According to some research, when you invest in paid advertising, you get a return of $2 for every $1 you invest. That means paid advertising brings back a 200% return on investment (ROI) rate.
While this is a huge benefit of paid advertising, there are many more benefits that businesses will enjoy when working with paid advertising.
It can be a very useful part of your marketing strategy, so keep reading more paid advertising tips and benefits.
What Is Paid Advertising?
Paid advertising refers to online methods that companies use to attract more customers. Instead of trying to take up Internet real estate through organic search, businesses can pay for ad space on websites, social media, or search engines.
There are many different types of paid advertising, and there are different benefits to each of them. For example, you have paid search. This is where businesses will pay to be at the top of a search engine’s result page. They’ll optimize these for when their audience searches for different keywords.
In addition to that, there are different types of paid search ads, like:
- Display ads
- Responsive ads
- PPC ads
You can also use social media paid ads, where you pay to run your ads on different social media platforms. You should choose the one where your target audience spends their time the most. For example, you’ll have to choose between:
- Instagram ads
- Snapchat ads
- TikTok ads
- LinkedIn ads
- Pinterest ads
- Facebook ads
In addition to that, you can also pay for banner ads. This is where you’ll have your ad appear as a banner on different websites. They’re normally rectangular, and they look like a footer or header, but they can also appear in the middle of a website.
Native ads are normally run on websites that are similar to the website that they’re advertising. They normally have a similar look or feel to the native content that is on the business’s website. People will do this type of advertising in order to attract a similar or certain demographic.
How to Develop a Strategy
While there are many different types of paid advertising, you need to develop a strategy before you start paying for any paid advertising. When you start your paid advertising, make sure that you spend time creating a campaign to make it as successful as possible.
Taking the time to do this will ensure that you save money and time. Paid ads can get expensive, so you can save yourself money if you know exactly where and how you want to run your ads.
Next, you’ll want to identify your goals with paid advertising. Do you want to get more followers? Do you want to convert leads into sales? Are you trying to grow your brand image?
Create a budget next. This will help you narrow down which areas you want to advertise in according to your budget and audience. Knowing your audience might also help you narrow down different channels that you can advertise on as well.
You’ll also want to figure out what channels you want to invest your money in. This should be one of the last stages of paid advertising because your budget will determine what channels you want to advertise on.
Measurable
One of the paid advertising benefits is that the results are measurable, whereas organic search is hard to measure. You can’t track where your audience is coming from, but paid ads will show you exactly where all of your traffic is coming from.
You can target a certain type of audience with paid ads, and the costs are related to what type of ad, objective, or audience you’re trying to reach.
You can easily create ads in just a few minutes with helpful tools that will reach your audience. For example, if you’re trying to reach a younger audience, you might want to try and create a short video on TikTok. If you’re reaching an older audience, you can advertise on Facebook and track which channel gets you the most result.
Depending on the channels you’re working with, you can also track the money that you spend and set a daily limit. This is true for most paid ad platforms, and some of them operate on a spending scale, so you can choose what you can afford.
Targeted Audience
With paid advertisements, you’ll also be able to target specific audiences. For example, if you’re targeting females between 18 and 29, this will easily be done thanks to all of the data that these channels have.
You can partner with the right digital marketing agency, and they will help you set up the right campaign based on your target audience. In addition to this, you’ll also be able to see if these targeted ads are working.
You might find out that your target audience may not be exactly right, and then you can use that data to tweak your audience.
Affordable
When you promote your business with paid advertising, you’ll find that it’s actually more affordable when you compare it to the return on investment that you get. However, you just need to follow a careful strategy.
It’s more cost-effective than other strategies, like organic search which can take a lot of time and money to build up. However, paid advertising gives you complete control over how much money you want to invest, which audience can see your ad, and where your ads appear.
Each platform uses the pay-per-click (PPC) payment model, so if no one clicks on your ad, you won’t have to pay that much. Social media advertising will depend on how much reach you want to get and how long you run your ad.
On Instagram, you could even run some ads for as little as $3 a day. If you’re running a non-profit business, you may even be able to get even cheaper costs on advertising.
Promote Brand Awareness
Many paid advertisements can help you promote your brand awareness as well. When you get your ads in front of more people, they will start recognizing your name and may return to your website later on.
Making the audience familiar with your products and services by putting your ads on popular channels can help you generate long-term customers. In fact, you need to get your brand and products in front of people at least seven times before they decide to purchase something.
Credibility
These ads can also help show your brand as credible and trustworthy. They’ll increase your content visibility to give assurance to your audience. You wouldn’t be spending that much money and time on advertising if you weren’t a legit business.
You can show your customer that you’re an authority in your space and industry while also generating qualified leads. You may also want to partner with promoters, ambassadors, or influencers to make sure that your brand has endorsements.
You can also use paid ads on social media to gain more followers. When other people see that you have more followers on social media, they see this as a sign that you’re a good account to follow, and many people might follow you because of it. When you have more recognition and endorsements, then you have more opportunities to convert to sales as well.
Audience Insights
While your results will be measurable, you’ll also have access to data on how people are interacting with your ads. You can even set up different versions of your advertisement to A/B test and optimize them to ensure that you’re getting the best results out of them.
When you gather all the data from your advertisements, you’ll be able to refine your messages and have a better understanding of your target audience. With this data, you’ll be able to market to the audience as well.
You’ll also get this data way faster than you would with doing organic search optimization. The data you’ll get will also give you as much depth as you want. You can do what you want with it, and you’ll have access to historical and current data.
If you don’t fully understand the data, you can partner with a marketing agency that can help you understand everything about the data.
Local Search
Paid search is also great if you’re trying to target a local audience. With organic search optimization, then you’ll target audiences around the country. However, with paid advertisements, you can reach consumers who are searching for people near them.
Many customers will see your business address when they’re searching for products or services that your company offers, so this is a great way to reach out to your local audience.
You may also want to use targeted ads for your keywords. For example, if you’re operating in Tampa, Florida, then you can include those in your ad keywords.
High Engagement Rates
Another benefit of these types of advertisements is that you’ll have high engagement rates with these ads. In fact, if you’re advertising on social media, then you can also have more control over ensuring the ads reach your target audience.
For example, when you’re advertising on Facebook, you’ll be able to target people based on their connections, behavior, interests, and demographics. When you can reach the right audience, they’re more likely to engage with your ad, rather than advertising to everyone and only getting a few clicks.
Higher Retention
A high-performing ad campaign will drive traffic to your website, but it’ll also help you convert leads into sales. The long-term effect you’ll have on audiences is what you want to achieve with your ads.
When you have customers that can come back to your business over and over again, then you’ll increase your revenue. You may even want to use your ads to retarget people who have visited your site before and remind them that they should come back.
You can also use these ads to tell the story of your business. You want to make your ads memorable so that customers are always thinking about your brand and that they always come back.
You’ll want to sell your audience on your products and services, but you’ll also want them to come back for more. Even if they don’t click on your ad, you want to at least have them thinking about your brand.
When there are many small businesses starting each year, there are at least 31.7 million small businesses in the United States. That is a lot of competition for your audience’s attention.
It’s not as easy maintaining long-term relationships anymore. Companies have to look beyond normal marketing strategies and figure out how to retain customers and keep them coming back. Paid advertisements can do just that.
Multiple Channels
You can also choose different types of channels that you want your advertisement to appear on. Some of the most popular channels include:
- Snapchat
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Bing search engine
- Amazon
You can choose different options to reach your targeted audience. There are also enough of them that you should be able to fit at least a few of them into your budget. Just make sure that you don’t spread yourself too thin on too many channels.
It’s best to pick a few of them and focus all of your energy, time, and money on them.
Maximize Marketing
Having these paid advertisements will also help you maximize all of your marketing efforts. It can be the final piece of the puzzle that ties in all of your marketing strategies.
You can use content from your different advertising to fuel all of the other avenues. For example, you need to do content marketing, but it’s important to get people to see it, so you can use this as a paid advertisement.
You can use social media advertising to distribute that type of advertising. You can also use that type of content to generate interest. When you generate interest, you can actually get more clicks and then work on converting that interest to a sale once they’re on your website.
On the flip side, you can also use the ads to boost your engagement with social media or blog posts. Then you’ll improve the return on investment on all of your content marketing, making your business even more successful.
Early Ranking
If you’re a new business, you’ll find that it’s difficult to start getting search results with organic search. It can take a while for Google to realize that you have a new website and build a reputation.
If your site isn’t ranking on the first page of Google instantly, you can use paid advertising to help get you there. Once you start appearing on the first page there, it will be easier to eventually use organic search to naturally land on that spot.
However, you need to make sure that you’re not just using paid search. Paid search works well when you combine it with organic search as well. You’ll be building the organic search capability while running the paid ads so that your website doesn’t become totally dependent on paid ads.
As the paid ads drive more traffic to your website, Google will realize that many people like your website, and they’ll start suggesting it naturally to other users as well.
Different Types of Paid Advertising
In addition to the benefits listed above, there are also benefits associated with each different platform.
Google Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook all have their own different benefits of using paid advertisements on their sites.
Google ads are great when you’re trying to reach people with high intent. For example, people will often search on Google if they’re trying to research, learn more, or purchase a service or product.
They may not exactly know what they’re looking for, so they turn to Google to find different options. This is where you can create ads that will help them decide your company is the best option.
On Google, you’ll also be able to target audiences with the same product. You can even choose many different audiences depending on the keyword that they would search for. You can also target different locations.
This is really important for local businesses, and you’ll be able to showcase your business profile and garner reviews as well.
According to the latest research, two billion people in the world use Instagram at least once a month, so there are a lot of users that you can connect with when you advertise on Instagram.
One of the other benefits of advertising on Instagram is that it’s connected with Facebook. You can use all of Facebook’s data to target your audience on Instagram.
In addition to that, their budgeting and scheduling tasks are also really easy to use. You’ll set up these ads through Facebook, and if you’ve already used Facebook, you can use those same materials and recycle them for Instagram, saving you time and money.
However, the engagement rate on Instagram tends to be higher as well. That’s because Instagram’s ads aren’t very intrusive, and they look like normal posts, meaning your audience is more likely to engage with them.
Because engagement is high, you may also see great results when advertising on Instagram. The app will also measure the success of your campaign, and you’ll be able to see your follower likes, counts, and comments.
LinkedIn has around 830 million members on its platform, so this is also a great platform to run your advertisements on. This is better for business-to-business advertising (B2B) since there are a lot of working professionals on this platform.
People here generally have a higher income and are more educated, so you can really reach a different demographic on this social media compared to something like Facebook.
LinkedIn makes it easy to share your ads here, and you’ll have better conversion rates as well. This is the only professional networking site out there, so you’ll reach a lot of the audience that you’re interested in.
You can also target your industry-specific variables. For example, if you are in the recruiting industry, then you can use paid search to target people who are in the recruiting industry so that you can get the best results.
Facebook paid ads will help target your audience at a very low cost compared to other traditional marketing costs. You’ll be able to achieve your marketing goals while not blowing your budget.
With Facebook, you can also target your audience. You can make it as specific or broad as you want, so you’ll have a lot of control over the entire process. For example, you can target people based on their:
- Relationship status
- Social media behaviors
- Spending behaviors
- Political beliefs
- Age
- Interests
- Location
- Gender
- Education level
- Birthdays
- Anniversaries
Facebook will also let you remarket to people who have visited your website in the past. This is a great way to improve your long-term customer relationships and retain employees for the long term. You’ll also get more engagement with ads when you advertise to people who are familiar with your brand.
Your organic reach on your Facebook page might be declining, but paid search can help boost that backup. These advertisements will go to people who haven’t seen your page before, so you can even use them to boost your following and revitalize your engagement.
Discover More of the Benefits of Paid Advertising
These are only a few of the benefits of paid advertising, but there are many more benefits that companies will see when they set up their campaigns.
This is an important stage in the marketing process, but we know that it can be confusing and overwhelming. That’s why we’re here to help you out.
Check out our website to partner with us and enjoy all of these benefits from paid advertising!