Paid Media Marketing: Definition, Types, and Examples
What is Paid Media Marketing?
Paid media, also known as paid media advertising, is an outbound marketing strategy that covers all paid marketing strategies. Paid media advertising can be found online in the form of search ads, display ads, social network ads, and more. Each of these adverts aims to put you directly in front of the appropriate audience at the appropriate time. You can deliberately segment and arrange these adverts with the help of a paid media specialist to attract the attention of your target market.
Paid media advertising comes in different approaches, making it a more complicated form of marketing. However, if you establish a strong paid media strategy, you can benefit from a larger number of qualified leads and potentially increase your marketing revenue.
Why use Paid Media?
Paid media is the area of digital marketing that enables you to buy advertising space and market your company on multiple websites. It is good to utilize paid marketing for your marketing efforts because you'll be able to spend money on content promotion with a higher reach. You can use clicks from paid media to boost traffic, sales, and leads. In the end, all of these will raise your profit.
It is best to use paid media when your material fails to receive enough organic engagements, and you wish to increase impressions. Paid media advertising is the finest way to immediately reach and engage with your ideal demographic because they are designed for segmenting and targeting. They even have the ability to connect with audiences who might never have heard of your business.
What is the Difference Between SEO and Paid Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) and paid media are two distinct marketing strategies on the digital marketing spectrum. Paid media advertising focuses on showing paid adverts on digital spaces, whereas SEO brings organic traffic to your website through search engine results pages (SERPs).
If you want to increase your web presence naturally, you may do so by spending money on SEO. Create a comprehensive SEO strategy to improve the quantity and quality of your organic traffic, and you're set.
In contrast, paid media advertising gives you the privilege to display content automatically on SERPs while targeting your preferred audience. But the catch is, paid media, such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC), requires you to pay for every time one of your advertisements is clicked. Nonetheless, it gives you more opportunity to grow your audience more quickly than SEO.
To put it simply, paid media provides you with immediate attention from your target audience, while SEO gives you a boost to your online visibility and rankings.
Types of Media: Difference Between Paid, Owned, and Earned
There are three methods that firms can connect to potential clients online — paid, owned, and earned.
Paid media refers to paid advertisements available on websites, search engines, and other digital platforms that aim to reach a particular target audience. By using paid media, you can refine and tailor your message according to consumer behavior and influence them to act.
Meanwhile, owned media refers to ads that are displayed on media outlets that the company already owns and runs. Owned media includes any privately owned blogs, personal websites, emails, and other digital resources.
Lastly, earned media occurs through organic publicity, where you establish your own credibility and recognition. Being able to be linked or mentioned by other websites can help you create connections that draw visitors. This may be through press coverage, social media posts, organic search results, user-generated content, and more.
All types of media are significant. That is why it would be helpful if you included them in your digital marketing strategy one way or another.
Examples of Paid Media Marketing
1. Google Ads
Google is an effective paid media platform to place your ads because of its targeting and analytics functionalities. It also allows you to place bids on particular keywords, making it a terrific method to increase ROI and maximize your marketing efforts. Currently, there are three primary ad types available on the Google Ads platform, which are search ads, display ads, and shopping ads.
2. Social Media Ads
Nowadays, almost all social media platforms include sponsored options that allow you to pay to post advertisements that platform users will view according to their demographics, behavior, interests, geography, etc.
The top-performing platforms for sponsored social ads are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Each provides a business account that enables you to make adverts or promote already-posted content. Some even allow you to invite users to contact you, follow your page, and aid in increasing your site's lead generation and traffic count.
3. Search Engine Ads
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Pay-Per-Impression (PPI) commercials are examples of search engine ads. PPC advertisements are ones that show up on a publisher's or media owner's website, but the advertiser only pays when a user clicks on them. These adverts show up at the top of SERPs nearly like a native ad, with a disclaimer indicating it is an advertisement.
PPI ads are billed every time they are seen on a website, regardless of interaction or clicks. They are often compensated per thousand impressions or CPM. When compared to CPC ad pricing, PPI advertisements might be more cost-effective if your ad is clicked on in addition to just being shown.
4. Banner Ads
Banner ads, also known as display ads and web ads, are usually visual, image-based ads that show up on websites for a limited period and lead the user to the advertiser’s site or a specific landing page. This type of ad is embedded into the publisher’s website in the form of an image or gif.
The performance of the ad is recorded by its click-through ratio, that is, the number of clicks that come through to the targeted landing page from the publisher’s site divided by the number of ad impressions.
Conclusion
Paid media can be seen everywhere — from social media to search engines, websites and every digital platform out there. Given that paid media marketing is one of the most used types of advertising, it is difficult to deny its influence, especially with the massive competition around it.
That being said, it would be most helpful for your brand to be ahead of its niche if you have a Google Ads Specialist or a Social Media Manager to handle your paid media marketing efforts. Good thing that SMART VAs have the perfect team of digital marketing experts, including the aforementioned, to help you! Book a call now!