It’s no secret that businesses go to great efforts to create a substantial online presence: from creating a beautiful website to setting up profiles on key social channels and working hard to produce relevant content. Of course, your current customers may like your pages and your content, but what about expanding your current reach to brand new audiences and to those who may be unaware of your offering through the world of digital? A good fit for this may be paid media.
Paid media. That’s an interesting term, as is PPC or pay-per-click marketing. Having many conversations with those who work in marketing and may not associate much with digital, many refer to ‘PPC’ as Google Search. In saying that, in 2018 paid search is predicted to be the largest digital channel with forecasted spend of £6.2 million – a large chunk of the predicted £12bn digital ad spend pie in the UK . However, to me, PPC is one of the many types of bidding strategies available, or in simpler terms, how you pay for a user interaction.
So, what is Paid Media?
I believe that paid media is utilising any platform where an organisation can pay to serve an ad, regardless of the format. For example, everything from a search ad on Google or Bing to a display ad through a programmatic provider to a sound ad on Spotify. The common denominator being that regardless of the channel, an organisation accesses an ad-platform to serve ads where interactions are paid for.
Although this is incredibly exciting for us as Marketers, unfortunately paid media has a common stigma that it’s scary, incredibly complicated and it’s a channel where money gets thrown into a black hole because ROI can’t be measured. However, this is untrue.
With expert knowledge in creating a data-driven strategy by utilising a logical framework stimulus and in-depth channel knowledge, paid media can be utilised effectively to reach beyond the current user base for a cost-effective cost per acquisition (CPA).
If you’re interested in finding out more, check out the paid search, analytics and SEO activity we’ve ran for Forbo or get in touch with the Multiply Digital team.
