A Strategic Approach to Digital Paid Campaigns
Digital paid campaigns can be an incredibly powerful way to increase brand awareness, ramp up lead generation, and maximize your marketing spend. But it can be costly, and mismanagement can render results less than optimal. So, how can enterprises take advantage of paid campaigns with a smart approach and appropriate channel selection.
Defining Paid and Organic Channels
Organic channels and campaigns involve creating valuable content and putting it on channels owned by your organization (e.g., your website or social media channels). Although organic campaigns cost (you have to pay people to work on that content and keep your website running), you do not pay any money for advertisements or getting people to view your organic content. Most of the campaign work here is either in SEO or social media (you can place video marketing such as YouTube in both categories, which has both search engine and social media functionality).
Paid campaigns also involve creating valuable content, but you then use a paid ad of one type or another to get users to view and engage with your content. There are many, many types of paid ad types:
Paid search (text advertisement on a search engine)
Paid social media (using a social media channel, paying for ads including text, images, and/or video).
Display and/or native ads (a visual/text display banner that appears on display networks)
There are also radio, podcast, and tv ads as well as influencer/affiliate style marketing where you’re paying a person or group for endorsement and product placements. Content syndication goes into the paid bucket as well, but we’ll be focusing on the group of paid search, paid social, and display advertisements in this article.
Creating a Hybrid Strategy
Both organic and paid digital marketing areas have an important place in growing your organization’s visibility and meeting your marketing goals.
Within organic channels and campaigns, you have limited control in the placement and appearance of your content. Yes, there are smart strategies to deploy to make the best organic appearance you can—but there are significant areas where you have little to no control. Organic campaigns are also typically long-term projects with longer lasting results. Quality of leads tends to be stronger in organic channels.
On the flipside, paid channels let you have significantly more control in content placement and appearance, which means both more control of the experience and a greater reach into new audiences. Paid campaigns are also much faster moving than organic campaigns, which means short-term ROI, high testing capabilities, and fast iteration.
Paid is a great way to learn lessons and apply them into organic channels. You can also expand your reach and bring more people into targeted organic campaigns. So don’t think about paid campaigns as a standalone channel that is just one more way to bring in audience and leads. Paid campaigns can be an excellent way to get powerful data that you can also implement in other digital areas and help you expand within a multi-touch approach.
There are a lot of consideration in terms of paid campaigns. Teams must choose the right channels and tools, and integrate a thoughtful strategy aligned to enterprise goals.
Tying Tactics to Goals
This might seem a bit basic, but it’s still one of the strongest misses we see mid-size and large organizations make. For the highest success, make selections about what paid channels, what tools, and what type of campaigns after you’ve clearly defined your paid objective and then keep your organizational and marketing goals first and foremost throughout creation and management.
Are you looking to increase brand awareness?
Do you only care about getting leads in the door?
Have you been getting leads but most of them don’t matter and you need to target accounts or increase % of sales-qualified leads?
Depending on what your goals are and what you really need to see from paid campaigns, you can start narrowing down what type of campaign to launch and prioritize in your budget. It’s also a good practice for enterprises to regularly audit what paid campaigns they are doing and ensure there are still clear and effective connections between your campaigns and goals.
Most large enterprises actually need multiple types of paid campaigns because they can work towards different objectives and build together to form a more comprehensive approach. But again—thinking through your paid channels and what they’re best at can be an effective way to analyze priority and budget allocation.
Starting with Paid Channel Strengths
We’ll caveat and say… this simplifies how complex and tailored you can make paid campaigns, but this is a good place to start when considering what paid channels to use for what objectives.
Paid Search: Since you’re placing ads in front of people who have used specific search terms to find something, this is a great way to target by intent and a powerful way to control management and performance based on ROI (e.g., a purchase or lead is worth this much to the company, costs us this much, and ROAS is this exactly). This channel can be a good, broad lead generator but is limited in targeting and engagement. It can also be competitive and can be an easy way to see budget wasted if the account is not managed well.
Display: Unlike paid search, this isn’t a great low funnel paid channel. Display is all about brand awareness—getting your name, images, and ideas out there. You have more engagement opportunities with highly visual ads, and you have some interesting targeting opportunities to reach new audiences based on affinity areas. ROAS can also be harder to determine here.
Paid Social: This can be the most wide-ranging and flexible of the paid channels, but generally this is a middle funnel channel. Again, this depends on the social network—but you also usually have strong targeting options by demographics and affinity. We love the flexibility and creativity here, but also recognize it can be costly and usually requires a longer-term approach for optimization and testing.
So, what area of the funnel do you want to impact the most? What targeting type do you think you need the most? How quickly do you need results? Answering these questions can be a first step towards building or improving a paid campaign. This is just the tip of the iceberg to creating strategic, effective campaign ads… we haven’t talked about which specific networks to use, what tools to rely on, or any of the details to consider when building out the actual campaign. Enterprise paid digital marketing done right is complicated but can bring in big marketing wins.
If you need help thinking through your paid strategy or managing paid campaigns, let us know. We have teams of experts that can help you use your marketing dollars wisely and effectively.