How to get the most out of your media budget
Contents
- Making the most of your media spend
- PPC
- #1 Brand PPC
- You should be doing brand PPC – here’s why…
- #2 Advanced Remarketing
- Display
- #3 Performance focused display
- #4 Building brand awareness
- #5 Display remarketing
- Social Media
- #6 Facebook Canvas
- What can Facebook canvas do?
- #7 YouTube Pre-roll
- Targeting on YouTube
- #8 Social remarketing
- Native Content
- #9 Native above the fold
- Audit your strategy
If you’re spending money on promoting your business, then ensuring you’re always looking for ways to optimise is the key to making the most out of that media budget.
In this guide, we look at 9 ways you can improve your paid media approach.
You may need multiple channels to succeed
In this guide we focus on four digital marketing channels and the approaches you can take within them, those channels being:
To make the most of your media budget, you’ll most likely need multiple channels of activity. You need a cohesive digital strategy, understanding how to optimise each channel and also how those channels work together.
Pay per click or paid search is one of the fundamentals of digital marketing and will likely be a cornerstone of your paid promotion strategy.
However, there is one PPC blind spot that we encounter time and time again when talking about this channel with clients…
When it comes to trimming the fat from a paid media budget, one of the first things that tends to go on the chopping block is brand PPC.
In our experience, this is a bad idea in the majority of situations. But why does it happen?
Why brand gets the boot
- There’s a perception that if someone has searched for your brand name they already know what they’re looking for
- People think that brand searches are coming their way anyway, so why pay for them
- SEO is expected to deliver on the brand terms – so why pay extra for that traffic?
The Problem with SEO
While you might expect your organic rankings to mop up any brand traffic, it’s becoming harder and harder to just rely on SEO.
As paid listings push organic further down the page, it becomes increasingly important that you supplement your successful organic pages with paid listings.
Dominate the SERP
While it’s true that your organic pages should rank well for your brand terms, by adding brand PPC ads you ensure that your name dominates that search result.
Brand protection
Your competitors can choose to target your brand keywords – meaning that if you aren’t bidding on them, they could be taking some of your brand traffic.
It’s cheap and efficient
Brand keywords are generally cheaper than generic keywords, due to lower volumes and lower competition.
And if it’s not…
If your brand keywords are expensive, then that suggests there is competition. This means your competitors may be moving in on your brand terms – making it even more important you’re present.
Remarketing users through paid search is a great way to drive more business – but the question is, how do you pick those users out of the crowd?
Do you want a blanket strategy that simply shows ads to anyone that has visited your site, or do you want to do something more advanced?
Creating a better remarketing strategy
By looking at your data, you can get the kind of insight you need to create a more advanced remarketing approach.
For example, if you can see an average return time – how long, on average, it takes a customer to make a second or repeat purchase – then this allows you to target those customers that fall outside of that pattern.
With an ad you can then bring those users back onto your site, which may in turn prompt them into the average repeat buying behaviour you’re seeing with other users.
You could also look at the metrics displayed by converting users – eg: average time on page, pages viewed per session. Again, you can then target nonconverting users that match this profile and bring them back to a key conversion point in the journey.
We’ve used this approach for some of our clients and seen great results – as always, letting data lead the way gives you the best chance of success.
Programmatic display equips you with advanced algorithms to ensure your ads are shown to the right user at the right time, with the ability to tailor device and platform to match your goals.
Whether you’re looking for acquisition, brand awareness or remarketing, you can adapt your display campaigns to deliver what you need.
Display can be a powerful sales tool. If you’re looking to use display to increase the number of leads or purchases on your site, then there are important considerations.
But what makes programmatic display so good as a performance focused channel?
Learning the keys to success
Programmatic display succeeds because it learns. When you give the display platform the goal of achieving conversions, it will then look to learn about the kinds of users that convert on your site.
From there, it will go on to target similar users across the web – bringing more people like the ones that have already converted to your website.
Getting your tags on early
If you really want to see a successful display campaign, you need to get your site tagged up before launch and give it time to collect data on your users.
Think about which pages are important to your campaigns and get tags live on these pages as soon as you can.
There are likely to be actions that are useful for every campaign – your key conversion points for example. Start tagging these pages early.
The sooner you can start feeding user information to the display platform, the more time it has to learn – meaning the better chance of it finding the users you need to achieve your goals.
Display can reach far and wide, all the while searching for your target audience – its not just about impressions, it’s about building awareness with the right people.
Memorable, impactful creative
In the world of display, your creative is always important – but when you’re running a brand awareness campaign, it’s your creative that needs to do all the work.
Brand awareness isn’t about what the user does right then and there, it’s about leaving an impression on that user so that, when it comes to them making a decision, they remember your brand and take action.
That’s why the creative is the key – it’s the thing that will create that memory.
Attribution modelling
‘Last click’ attribution modelling will make brand awareness campaigns look like a failure – a subsequent PPC ad or an organic visit will take all the credit for the conversion.
With more advanced attribution models, you can keep an eye on the conversion rate of people who were served your brand awareness ad compared to those who weren’t.
That way, you know exactly what that brand awareness was worth to your business.
With the powerful and flexible targeting available through display platforms, it should come as no surprise that display is a great way to run an effective remarketing campaign.
Go cross-device
Programmatic display allows you to target users depending on what kind of device they are using at the time.
That means if your data shows that people visit the site on mobile to do research and then return on desktop to convert, you can tailor your display remarketing to match.
In this scenario you could bring mobile users on with research led messaging, sending them to information pages.
You can then remarket to those and other mobile users, targeting them with conversion focused messaging when they are on desktop.
We are spending more and more time on social media, both as consumers and marketers.
Let’s look at how we can we make our social media spend more effective, improving our situation as marketers and our users’ experiences as consumers.
Created to improve the Facebook advertising experience for mobile users, Facebook Canvas allows users to explore interactive media within the Facebook platform.
Advertising meets mobile first
While ‘mobile first’ is something you’ll have heard if you’ve created a new website recently, it’s something that can fall by the wayside when it comes to marketing.
With the knowledge that a huge proportion of the Facebook audience is using the platform on a mobile device, it becomes clear that we need our Facebook advertising to be better than mobile friendly – we need it to be mobile first.
“Canvas was built to bring your content to life in a fast-loading and seamless experience on Android and iOS. Leveraging the same technology used to display photos and videos quickly in the Facebook app, Canvas loads quickly, as much as 10 times faster than the standard mobile web.” – Facebook
The Benefits of Canvas
- It’s specifically designed for mobile users – which make up the majority of most Facebook audiences.
- It circumvents your website, so if your landing pages aren’t up to scratch Canvas can do that job for you.
Facebook Canvas allows you to create an interactive, visual experience for mobile users featuring:
- Video
- Imagery
- Text
- Other rich media
You can drive users from this mobile experience to conversion destinations, like forms or on-site content pages.
Users can then explore the content through a variety of actions on their mobile device, like touching objects, swiping, rotating the screen, tilting the device and more!
Burberry example from https://www.facebook.com/business/news/introducing-canvas
People think of YouTube as a video platform, but when you consider the amount of user generated content, the user ratings, the comment eco-system and the ability to share content, it’s really a social media platform.
Get in front of your target audience
The targeting available through YouTube gives you a myriad of options – ranging from the broad to the specific.
In terms of broad audiences, you could target by gender, age and interest.
If you want to get really granular you can go down to the keyword level, targeting people watching videos around a particular subject.
On top of that you have the ability to remarket, making YouTube an extremely flexible advertising platform.
You have a breadth of targeting options available to you on YouTube – mirroring the targeting available through Google Display Network.
You can target users in all the ways you’d expect, such as interest, topic, and demographic.
However, with YouTube you have even more options.
Contextual keyword targeting always you to target users based on keywords within the titles of the videos they are watching.
With placements you can choose a particular channel to have your ads appear on.
You can also use YouTube for remarketing, a subject we’ll dig into more on the next page.
As social media advertising platforms continue to evolve, we have more and more options for remarketing. So, how can you remarket to your users through social media?
Three ways to remarket on social media
1. Reach out to your followers
The most basic way to remarket on socia media is to target your followers – you could also target ‘look-a-likes’, users that are similar to your followers, to grow your audience.
You can make this more specific by only targeting those users that have engaged with your content, meaning they’re more likely to engage with your ads.
2. Create a custom audience
If you have an existing database of customers, then multiple social media platforms now allow you to upload those email addresses in an attempt to match them with accounts on the platform.
You can then advertise to those matched accounts, meaning they’ll see your ads in their social media feeds! You can also further expand this activity by targeting look-a-likes.
3. Install a tracking pixel
By installing a tracking pixel on your website, you can get more dynamic with your social remarketing – for example, why not show a user a product they viewed but didn’t buy in their social media feed? They might be convinced to return and complete the purchase.
You might know it as sponsored content or advertorial – native content means having your content present on an external site.
Native is all about getting eyes on your content, so lets look at how we make it work harder to achieve that.
One of the problems with native content is that you can end up paying for a slot that languishes down the page, far below any point a user is likely to visit.
Thankfully, some native content providers now offer placements that are guaranteed to be ‘above the fold’. This means your content will appear in line with the rest of the site and has the highest chance of being considered by users.
Why it matters
When it comes to the result of a campaign, quality reporting is vital. Native content is no different. Simply knowing you’ve paid for a placement isn’t enough, you want to know that you’re paying for placements that your audience are seeing.
This kind of metric should be part of the reporting you see from your native content provider. If it’s not, then this should raise questions about the kinds of placements you’re paying for.
What to do
If you’re running native content, then ask how often your content is appearing above the fold – you don’t just want to be paying for placements, you want to be paying for placements your target audience is seeing!
Whether you aren’t doing paid media promotion, are just running one channel or have a huge multichannel strategy, getting an understanding of what is and isn’t working is vital.
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