Paid media might seem like a daunting topic when entering into the digital marketing space, but let me be the first to tell you that with a little practice, you’ll see why paid media is so important. Whether you are trying to grow your personal brand or your small business, developing a paid media strategy is a crucial step.
Take it from a 20-something, highly un-tech-savvy graduate, that if someone told me I would be working within the paid media realm I would have laughed out loud, not giving it another thought. Yet, here I am writing not only about paid media, but about how you too can (and should) integrate paid media strategy into your social media routine.
What Is Paid Media?
So let’s start with the basics — what exactly IS Paid media. Paid media refers to non-organic marketing efforts that involve a paid placement of content. Paid media includes targeted advertising, branded content, and display ads. Paid media is an essential component of revenue growth and brand awareness for online businesses as well as paid influencer marketing.
Paid media allows organizations to promote sponsored or organic content to a wider audience while targeting key demographics, interests, and placements. This form of digital marketing will help to expand your brand reach, get more targeted clicks and generate more traffic overall —ultimately allowing you to reach audiences you otherwise wouldn’t.
Building a Personal Brand
Influencer marketing provides a unique platform for paid media outside of branded content. For individuals that are working within the social media space, it can be hard to organically grow your KPIs through daily activity. Instilling a paid media strategy into your content calendar could be a natural way to help achieve your growth goals while remaining true to your individual brand.
In order to maximize your return on investment, often digital marketing strategists suggest including paid amplification on sponsored content, in turn growing both the awareness of the prompted product as well as your personal reach. This is the most commonly used tactic when looking at static, simplified target marketing.
The Benefits of Paid Media for Influencer Marketing
When brands partner with social media personalities through influencer marketing, the content created is often boosted using paid media. This critical move entails countless benefits for both the brand and the influencer, including the following:
Boosts Content and Brand Visibility
The ever-changing algorithm of social media platforms, such as how posts appear in the newsfeed and the rules for relevancy, has made it increasingly difficult for brands and content to be seen. Just because an influencer or brand has a huge following doesn’t guarantee that every follower will see each piece of content.
Whether you’ve produced an incredible travel vlog or are breaking down the best fashion looks in an Instagram carousel, investing in paid media (such as Instagram ads or Facebooks ads) is one of the most effective ways to ensure that your content becomes as visible as possible.
Strengthens Brand Credibility
Influencer marketing itself is one of the most popular ways for brands to strengthen credibility in the eyes of their audiences. And when such posts are boosted using paid media, brand credibility gets built up even more by showcasing quality content to a whole new target demographic who might not know of your existence just yet.
Also, when it becomes evident that a social media personality has growing partnerships with brands, this tends to be an indicator of influencer success. Not only do influencers get to produce more interesting content for their followers, but it also shows that they’re trusted by brands to promote their products or services.
Helps Build A Strong Presence on Social Media
When you leverage paid media, the odds are that this will generate more clicks and leads to your social media profiles. Hence, increasing the chances of growing your following and building a strong presence.
Provides Valuable Performance Insights
Paid media always comes with valuable ad analytics that accurately shows you the results of all your efforts. This useful tool helps brands and influencers see what they did right or how they could improve their strategies for future campaigns.
From how many people were reached to the number of impressions and clicks, paid media for influencer marketing provides vital insights that can upgrade your brand.
Audience Targeting
An important distinction to make when deciding on what paid media strategy is best for you is to be able to understand the difference between paid media, owned media, and earned media. These three avenues of digital marketing are vital to every successfully paid media strategy.
Paid Media
Paid media involves any marketing channel you pay for, and most of us are already using or buying into this familiar type of media. This media includes traditional ads, commercials, and PPC (pay per click). This strategy involves a third-party platform and targets specific consumers based on their interest, consumer history, and location targeting. This form of paid strategy allows for easy tracking and quick results however, you need to be careful to avoid dependency on these paid channels to ensure they maintain scale with spend.
Earned Media
Unlike Paid Media, earned media are natural conversions the come from others voluntarily interacting with your content. It is not paid and is considered organic, however, can be the result of paid or owned media. Most commonly, earned media takes the form of features, positive reviews, social media mentions, shares, or press releases. When considering how to include Earned media in your paid strategy - this is often where we see influencers being gifted a product, in exchange for sharing or posting about it. This results in ‘organic’ mentions and awareness targeting both their platform, your brand, all while optimizing your on-page SEO ranking.
Owned Media
Owned media refers to anything that travels through a personal channel under your own control — this refers to newsletters and social media accounts. Even if you do not own the platform, you own the content and account that you plan on marketing. For the sake of digital marketing, owned media refers to the final destination. Paid media and earned media are the channels used to push traffic to this end-in-feed-goal, your personal owned media. Due to the high density of content marketing and social media, this strategy pull sin traffic to your owned media channels resulting in higher visibility
The above three methods of paid media strategy can allow you to distinguish yourself within an increasingly digitized world. With a strong paid media strategy you can increase your reach, engagement, and overall ROI for your business, personal brand, or partnerships.
Takeaways
Remember that paid media is only daunting from the outside. With practice and understanding, you will have an increased ability to stand out, be seen, and collect impressive data to continue to grow your following, business, and relevance!
Here at the Influence agency we strive to create dedicated paid media strategies for your brand's individualized needs. Leave a comment, or contact us, and follow us on social to learn more about paid media!