Paid marketing is a great way to hone in and connect with your buyer persona and can be one of the quickest ways to help potential clients discover you. This encompasses any marketing strategy you use to interact with potential clients based on their previous interactions and interests. Paid marketing works best when paired with organic marketing because it provides a balance. This balance is crucial to success because it allows your clients to continue to connect after their initial experience with you. Paid advertisements redirect 65% of the traffic from search engines to websites. This other 35% is organic, so it’s still a big player. 

Your customer journey is a driving factor in paid marketing. Once you know your goal, you can redevelop your customer journey to figure out how you will get there and what advertising you should use. Ask yourself: Where are viewers headed when they click your ads? What is the purpose of the ads? If customers invest in your company’s product, are they going to be satisfied with your overall brand?

Paid marketing took off after the development of the web, specifically through search engines like Google and social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and most recently TikTok. This is because the increased reach and how people can be reached has been innovated. Paid digital marketing is done mainly through search engine pages (SERPS) and social media. The great thing about these channels is their capabilities to target very specific audiences and demographics. It’s one aspect (of many) that sets digital apart from traditional marketing efforts.

5 Types of Paid Efforts

1. Pay Per Click

2. Paid Search

There are 3.5 billion Google searches per day. Google makes up around 92% of the US search engine market. This means that most of your potential clients use Google. Using Google to promote your brand is a worthwhile investment. Google dominates the search engine market because of its ability to keep up with marketing efforts. Google is fully capable of meeting your SEO needs. A few ways to create even more buzz around your marketing efforts is making sure your website is a place users want to visit after they find you from search queries. Mobile-friendly experiences are a big part of a good user experience because most of your traffic is going to be from phones or tablets.

3. Retargeting

Retargeting beats all other ad placement strategies with a 1,046% efficiency rate. Using retargeting alongside other types of advertising tools increases the chances for sale by 50%. The more integrated your digital marketing campaigns, the higher success and return on investment (ROI) you will see. This is because of - you guessed it - brand consistency. It is highly likely that most of your customers won’t purchase from you on the first visit, but how do you engage with them after this? Retargeting is fundamental to engaging customers who have already seen your brand before because it makes them more comfortable with you and your brand image, this is why consistency is that important. Some great ways to retarget are by promoting best sellers, introducing new product lines, and moving inventory in a unified way that encompasses your brand image and values. Mail Chimp offers some great advice on ways to take these ideas and run with them.

4. Paid Social

Paid social advertising is how you can display sponsored content on third-party platforms. The goal of displaying this content is to target specific buyer personas. Marketers often use this tactic to capture new optics, new leads, and create higher efficiency. Every channel looks a little different but overall, the projected market volume for paid social is 230 billion dollars by 2025.

5. Display Ads

Display advertisement digitally combines text, images, and a call to action that brings a customer to the website so they can experience all you have to offer. These ads come in many different shapes and sizes. They can include static and animated elements like images, video, or text. Banner ads are one of the more common kinds of display ads and they are often used to create awareness of campaigns and brand image.  Display advertising can generate up to 300% more traffic. Display ads can convey your message quickly. Display ads have an average conversion rate of 0.77%. This makes them an awesome resource for businesses to engage with customers. 

Paid Marketing is often a sure-fire way to convert your audience. Why? The simple answer is you are getting more traffic. People are noticing you. Organic methods can be great for driving traffic, but they don’t work overnight. When executed correctly, paid marketing strategies can help generate results more efficiently. Paid marketing is a powerful piece in inbound strategy – but don’t forget there’s more than one piece in the big picture of inbound.

4 Benefits of Paid Marketing

Today, it’s almost inevitable that potential customers will first meet your brand digitally. A massive 87% of consumers begin their searches on digital channels, regardless of whether they end up making a purchase online or in a brick-and-mortar store. With the world at their fingertips, people are now able to do more research about what products and services fit them best. There are a lot of different ways to market through PPC. The success rate of each platform varies based on your audience, but they all focus on these four main things that will benefit your brand.

1. Build Brand Awareness

Building brand awareness is essential to the success of a growing company. On average, it takes 5 to 7 impressions for people to remember your brand. Brand awareness is a direct result of paid marketing efforts because it fuels these impressions. Think of all the big-name companies and their presence online. For instance, Apple, this company dominates even the fruit we all love in our search engines. This tech guru has developed a strong customer base because of the traffic and traction that its marketing brings in. This is highly dependent on their level of brand consistency as well because it allows people to trust the service, quality, and overall company.

2. Encourage Customer Engagement

The average reach of an organic post on a Facebook Page is sitting around 3.91%. That means roughly one in every 25 followers see your non-promoted marketing efforts. Organic is important because it shows the client who you are, but the most efficient way to boost traffic and sales is to up your budget for paid marketing. This is because it gives prospective customers the opportunity to engage. Paid ads visitors convert 50.6% more than organic search visitors, given their higher intent. Organic allows them to continue, but there needs to be a spark to grab your target audience’s attention.  

3. Target Specific Audience Segments

Talking to the right people in the right place at the right time is the foundation of successful sales and marketing. This is why focusing on psychographics and demographics is so important. The awesome thing about the development of the digital world is that technology has allowed us to gather more insights than ever before about clients. This is one of the beautiful things that paid marketing is equipped for. Throughout almost any channel you are allowed to target certain demographics and psychographics through your campaign settings which allow for the people you want to find you, a way to find you.

4. Optimize and Measure Campaigns

With the acquired digital information paid marketing efforts lend, you can better understand your customers and what they value the most. Metrics provide a lot of insight into how a business should strategize in the future. Optimizing your campaigns based on what you learn on the way allows your company to keep up with prospective visitors. Places like Hubspot make it easy to analyze this information, like website traffic, PPC, and engagement.

Balancing Paid and Organic Efforts

Using organic and paid methods of marketing allows you to strategically target your current and prospective buyers at every stage of the flywheel. . Organic methods are great for creating an authentic brand, but they aren’t always enough. The key to successful digital marketing is in the balance. 

Paid marketing produces traffic, while organic marketing creates traction. Paid marketing brings people in and organic keeps them hooked and engaged with your brand. The balance plays out nicely because it isn’t always one or the other. This mix provides for an authentic and developing brand.

Successful paid marketing strategies are not just made, they are analyzed and adjusted to enhance performance. This is why it is so crucial to understanding exactly what these strategies entail. This is a great starting point for you to dive into creating your paid marketing plan. Your overall strategy will never be the same once you see the effects paid marketing can have on your business. You will not only see a higher ROI but also increased engagement.