Instagram or TikTok. Furthermore, paid social runs best with strong assets that can be tested and refreshed, unlike paid search where all you need is a website to send users to your website. The landscape of paid marketing is shifting further and further towards paid social as Gen-Z and Millennials get older and data suggests that the balance between Paid Social and Paid Search is shifting further towards Paid Social, with costs coming down and conversions going up.

Keys to Success in Paid Social

• Strong defined audiences
• Assets that can be used for ads
• A/B testing philosophy

Overall, there is value to all of the channels mentioned above, but marketers must look at their entire marketing strategy and evaluate whether or not these channels fit into these strategies.

All of these channels play different roles within the marketing funnel, if you are looking to engage with users at the buying stage, then shopping can prove useful, if you are trying to engage with a well-defined audience and get your brand in front of their faces, then paid social can do this. 

The ability to evolve, optimise and improve is imperative to success when working in paid media, and with the amount of data available to marketers using these platforms then there are always things that can be done to facilitate this improvement.

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Sources
https://www.statista.com/statistics/633651/alphabet-annual-global-revenue-by-segment/
https://www.wordstream.com/blog/2024-google-ads-benchmarks
https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6324461?hl=en
https://searchengineland.com/facebook-ads-2024-data-clicks-and-conversions-up-costs-down-445162