Paid media is a method in which organizations can promote their content by purchasing ad inventory on a media channel or site to broadcast brand messaging and reach target audiences. For some consumers, a promoted article or tweet will be their first exposure to your business or brand. It’s an opportunity to reach and target your key buyers and work in tandem with earned and owned media to help your business grow and drive traffic back to your site.
For paid media to be effective, it needs to be focused, well-planned and properly executed. The key is to ensure you’re reaching your target audience where they’re already spending time.
Why Is It Important?
Paid media is an essential part of an integrated media strategy. More and more publications are moving toward paid media as revenue models of publications have changed drastically in the last decade and even in the last year.
Here are three ways to get started with paid media opportunities.
1. Understand the Business Goals Paid Media Can Support
Leveraging paid media allows you to control the messaging and the materials highlighted. It can help you promote a big announcement, announce a company rebrand, sponsor a survey, support category creation or generate new sales leads. This ensures your messaging is not diluted and reads exactly how you want it to when announcing a major initiative.
Understanding the goals behind paid media is important, too, so your team should sit down and determine what you want to achieve from this strategy. For example, is it to increase website traffic, support lead generation or maybe boost social media engagement? Understanding what’s most important to your business will help determine what platform or paid media strategy to move forward with.
2. Identify the Publications Your Target Audience Reads
Paid media helps brands promote ideas, products and services to their target audiences. Through paid articles, you can reach users actively looking for similar services and control where your brand's content is getting seen and by whom. When you place your brand in the right publications, you gain exposure for your content, have the ability to target specific audiences and can drive engagement with more qualified website traffic.
3. Use Paid Media Alongside Earned and Owned Media
Combining these elements can prove powerful in generating and engaging leads. The key to tapping into owned, paid and earned media is developing a calendar that clearly breaks down all of your upcoming content and plans. When you organize content assets in one place, it becomes much easier to identify opportunities to expand audience reach and generate engagement.
Readers are spending roughly the same amount of time on advertiser-sponsored posts as they are on editorial news stories. This avenue is impactful for your brand and you should strongly consider leveraging paid media opportunities this year. Not sure where to start? We can help.
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