A paid media strategy is an essential part of every marketer’s plan. From giant billboards to tiny mobile display ads, paid media (aka paid advertising) is how you get your message out to the world.
But how can you tell a good paid media strategy from a bad one?
For most organizations (at least those that don’t have Super Bowl-sized ad budgets), a zero- waste paid media strategy should be the goal. If you don’t have a zero-waste paid media plan in place, we’re here to help you understand what one looks like and how to effectively build one.
What is a Zero-Waste Paid Media Strategy?
A zero-waste paid media strategy is a hyper-focused, data-driven approach to advertising designed to ensure your ads appear only where your target audiences are.
Instead of casting a wide net with traditional methods like TV, radio, or print advertising, which are designed to reach the masses, a zero-waste approach emphasizes precision and data-driven decision making to ensure that your paid ads reach your intended audience without wasting your valuable resources. The end result is usually a significantly higher quality of leads, a dramatically lower cost per lead, and a greater overall marketing ROI.
5 Common Tactics of a Zero-Waste Paid Media Strategy
The driving force of a zero-waste paid media strategy is digital advertising. That’s because only digital advertising gives you the data-driven precision you need to avoid putting your message in front of the wrong people.
The world of digital advertising can be extremely technical and jargon-riddled. But there are a few basics that every marketer should know in order to start building a zero-waste strategy. Each of these tactics relies on user data to precisely deliver your ads to the right people:
Cross-Platform Display Advertising
Display ads are what we used to call banner ads. The idea of “cross-platform” advertising is that we can serve display ads to the same set of users across various platforms and devices (desktop, mobile, and tablet).
OTT and CTV
Over-the-top (OTT) advertising and connected TV (CTV) advertising are essentially your tv ads, just served to users through streaming platforms rather than traditional broadcast television.
Social Media Advertising
With organic social media, your content is typically only ever seen by your followers. With paid social media advertising, however, you can get your social media content in front of new audiences who are not already following you. (BTW, don’t miss our guide to the latest social media advertising trends.)
Streaming Audio
This is your modern-day version of radio advertising. Streaming audio ads are served to a precisely selected set of listeners on apps like Spotify, Pandora, and iHeartRadio.
Paid Search
Also known as pay-per-click, search engine marketing (SEM), and/or Google AdWords (although Google ads are not the only game in town), paid search ads get your listing to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for keywords relevant to you.
How Zero-Waste Paid Media Tactics Work Their Magic
The digital tactics that drive a zero-waste paid media strategy are powerful because they are precise. To achieve this precision, they rely on three buckets of data that, when combined, create a potent formula for where to deliver your ads. Again, this can get mind-bogglingly technical, so we’ve kept it simple!
Demographic Data
Building a broad “first draft” of your ideal user, focusing on general identifiers like gender, age, and household income.
Behavioral Data
Sharpening the profile of your ideal user around the behaviors they might exhibit online—things like shopping habits, types of content they consume, or hobbies/interests they’ve expressed.
Geographic Data
Identifying where your ideal user is based on their location data. Through geo-targeting and geo-fencing you can set your ads to reach audiences almost anywhere: a 5-mile radius from your business, a tri-county area, your competitor’s business, or even around an important destination in the user’s buying journey such as a car dealership (think titling services!) or a B2B conference (think B2B software sales!).
4 Steps to Build Your Zero-Waste Paid Media Strategy
Because zero-waste paid media strategies can get highly technical and encompass a variety of different tactics, it’s often helpful to let an agency that specializes in paid media to handle the day-to-day planning and execution.
Whether you decide to partner up or go it alone, there are 4 key steps you should follow:
1. Zero in On Your Budget
Digital paid media is often more affordable than traditional paid media, but it still requires an investment of time and money.
Identify the max you’re willing to spend, and commit to, at minimum, a 3-month run. This will give the digital platforms that run your ads the time to use machine learning to better understand your ideal users and optimize the campaign around those findings.
It also gives your campaign time to retarget your ads – making sure users who’ve interacted with your brand online see your ads multiple times as a way of building awareness on the path to conversion.
2. Zero In On Your Target Audience
Now it’s time to build your ideal user profile. Because digital platforms rely on machine learning to continuously improve your targeting, you can do a lot with just a little bit of starter data: age, household income, occupation or lifestyle interests, and ZIP codes or geographic radius.
3. Zero In On Your Tactics
From cross-platform display advertising to streaming audio to OTT/CTV, there can be a lot of pieces to consider in putting together your zero-waste media puzzle.
You’ll not only need to determine the right mix of tactics for your campaign. You’ll also need to identify the timing of each tactic. (Pro tip: It’s not always the best move to fire on all tactics at the exact same time.)
You’ll also want to negotiate your media spends with your digital publishers to make sure you’re getting the best rates possible. Everything is negotiable in media! (In that regard, it’s just like traditional media…digital advertising doesn’t solve everything!)
4. Zero In On Your Findings
Digital advertising isn’t just more precise – it’ s also more nimble and more informative than traditional media. Even with a short campaign, you can learn a lot and course-correct based on your findings to generate better and better results.
Here are just two simple data points to look out for and learn from:
- Click-through rates: Are people clicking on our display ads? Which ads are generating the most clicks?
- Completion rates: are people listening to our streaming audio ads and/or watching our OTT/CTV ads in their entirety? Or are they skipping out early? Which ads have the higher completion rates?
With just those two data points alone, you can determine which of your ads are performing better, pushing more of them to your publishers while pulling the underperformers out of the campaign.
The Secrets to Success with Paid Media
We’ve covered a lot of ground and it might be overwhelming if you’re trying to figure out where to start. So if you remember only a few things, focus on these:
Gather your basic data points.
Don’t let the word “data” scare you. As we’ve discussed, simple data points like age, household income, and ZIP codes and get you pretty far.
Learn the tactical vocabulary.
Know the difference between display advertising and paid search. Organic social media and paid social media. Retargeting and geotargeting. The technical language of digital paid media is here to stay and it’s only growing.
Give your team permission to test and learn.
A digitally-driven, zero-waste paid media strategy will give you good intel quickly. Trying different approaches and adjusting around what you learn is how you get better.
Still feeling overwhelmed?
Devaney & Associates is here to help. From media planning to media buying to campaign analytics, we can support you with every step of your paid media strategy. Contact us to learn more and get started on the path to zero-waste, all-results marketing today.