When it comes to marketing on digital channels, you can either take the organic route or go the paid advertising way. Organic basically means you let your brand grow naturally without doing any paid promotions. Paid media advertisement basically gives you visibility in front of customers right then and there. You pay to be there where your customers are – be it search engines, social media platforms, or websites.
What is paid media?
Paid media basically refers to any type of paid promotion on any channel. In traditional settings, paid media means TV, radio, billboards, and print ads. In the digital world, paid media refers to placing your content on various channels like search engines, websites, social media, etc.
Paid advertising has been widening the opportunities for its users to build networks, generate leads, and enhance their media presence. It is a marketing strategy that focuses on increasing traffic, conversions through clicks, sales, and increasing revenue. Media is composed of three types, that are paid media, earned media, and owned media.
Comparison between Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
These three media strategies give you healthy online coverage over the internet. Let’s compare these media categories and see how they are different from each other.
Paid Media
Paid media is one of the methods by which companies can promote their products/services usually through sponsored ads, social media posts, video ads, pop-ups, paid search results, etc. Paid media can turn out to be an effective opportunity to enhance and expand your brand reach, generate more traffic, and get more clicks.
Owned Media
As the name implies, it is the type of media that displays your content on different media channels that you own, such as blogs, emails, websites, case studies, whitepapers, and other owned resources and assets. Owned media is like a deliverance of your company’s message in different ways and in different forms.
Earned Media
It refers to the media exposure you earn through word-of-mouth. Whether it’s the customer experience that you deliver, the result of your SEO efforts, the amazing content you’ve delivered, or the blend of all three, it is the acknowledgment of your contribution you receive as a result of your efforts.
Media can be earned by getting positive reviews, press mentions, recommendations, reposts, etc.
Why paid media is recommended?
Paid media might look archaic or unnecessary, but for some users, a sponsored post or tweet can be their first exposure to your brand or business. It does not matter how old your business is, it drives your audience to your content, and delivering your best content should be your top priority. For this reason, paid media helps you reach the targeted audience, and it is the quickest way to drive traffic to your website, blog, or to your business.
Types of Paid Media
Paid media is somewhere closer to traditional marketing, where you usually pay an external source to broadcast your content/message on media platforms. Here in this section, we will dig deeper into the various methods and platforms where you can promote your brand through paid media.
Search Engine Advertising
Search Engine Ads include PPI (Pay Per Impression) and PPC (Pay Per Click) ads.
PPC ads appear in the search results in the sponsored ads category where a company can direct traffic towards its website, but the advertiser is only charged when a searcher or user clicks on the ad. To ensure that the PPC method does not cost you much or bring irrelevant traffic to your website, you must first identify the keywords that are related to your content and bid on them or add them in the relevant ad set.
On the other hand, pay per impression is slightly different than the PPC model. Instead of paying every time someone visits your website, you pay based on cost per thousand (CPM) impressions. A flat rate is applied on showing your ad to around thousand people.
Banner Ads
Banner ads are also called web ads or display ads, which are normally image-based ads. These ads mostly appear on the websites for a limited time and drive the user to any specific landing page or website of the advertiser. These types of ads are embedded in the form of gifs or an image to the publisher’s website.
Paid Social Media
Certainly, the most famous from the list of paid social media requires no introduction. We see it every day while scrolling our favorite social media platforms. Now every social media platform offers paid ad options, where you can publish and promote your brand’s ad. Your ads will be displayed to the users, depending on their interests, location, behavior, and demographics, etc.
Reach The Right Audience
Paid media gives you coverage far better than what you could get organically. You must know the right paid advertising channel to promote your brand to the relevant audience. When you spend money on advertising, you naturally want a healthy ROI. An adequate set of tools saves your time, which you can spend on refining your target audience and optimizing your spending.
You must be wondering, what are these tools? Here are the best paid media tools listed for you that are available in the market.
The best paid media tools for advertisers
SEMrush
SEMrush is among the best paid media tools. It helps you with keyword research, tracks the strategies applied by your competitors for keywords, performs an SEO audit for your website/ blogs, looks for the opportunities available for backlinks, etc. It is trusted worldwide by internet marketers and used by many small and big businesses.
How Much SEMrush costs?
It offers three standard monthly packages: Pro, Guru Pro, and Business. But if you want to make your own package, then a custom Enterprise Solution is also there for your convenience.
Google Ads Editor
Google Ads Editor helps in gaining performance and efficiency of ad campaigns. It has become popular among professionals and beginner advertisers alike as it assists them in managing multiple accounts even when they have no internet connection.
How Much Google Ads Editor costs?
It’s free-to-use tool with a free downloadable application feature that can be used without an internet connection.
Word Stream Advisor
Doesn’t matter if you are running paid search or social ads or both. Word Stream Advisor helps you optimize and enhance your campaign, so you would receive leads, calls, visits, and more sales that automatically will improve your ROI.
How Much Word Stream Advisor costs?
It depends on your budget range. Word Stream Advisor offers two standard plans with different budget ranges. Plans include 3-month subscription plan that starts from $299/month and ends at $789/month and, the other is 12-month plan that starts from $264 and ends at $694/month.
SpyFu
SpyFu is a keyword research tool that most digital marketers use to optimize their online search results. This paid tool helps marketers to analyze search terms that their competitors are using for paid and organic search campaigns. You can also easily search your business competitors with this paid tool.
How Much SpyFu costs?
SpyFu offers four plans for its users.
- Basic monthly plan – $39
- Annual plan – $33 per month
- Professional plan – $39 for the first month and $78 per month for the rest of your purchase of the monthly professional plan. For the annual professional plan, $58/month will be charged.
- Team plan – $299 monthly, and for the Annual Team plan, $199 will be charged.
There are many other paid media tools that marketers use to promote their brands and businesses. The list continues with:
- Supermetrics
- Invoca
- Leadpages
- Serpstat
- Acquisio
- CrazyEgg
- Ahrefs
- Sizmek
- SE Ranking
- Google Data Studio
- Optmyzr
- Microsoft Advertising Editor, and much more.
