What Is A Paid Media Mix?
A paid media mix is basically all the various forms of marketing that you pay for to get your message in front of the right audience. The best thing about them is that they offer you full control of the targeting, timing, and budgeting. You control every aspect of your marketing decisions, including content creation and platforms used for promotional campaigns. Companies often use a combination of paid, earned, owned, and shared media to keep their marketing budgets under control. A few of the most common and popular paid media are social media advertising, search engine marketing (SEM), pay-per-click (PPC), influencer marketing, and display ads.
One of the smartest digital marketing tips and tricks we can offer you is to not put all your eggs in one basket. It's best to invest in various types of paid media to reach customers across different demographics and at varying stages of the funnel. If you want to reach local audiences, TV ads and billboards may be ideal. On the other hand, if you want to target audiences on the other side of the planet, display ads and video marketing may be your best bet.
In This Guide, You Will Find...
- Why Is Paid Media Important For Businesses?
- Understanding The Paid And Non-Paid Media Mix
- 6 Examples Of Paid Media You Should Leverage
- The 5 Elements Of Media Mix
- How Can B2B Businesses Diversify Their Media Mix?
- How Can eLearning Industry's Niche-Specific PPC Services Help You?
Why Is Paid Media Important For Businesses?
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Reach
Whether you want to increase your clientele in your existing market, enter a new one, or enforce growth hacking strategies, a paid media mix is ideal to expand your reach. By utilizing various paid media channels, you expose your ad to new targeted audiences. It's important to ensure your potential buyers are present on these channels so you don't waste your budget.
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Targeting
If you've suffered from wasted ad spend in the past, it's time to forget about it. The paid media mix model allows you to target people based on demographics, gender, job roles, location, interests, and behavior. That's why you work hard on ensuring your messaging resonates with their challenges and needs. Plus, with PPC search ads, you can target people looking to buy a specific product. That's why you target them based on keywords, interests, location, and other factors. The more specific you get, the higher conversion rates you enjoy.
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Measurable Results
The ability to measure marketing performance is any marketer's holy grail. What's the point of using paid, owned, earned, or shared media if you can't measure their impact? Paid media campaigns allow you to track key performance indicators (KPIs), offering data for real-time optimization, refinement, and continuous improvement. You can easily check the performance of your campaigns and make changes as you see fit, meaning you can make highly informed decisions.
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Control
Organic media takes time to show any results. Even if you make good changes, you won't understand whether they yielded results until weeks or months later. However, paid media mix modeling helps you track your campaigns' performance in real time and adjust your strategies swiftly. This way, you can stay on track with the latest trends and ever-changing market conditions.
Understanding The Paid And Non-Paid Media Mix
B2B companies usually focus on blended media mix marketing, involving not only paid campaigns but also earned, owned, and shared content. Throwing money on advertising isn't a solution you can depend on forever. Your organic media should also bring in traffic. But, since it takes time for them to take off, you can definitely invest in paid ads. Let's see how earned, owned, and shared media can benefit your business.
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Earned
Earned media is extremely valuable, as it derives organically from people who have no gain in promoting your business. They are genuinely impressed by your performance and happy with your services. So, they may go online and mention you on their social media, pick up your press release announcement for publication on their news site, and talk about your services on their podcasts. Customer testimonials are also super valuable earned media, as are word-of-mouth recommendations.
To earn more media attention, you should engage with influencers and journalists, fostering good relationships, and create high-quality and expert content that showcases E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). You should also learn how to ask for reviews so more satisfied clients start leaving triumphant comments online.
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Owned
In contrast to paid media mix, owned media refers to channels and assets that belong to you. Websites, landing pages, social media profiles, newsletters, and branded content are part of your owned media. You have full control of what is being published and the messages that reach your ideal buyer persona. You have the creative freedom and flexibility to publish anything you think aligns with your audience's needs. Also, you can engage directly with your followers on social media and build loyal relationships. Your goal is to use owned media to build trust, bring value to people's lives, and increase engagement.
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Shared
Shared media may be the hardest to generate, as you are not paying for the exposure or creating the content yourself. Your goal is to appeal to your audience's needs and preferences and encourage them to share your content on their feeds. It could be viral videos, user-generated content (UGC), social media shares, and community discussions. For instance, you may write an answer on Quora that is so thoughtful and valuable that your followers share it without you even asking for it.
6 Examples Of Paid Media You Should Leverage
1. Search Engine Marketing Or Pay-Per-Click
SEM and PPC are often used together to bring a company's campaigns in front of the right audience. As a prominent digital marketing media mix example, your goal is to bid for niche-specific and high-intent keywords so you appear at the top of the page when someone searches for these terms. They are marked as "Ads" or "Sponsored" and are usually followed by organic search results. SEM is followed by search engine marketing intelligence, where you collect data like click-through rates and conversion rates to check whether a campaign worked and why it did. While SEO vs. PPC is a hot topic in the marketing industry, we advise you to utilize both strategies to succeed.
2. Social Media Ads
We can't be talking about media mixes in marketing and not mention the immense possibilities social media ads offer. Whether you are using Meta, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Pinterest, you have the ability to get uber-specific with your targeting. B2B companies may find Meta ads, X ads, and LinkedIn ads much more beneficial, though. On Meta, you can create ads using various formats, including carousel, video, and image. You can even create your custom audiences based on your customer data. On X, it's best to target keywords that your audience uses in hashtags, interests, and the followers of specific accounts.
LinkedIn is the most corporate option out of the three. There, you can reach professionals based on their job titles, industries, company size, seniority, and even skillsets.
3. Display Ads
You can't exclude SaaS display ads from your paid media mix. Most B2B companies invest a respectable portion of their marketing budget in placing display ads on various platforms. These ads usually feature a strong image alongside engaging and convincing copy. There are various display ad types, including banners, rich media, video pop-up banners, sticky ad bars, and interactive content.
They are great at targeting people who have already shown interest in your product and building awareness. Modern display advertising is often done programmatically, which means buying and placing ads in real time. eLearning Industry offers four popular and effective banner ad types you can leverage to increase reach and clicks.
4. Influencer Marketing
With paid influencer marketing, you can lean on the credibility and trust people in your industry have for popular and reputable figures. We are not talking about offering free access to your product so influencers can share their genuine opinion. We are talking about creating paid partnerships with trustworthy figures who have a vast network of loyal followers. For example, you may appear on their podcasts and discuss your product at length. Or you may invest in webinar marketing and ask them to appear at your live event as keynote speakers. This way, you take advantage of their engaged audiences and wide reach.
5. Video Ads
Have you incorporated videos into your SEO content strategy? If not, you definitely should. They are also a wonderful format for online advertising. SaaS products are often complicated, and you need too many words to explain them to audiences. Videos simplify everything by showing people how your product works. Explainer videos, how-to videos, and step-by-step guides make it easy for everyone to understand your product's value and functionality. They belong to your media marketing mix and can be utilized in emails, social media ads, and landing pages. You may use them as pre-roll ads, mid-roll ads, and in-stream ads on platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.
6. Affiliate Advertising
There's another way you can utilize your chosen influencers. You can propose that they become your affiliates. Based on their promotional performance, they receive a small percentage of the total sale or for the new leads they generate. This tactic is often included in companies' paid media mix as it helps you capitalize on these influential figures' authority and credibility.
The 5 Elements Of A Media Mix
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Product
Before even creating your marketing mix, you should understand your product. What are you offering to your audience? You must have a clear vision of your branding, product functionality, quality, and terms. At the end of the day, your buyers must know exactly what benefits they should expect from using your services.
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Price
No matter what content marketing ideas you implement, one thing should be clear in your advertising messaging: the pricing. This includes not just the product price or subscription rates but also the discounts, payment arrangements, and credit terms. For subscriptions, you could choose to charge software buyers monthly, quarterly, or annually. Your pricing should reflect your market position and your product's value and capabilities.
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Place
It's important to decide where you will advertise and promote your product so that your target buyers can find and purchase it. From paid media mix channels to various distribution avenues, you should make your product easily accessible and discoverable. Buyers should be able to find it at the right time and place. For example, a payroll software buyer may be able to purchase your software from your website and third-party directory submission sites.
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Promotion
The future of internet marketing relies heavily on targeted promotions. How will your buyers find you? You may create online ads, press releases on niche-specific publications, and organize sponsorships with thought leaders in your field. Analyze your market to identify how much it's worth spending on acquiring customers.
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People
Your staff, salespeople, and those working for your business are interested in matching the best B2B customer service examples to retain and gain new customers. This means that you should offer them training and development opportunities to work on their skills.
How Can B2B Businesses Diversify Their Media Mix?
When you start crafting a digital advertising strategy, shared, owned, earned, and paid media mixes will probably be on your map. However, it's hard going all in on all of them when you don't know what works yet. If you don't want to rely solely on the most popular B2B paid media avenues, there are ways you can differentiate. For starters, build a profile on Reddit and Quora. Both social media platforms attract B2B buyers who are searching for genuine answers. Join relevant subreddits and learn as much as you can regarding your audience. Then, you can set up a simple ad with a captivating image and copy.
Another successful paid media example is contacting 2–3 successful and niche-relevant influencers. Offer them free access to your product and ask them to talk about their experience with their engaged audience. Lastly, you may opt for an exclusive email blast through an industry expert. For example, eLearning Industry's hundreds of thousands of dedicated subscribers are always on the lookout for new technology. Leveraging our visibility allows you to gain new prospects and boost your authority.
How Can eLearning Industry's Niche-Specific PPC Services Help You?
Influencer marketing and online ads may be enough for eCommerce businesses. Yet, B2B and SaaS companies can't rely solely on Google Ads and sponsored content. This is where PPC directories come into play. eLearning Industry features directories on various eLearning and HR tech categories, including LMS, authoring tools, content providers, payroll software, time-tracking software, and many more. Corporate buyers can check out your product's features and compare them with others. What sets us apart from generic directories is that we target specifically EdTech, L&D, and SaaS buyers and guarantee up to 12.58% conversion rates.
Our transparent geo-bidding allows you to take full control of your listing and spend more on valuable traffic. Also, you can check the performance of your listing anytime you want through your dashboard. We offer flexible reports and detailed graphs that make it easier for you to see how you're doing. While free listings are a great start, you might want to upgrade your PPC listing if you want to surpass your competition.
Key Takeaway
When you enforce organic marketing tactics, your goal is to rank higher on search engines. With a paid media mix, the goal is pretty much the same. You're still using PPC, SEM, display ads, and video ads to grab your audience's attention and hook them with your messaging. Earned, owned, and shared media deserve a spot in your marketing strategy, too, but paid media are undoubtedly necessary. They help you expand your reach, appeal to new audiences through specific targeting, and optimize your tactics by checking your performance in real time.
Affiliate and influencer marketing are two vehicles that help you target niche-specific buyers through influential experts in your field. Don't underestimate the power of an industry influencer talking nicely about you. If you want to differentiate yourself, you can go beyond the usual social media platforms and make a splash on Reddit and Quora. And don't forget that featuring your business on niche directories like eLearning Industry can present you in front of targeted corporate buyers.
