Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Wednesday, June 30, 2021
The following article is a generalized paid media strategy split into 3 phases for your brand to follow. It will be an overview of a good starting point. There will be insightful information for any budget or brand.
The first place to start for social and digital advertising is defining the platforms and your target market that are going to work best for your brand. It’s always best to create a buyer persona so you know exactly who you are targeting online. This will help in crafting your ads and brand messaging. Hubspot has a great free resource for you to utilize: https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona.
Now that we know our buyer persona we need to look into our product or service and select the best platforms to advertise on to reach them. For example, if I am a higher ticket eCommerce store selling luxury items over $500 dollars, Google Ads will most likely be the best platform to allocate a marketing budget to as it has the ability to target warm buyers.
If I have an impulse buy eCommerce brand selling makeup, pet toys, or lower budget apparel, the platforms I would utilize would be TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram.
When selling a course, consulting, or a high ticket service, I would want to utilize Youtube advertising and target users who are actively seeking information related to my service.
It’s very crucial you understand the platform you are about to advertise on. For example, Instagram is very visual. The type of content used here has to visually engage users. ( more on this in phase two) Youtube is the second largest search engine in the world. For this platform, you can advertise your information.
A paid traffic source that is very under utlizied is influencer marketing. To give a brief description of this channel: paying an individual or an entity to promote your product or service to their audience. An example of this would be paying a Makeup artist on Youtube to promote your makeup brand. If done currently, this can be done incredibly well. This strategy is great for eCommerce brands. The reason this strategy works so well is because the influencer has an audience that already knows, likes, and trusts them. We’ll create a separate blog article on this topic in the near future on how we set these up and the softwares to use for finding and managing influencer campaigns.
As far as budget goes, the strategy will look a lot different for an ecommerce brand that has a 10,000 dollar paid media budget vs a local boutique startup with a 300 dollar budget.
If I was the local boutique eCommerce store looking to create an online presence I would find a micro influencer. A micro influencer is an individual or entity with a smaller influence. When we think of an influencer we often think of huge celebrities and social media personalities. However, influencer marketing can be done with smaller individuals as well. Going back to the boutique eCommerce example, I would search local individuals with influence. Think radio hosts or well known members of your community and pay them to give you a shout out on Instagram or social platform.
Now that we have defined our target persona,we know what platform they are on, and we have our budget set we can start to look into our content strategy.
The first rule of social media is content is king. It doesn’t matter if you have the best technical paid ad setup and strategy. If your content sucks, you won’t get the result you are looking for. Studies have shown that if audio isn’t quality on a social media video users will stop engaging with it over lower quality visual aspect of a video. So contrary to popular belief, you don’t need high quality expensive equipment to start killing it on social media. If you have an Iphone or Samsung you can get started.
When we create content we need it to resonate with our target persona that we created in phase one.
Content and ad creation can be outsourced for relatively cheap. Here are a few options:
Social proof is becoming the new norm in social advertising and is working very well.
The award winning Youtube advertising script created by Millionare Alex Becker goes as following:
For platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram it’s important your content looks native to the app and not “forced” this is especially true for Tik Tok. This is why their advertising campaign promo slogan for the Tik Tok ads platform is “make Tik Toks not ads”
The best advice I can give you to sum up content creation, not just for ads but in general is, “different is better than better is better”. For example, if you’re creating a gym apparel clothing brand are you really going to try to beat out Gym Shark? It’s possible yes, but you will have much more success faster if you stay true to yourself and be different. There is room for everyone online. A great example of this is an individual on Tik Tok is building his fitness clothing brand by combing his passion for religion and the gym. His logo, brand messaging, and advertising content reflect that message.
To simplify content the best strategy is keep it simple, be true to yourself, and make sure it resonates with your target market/persona.
Now that you have your strategy, content, and budget we’ll go over some of the advertising platforms/channels & the steps to get started utlizing them. This will be very generalized. For more in depth help please contact us
For technical setup - there is an abundance of Youtube videos and resources walking you step by step on how to set these up.
Hopefully, you have a better understanding of where to start and some steps to take for creating a paid media strategy. There’s a myth that you need a large budget. That is not true. Follow these three phases and watch your business skyrocket📈
The key take aways: Do you research about your target market, persona, and what platforms they are on. Create killer content that resonates with your target market. Finally, execute! Test, test, test, and then test some more until you find out what works.
