Paid marketing is a quick and effective way to help customers find your brand online. By purchasing advertising on Google Ads or social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, you can directly target a specific audience looking for a business like yours.

While organic marketing, like SEO, delivers results over time, paid marketing instantly places your brand in front of potential customers. This is why paid marketing is often used in the early stages alongside an SEO campaign, before organic marketing begins delivering results. Paid can also provide expectional growth for established business who already ranking high organically but maximising their visibility for key search terms.

How Does Paid Marketing Work?

Paid marketing appears on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and on social media channels. Paid ads are created on a channel, like Google Ads or Facebook, and set to target a specific customer defined by criteria including location, interests, demographics, and previous purchases.

Both Google Ads and paid social media work on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, which means that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You can set a maximum budget for your paid marketing campaign, and when this budget is used up, the ad will stop running.

Benefits of Paid Marketing

• Targeted: Paid marketing ensures that your brand will be found by the right type of customer who is looking for services or products like yours.
• Quick results: Paid ads are instantly visible in the SERPs or on social media, unlike organic listings which take time to rank or organic social posts which can quickly become lost.
• Cost-effective: Setting a specific budget allows you to spend as much or as little as you want to on paid marketing, with the option to increase or decrease your spend over time.
• Brand awareness: Paid social media will ensure that your brand is seen by more people, boosting brand awareness.
• Enhance content marketing: Using paid social media to promote your best content will drive traffic, boost engagement, and help establish your brand as an authority in its space.

Intro to Google Ads

When searching with Google, the SERPs show both organic and paid results. Paid ads appear at the top of the results or and feature the word “ad” before the listing. This prominent position at the top of the SERPs ensures that your ad will be highly visible, and will target relevant potential customers based on your criteria.

Building a paid advertising campaign in Google Ads starts with selecting relevant keywords or search terms to target. When a potential customer uses these keywords or search terms, they will see your ad.

When a user clicks on your paid ad link, you are charged a small amount of your budget. The amount you pay for each click, or the cost per click, will be determined by the popularity of your chosen keyword or search term, or its search volume.

Google Ads also makes it easy to monitor how many people have clicked on your ads and how much revenue has been generated from a campaign, allowing you to track your return on investment.

Intro to Paid Social Media

It can be difficult to navigate ever-changing social media algorithms to ensure your content is seen. Paid social media ensures that your campaigns are found by the right type of potential customers. It allows you to pay to have your content shared to a targeted audience, either through boosting organic content or by promoting specially-designed advertisements.

As with Google Ads, you can control who sees your ads based on a variety of demographics and online behaviours. To inform your marketing, you can also access valuable insight into how your campaign has performed through social media metrics.

Every mainstream social media channel offers paid advertising, however the most effective channel for your brand will depend on your target audience, products, or services.

Paid Marketing or SEO?

Paid marketing can be used to support an organic SEO campaign, providing an extra boost to your brand. The fast results offered by Google Ads or paid social media mean that paid marketing is often used when a new organic campaign is still building momentum.

Once an organic SEO campaign is delivering results, paid ads can remain an important part of your marketing strategy, allowing you to instantly target specific types of customer or explore the potential of new keywords and search terms.

Ask Us a Question About Paid Marketing

Unity Online has plenty of experience in running paid marketing campaigns for our clients, so if you have a question about our PPC services and how paid ads could benefit your brand, get in touch.