Module 1: Digital Paid Media
Strategy
Introduction
What is Paid Media?
Types of media
Owned media
Paid media
Earned media
Why use paid media?
Planning a media strategy
User-centric thinking
Data and testing
Examining context
Micro factors
Macro factors
SWOT
Setting objectives
The customer journey/purchase funnel
How customers choose brands and products
The online customer decision-making journey
Purchase funnel
Google’s Zero Moment of Truth
Zero Moment of Truth vs Micro Moments
Touchpoints
SMART objectives
Goals, KPIs and targets
Defining your target audience
Target market, segment, and target audience
Optimising
Delivery formats
Paid Search
How does it work
Best uses
Programmatic Display
How does it work
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1
Best uses
Paid Social
Video
Tracking
What are tracking tags for?
The Google Marketing Platform
Why do we care about the GMP?
Conclusion
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Introduction
Welcome to the Performance Marketing course! You’re here to learn about how to use digital paid
media to execute excellent campaigns that get the kind of results you need to push your business
forward.
The first step is to be aware that paid media is only one part of a holistic marketing strategy. If
you’re focusing solely on running ads and ignoring the rest of the customer experience, you’re
never going to do as well as you could.
Let’s briefly consider how online advertising fits into a business strategy. Keep in mind, advertising
isn’t separate from the business. You can’t just sell things without any idea of how that fits into the
overall business goals. Instead, you need a good understanding of the brand and how that dictates
the overall business strategy. In turn, the business strategy will inform the marketing strategy,
which will dictate the kind of campaign being run and whether that will include online advertising.
Remember, you need to build advertising that will fit into that campaign.
Where online advertising fits in (Source: Red & Yellow Creative School of Business (Pty) Ltd, 2022).
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The Internet is more than just another marketing channel. People and brands can interact with
each other in entirely new ways online, offering each other considerable benefits. For example, a
brand that uses social media for brand awareness can offer consumers a new platform for
consumer relationship management by listening to and acting on comments from consumers. A
brand that uses interactive display adverts to drive sales can offer users a rich, entertaining
experience and in return, gain essential information about users’ online purchasing habits through
analytics tools.
The processes and tactics of digital and offline marketing work together as a chain of interrelated
activities. While we’re going to focus on paid digital media in this course, we’ll touch briefly on
some other marketing elements now and then, since you can’t really have one without the other.
This module is all about the strategy behind setting up a paid media campaign. We’re going to look
at how to plan that strategy and at what kind of paid media options are available to execute it.
Then, later in the course, you’ll learn how that execution works.
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
●
define the target audience for your campaign;
●
set solid objectives for your campaign; and
●
determine the ideal delivery format to achieve your goals.
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What is Paid Media?
Marketing as a whole refers to every interaction a customer or prospect has with your brand.
These interactions happen at one point or another in the marketing mix. We refer to these points
as the 4 P’s. Flip over the cards below to learn more about each of the 4P’s.
●
Product: What you’re offering to consumers.
●
Place: Where the product is available.
●
Price: What the customer pays (in money, time, and effort) to acquire your product.
●
Promotion: How people find out about your product.
Paid media falls under that final “P” - Promotion. It refers to external marketing efforts that involve
a paid placement. In digital, paid media includes, but is not exclusive to:
●
Paid Search Advertising;
●
Paid Social Media Advertising; and
●
Display & YouTube Advertising.
Paid media is an essential component of revenue growth and brand awareness for online
businesses - and, indeed, for any business at all. In this module, we’ll briefly touch on these three
areas, though we’ll only go into detail about them a little later in the course.
Watch our video to review exactly where paid media (online advertising) fits into the
marketing mix.
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Types of media
Digital paid media is part of the promotional element of the marketing mix. It's important to know
that media of all kinds are inextricably interlinked in digital. There are three kinds of media in
Digital Marketing: Owned; Paid; and Earned.
Let’s briefly go over each of these kinds of media. Click on the plus sign in each block below to
learn more about the three types of media.
Owned media
Owned media refers to channels that a brand controls and owns, such as a website, social media
page, or blog. A brand generally uses an owned media space as its base in the digital world.
Paid media
Paid media is all forms of media that an advertiser pays for. The “ad space” is bought and planned,
and the brand “owns” it for a period of time. Paid media can include:
●
Search advertising
○
Text-based pay-per-click (PPC) search ads, which appear on search engine results
pages (SERPs)
●
Display advertising
○
Static or dynamic display ads that are graphic and allow for rich branding
opportunities
○
Mobile ads, which can be text or image based, and are specifically created and
formatted for mobile devices
○
Video ads on video sharing platforms such as YouTube, websites, and social media
platforms - and Instream Ads on YouTube
●
Social Media Advertising
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○
Social media advertising can include text, images, GIFs and videos
○
Lead generation using in-platform lead forms
○
Online sales via conversion or catalogue sales
Earned media
Earned media is publicity and word of mouth promotion that is not paid for directly and is not
guaranteed. Instead, it is nurtured, encouraged, and earned through sharing and social interaction.
It includes mentions in various social media spaces (blogs, social networks, podcasts, video sharing
platforms, etc.). Because it relies on relationship building, it can take time to develop and grow.
Search engine optimisation, social media sharing and engagement, and online public relations fall
into the earned media category.
Have a look at the below diagram, which illustrates the interplay between the three media types the ‘digital marketing trifecta’. The diagram also mentions channels (like websites, paid search, and
social media ads) as well as strategies (like retargeting and content) and potential metrics (like
mentions, shares, and reposts). This should give you an idea of what is covered by each type of
media.
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Paid, earned, and owned media* (Source: Business2community.com, 2022)
While you have full control of owned media, such as your brand's website, your reach isn't very
high (not that many people will see you), so you are most likely to draw existing customers. While
paid media allows you wider and more targeted reach to engage with new prospects. You don't
have to pay for earned media, so you don’t have much control as it is spread by your fans. Paid
media, however, does require a budget, so if you’re working with limited resources (budget, time,
and effort), it needs to be implemented with a strategy based on a clear goal. While the latter is
true for owned media as well, it’s especially so for paid.
Take a look at the table below which outlines the roles, examples and benefits of Owned, Paid and
Earned media.
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Table showing the pros and cons of each type of media (Source: Textbroker.com, n.d.) )
You need to use paid, earned and owned media in conjunction for maximum impact, to retain
existing customers, convert prospects, and reach new brand fans. These three types of media can
overlap considerably, and any marketing campaign is likely to involve more than one.
Owned, paid and earned media also impact on one another to improve results. For instance:
●
Online advertising strongly influences certain elements of earned media, such as organic
search. Paid search ads on search engine results pages (SERPs) increase the likelihood of
clickthroughs to a website via the organic results (BrightEdge, n.d.) . So, if a brand's website
ranks well (first or second spot on the SERP), more people will click on it if there is also a
paid search ad on the page.
●
Banner advertising has been shown to influence consumer search behaviour. A consumer
might see a banner and not click on it, but go to a search engine to search for the
product/brand advertised and then click on the search ad. This is also referred to as an
assisted conversion, if the client buys the product.
The lines between these three forms of media are not fixed, and all three can overlap and converge.
For instance, a piece of content created as online advertising might be shared via social channels
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to become earned. This convergence and interplay between the different forms of digital media
are increasingly important for businesses, whether they sell online or not - and they can all play a
role in the zero moment of truth - which we’ll discuss later, when we look at the customer journey.
Reach (and who you can reach) vs control in paid, earned and owned media (Source:
pattytalksdigitalcomms.blogspot.co.za, n.d.)
Why use paid media?
Since people are constantly exposed to a number of ads and seem to be growing less tolerant of them,
what makes paid media such an important element in the marketing mix? Well, a big part of digital
marketing these days is creating a relationship with the consumer via content marketing - that is,
creating content that is valuable and personalised to the consumer rather than overtly promoting
the brand.
Content marketing does you no good if your content is never seen. Paid media is a good way to
promote content to drive earned media, as well as direct traffic to owned media properties - in
fact, it’s one of the fastest & cost effective ways to drive traffic. On social media in particular,
organic (unpaid) reach is near zero - brands simply will not have their posts seen if they don’t pay
to promote them. In other words, as we discussed above, paid media can positively impact owned
and earned channels.
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Paying to promote content or products can help get the ball rolling on awareness and create more
exposure and interest - and all for a pretty reasonable price. Online ads tend to be much more
affordable than more traditional advertising methods, though costs are tied to the objective you’re
trying to achieve. This is especially true because of how specifically you can target your paid media
- you’ll reach the right people, at the right time, with, hopefully, the right message.
Last, but most certainly not least, paid results are easier to track than organic content. Paid media
overall is highly trackable, allowing you to see everything you’ve spent and exactly what results
you’ve received.
Let’s finish off this section by doing a quick activity on the characteristics (advantages and
disadvantages) of owned, paid and earned media. Drag and drop the below characteristics into
their corresponding media types.
Owned
Paid
Earned
Company has full control of
Allows a very targeted reach. Costs nothing.
assets.
Takes time to develop.
Can reach a large audience.
Company has little control over
messages.
Does not have a massive
Paying for ad campaigns can
The most credible type of
reach.
be costly.
media.
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Planning a media strategy
Planning a new campaign is exciting, but you won’t succeed unless your campaign is backed by a
clear strategy. A brand’s digital marketing strategy should encompass all aspects of marketing,
both ongoing (continuous) and intermittent (flighted). Online advertising makes up an important
part of this overall strategy, but for the best possible approach, you need to keep two things in
mind:
●
User-centric thinking; and
●
Data and testing.
User-centric thinking
A good digital marketing strategy is focused on the user and not the brand. User-centric thinking
means putting the consumer and their needs at the centre of all the marketing decisions you make.
Think about where you can find them and what might appeal to them.
Questions to help focus your strategy could include:
●
Where is the user spending their time online?
●
What does the user like to do online?
●
What types of content does the user appreciate and engage with?
●
What times of the day is the user online?
Notice that it is not about where the brand already has a presence, is active or well known. Neither
is it about the content the brand wants to make or is comfortable making. It is all about the user
and ensuring your strategy meets them in the places they already are, with content they will
appreciate. How can you be sure of what they appreciate?
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Data and testing
One of the main benefits of digital marketing, and online advertising in particular, is how easily it
can be tracked, measured and documented. User behaviour, user actions, navigation paths, sales,
and social media mentions, among many others, can all be tracked and recorded almost
automatically in real time. Statistical analysis can then be carried out on all this data to measure,
compare and determine what is working and what is not. Because of the real-time nature of digital,
marketing efforts can be tailored and adjusted constantly, optimising for performance.
Examining context
When examining context you need to consider all the factors, both internal and external, that
impact on your business and its stakeholders. Although you may have an instinctive understanding
of where your business sits in both contexts, it helps to approach this analysis in a systematic and
structured way so that you consider all the factors involved, and get a more rounded view of the
customer’s context, as well as the overall business context.
Micro factors
Micro factors are factors that your business has some control over and are limited to their impact
on your organisation itself. Click on the blocks below to reveal what these factors include:
Your company
This can be broken down further to include:
●
Brand identity: Who are you? What is your brand about? What does it stand for? What
ideas, emotions, and benefits do people associate with it? What is your USP?
●
Your current digital offerings: Do you have a website? An app? What social media
platforms are you on? Do you advertise online? Where, when, how?
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Unique selling point (USP)
Your USP is the one characteristic that makes your product or service better than the
competition’s. What makes it stand out? What can it claim that no other can?
Your customers
Who are your customers? What are their wants and needs? Never make assumptions about why
people like and transact with your brand - this is where that user-centric focus we mentioned
earlier is important. Place the customer at the centre of all business decisions - and test to make
sure you’re doing this accurately.
Your competitors
Who are they? What do they offer that you cannot? What spaces do they operate in? Are they
direct competitors or substitution competitors (that is, do they compete with you based on price
and product, or in the form of more abstract concepts such as time or mindshare)?
Macro factors
Macro factors (or external factors) are shaped by external forces which are beyond your control.
They impact on the broader environment in which your business operates. No business operates in
a vacuum, and these external forces can have a large influence on your business, so it is important
to identify them and be aware of their potential impact.
A PESTLE analysis is also a great tool for identifying threats and opportunities, establishing
strategic direction of the business, and minimising potential failures. It can assist in breaking down
assumptions that could lead to blind spots.
As you can see in the image below, PESTLE is an acronym which represents six external forces.
Click on the question hotspots to learn more about each external force.
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●
Political: The national and international regulatory environment, including labour law,
employment regulations, taxation, and trade agreements. Political stability, trade
sanctions, and boycotts can also impact businesses.
●
Economic: Economic fluctuations, exchange rates, government spending, trade cycles, and
other monetary issues can all impact your business.
●
Social: Consumer demographics and psychographics - lifestyle information and trends,
cultural differences, consumer attitudes and values, media attitudes, consumer buying
patterns, fashion, role models and influencers, and ethical or religious concerns. These can
all impact how people see your brand.
●
Technological: Rapid changes in technology have become the norm in the digital age products and processes become redundant quickly. Research, funding, access to
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technology, and licensing can all play a role in your business and influence how your
customers access your product and communicate with you.
●
Legal: Legal regulations for what can be sold to whom and how it can be advertised.
●
Environmental: The way a business impacts the environment. Green tax, lobby groups, and
corporate social responsibility efforts (the idea that an organisation’s business model
should be ethical, lawful, and environmentally friendly) can all impact your offering.
Watch
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SWOT analysis
A SWOT analysis is useful for understanding how the internal and external factors work together.
A SWOT analysis examines the Strengths (internal positives), Weaknesses (internal negatives),
Opportunities (external positives) and Threats (external negatives) surrounding your business to
give you a clearer picture of what might impact you.
Study the below image and, and click on the question hotspots to learn more about each quadrant.
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A SWOT Analysis (Source: Red & Yellow Creative School of Business (Pty) Ltd, 2022).
●
Strengths: What is the brand good at? What does it do well? USPs?
●
Weaknesses: What shortcomings does the brand have? Recent crises or mistakes?
●
Opportunities: Are there any market gaps? Any new marketing channels to explore?
●
Threats: Are there any strong or new competitors? Any strong competitor USPs?
An in-depth examination of your business helps you determine exactly where your business is,
what is immediately possible and attainable, and what it needs to guard against and watch out for.
It is an integral step in developing your marketing strategy.
Watch this video on how to perform a SWOT analysis.
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To apply your knowledge of the SWOT analysis, drag and drop the following examples into their
corresponding quadrant.
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Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats
Having a well-known
A relatively low
New technology
A competitor is
and established
marketing budget.
promises a possible
offering a similar
new sales channel.
product value at a
brand.
lower price.
Your product has a
Poor quality existing
New market research
The economy might
strong USP.
marketing assets.
shows a big consumer
be heading into a
market that is
recession.
untapped.
Setting objectives
What does your campaign need to achieve for the business, and how can online advertising fit into
that? Your digital marketing objectives need to be aligned with your broader business and
strategic objectives. Marketing objectives are more than simply increasing sales; they are about
getting your customer to engage and interact with your brand in some way. All online advertising
campaign objectives need to consider this.
To start determining your objectives, consider your brand, your customer and the technology
available. You also need to think about the entire customer journey. You don’t want to stop at
raising awareness, although grabbing your audience’s attention is very important; you also want
your customers to engage and take some form of action. Before we get into writing objectives, let’s
look at the customer journey.
Remember, overarching marketing objectives are supported by objectives at the campaign level
e.g. an overall marketing objective could be to increase online sales. To support this, you could have
a display campaign focused on brand awareness and a search campaign focused on generating
leads. In this case, your display objective could be increasing website visits by 100 visitors per
week, while your search objective could be increasing leads by 50 per week.
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The customer journey/purchase funnel
The customer journey describes how people go from deciding that they need a product to
choosing the product they want and then buying it. Let’s examine the path an online customer
would follow from the point where they become aware of your product to the point where they
decide to buy it (and where digital paid media can fit in).
How customers choose brands and products
Traditional marketing strategy sees consumers as following a linear decision-making funnel when
engaging with a new brand or product. The phases of the customer journey are shown in the below
purchase funnel infographic. As you can see, at each stage, the customer narrows down their
options, as shown in the image below.
Click on each number hotspot to learn more about each stage of the purchase funnel.
Purchase funnel (Source: McKinsey, 2009)
1. Awareness: The customer becomes aware of their need for a specific product or service.
2. Discovery or familiarity: The customer starts noticing brands that meet this need.
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3. Consideration: The customer weighs up their options and starts asking questions about
the offerings available.
4. Purchase: The customer decides on their top choice and enters into a transaction with the
brand.
5. Loyalty: The customer uses the product, and hopefully starts developing loyalty to the
brand after a positive experience.
This process changed when digital became ubiquitous, though.
The online customer decision-making journey
You will not be surprised to learn that the internet has changed how consumers find, research,
choose, and buy products - the traditional funnel doesn’t account for the various touchpoints,
decision factors and non-linear behaviours of internet users. People no longer follow that linear
purchase journey. Instead, they follow a cyclical loop of brand engagement, at the core of which is
consumer-generated content and social media.
In the online consumer journey, the consumer engages in a cyclical process of evaluating and
interacting with brands and products. Their decisions online are constantly in flux, and brand
loyalty is much harder to earn and maintain. This cycle has four phases:
1. Initial consideration;
2. Active evaluation and research;
3. Closure - the moment of purchase; and
4. Postpurchase - ongoing exposure, where the customer builds expectations based on their
experiences. This contributes to the next decision journey.
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The online customer journey. Note the loyalty loop - that’s what you want! (Source: McKinsey, 2009)
Consumers are constantly faced with branded messaging and advertising, both online and off.
When they decide to buy something, these accumulated impressions can steer them towards a
specific brand. Paid media can be incredibly effective in building up the brand awareness that can
make this happen.
The consumer is likely to explore and revisit their options each time they make a new decision to
purchase, actively adding new choices throughout the journey. The final decision can be made as
late as the actual moment of purchase, by adding the desired product to an ecommerce cart and
checking out.
Even after purchase, consumers continue to research and explore options, giving brands another
chance to offer customers value by supporting customer relationships or interrupting a customer
journey with a competing product.
Why is online advertising so important in the online customer journey?
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Purchase funnel
A useful way of looking at the customer journey is through the purchase funnel, which describes
how your customer moves from first contact with your brand through to purchase. This is useful to
track because you can see exactly where customers drop out of the funnel (where you lose them),
which gives you an idea of how you need to optimise your owned and paid properties to keep them
in the funnel until they convert.
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The modern purchase funnel (Source: Mobile Mob, n.d.)
Note that it’s called a funnel because it gets narrower as you move through the stages. This is
because, as each stage progresses, more and more customers drop out.
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Conversion funnel with best performing networks for each stage (Source: Cleary, n.d.)
Google’s Zero Moment of Truth
Traditionally, marketers referred to a process containing a stimulus, and two “moments of truth”.
The stimulus would be something that sparked a consumer’s interest in a product - for example, a
social media ad for sneakers. The first moment of truth would be when they saw the product on
the shelf - looking for the pair of shoes and finding them in a store. The second moment of truth
would be when they used the product after buying it - putting on the shoes.
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First and second moment of truth (Source: Think with Google, n.d.)
The internet has introduced a new moment. It is between the stimulus and the first moment of
truth. Customers can now go online and research the product or service, read reviews, and ask
questions on social media. Google has named this ZMOT - ‘zero moment of truth’ (Nelson, 2019).
This is the “active evaluation” stage referred to above.
Google’s ZMOT (Source: Think with Google, n.d.)
For example, Laura, a college student, sees a display ad for the new Google Chromebook. The ad is
the stimulus here because it arouses her interest in the possibility of a new notebook computer.
Laura decides to do some research. She looks at product reviews, forums, and social media. This is
the zero moment of truth. During this stage, Paid Search ads guide her to content about the
Chromebook so she can learn more about it.
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Eventually, Laura decides to buy the Chromebook she first saw an ad for. That’s the first moment
of truth. The second moment of truth occurs when Laura switches on the Chromebook and starts
using it.
Note that one person's second moment of truth can become another’s ZMOT - if someone has a
very good or very bad experience and posts a review online, or if they answer a query about their
experience, other people can see this review. These online impressions can shape a potential
customer’s perception of a brand, so making sure that your brand has a solid, positive presence on
social media can have a significant impact on your success.
Still not sure about the zero moment of truth? Our video will explain it to you. <iframe
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Zero Moment of Truth vs Micro Moments
Since the surge in mobile use, marketing has expanded even further than ZMOT to include Micro
Moments in the customer journey. According to Smart Insights (Llewellyn, 2020), “82% of
smartphone users use their phones to influence a purchase decision in a store”. As a result, Micro
Moments are intent-rich moments in the customer’s decision making along the purchase journey.
The 4 types of Micro Moments include:
1. I-want-to-know moments;
2. I-want-to-go moments;
3. I-want-to-do moments; and
4. I-want-to-buy moments.
This means that reaching the right person at the right time and with the right message (and, now,
in the right place) needs a concerted digital marketing effort.
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Touchpoints
We keep mentioning touchpoints and how the customer forms an impression of your brand based
on every single touchpoint they encounter. What does that mean, though - what is a touchpoint?
In short, it’s any point where a customer can encounter your brand - ranging from a direct
encounter, such as in-store service or a face-to-face conversation with a salesperson, to indirect
encounters such as hearing a radio ad, seeing a billboard on the way to work, or seeing a PPC ad
when doing an internet search.
Various consumer touchpoints (Source: Brandrick, 2021)
Together, the touchpoints make up the customer journey. Your b: rand needs to be communicated
consistently through these touchpoints.
This is really important when creating a paid media campaign. If your ad is exceptional and
encourages immediate clickthroughs, you’re still going to fail if your landing page is terrible. The
user’s experience (UX) on your site is a key factor in conversion. Poor navigation or sites that lack
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credibility or are difficult to use will lead to the user bouncing off the site as soon as they arrive on
the landing page. A wonderful, creative ad campaign will suffer, if it leads users to a disappointing
website that does little to facilitate conversions.
You also need to consider the circumstances and stage of the day in which the customer is likely to
encounter your brand. Is there a particular touchpoint where they are more likely to encounter the
brand that will leave a first or last impression? Which points will have more impact? Start thinking
about how these factors might influence your communication strategy.
Watch
our
video
on
how
to
map
the
customer
journey.
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From this point on, we’ll be focusing only on touchpoints related to paid media. Remember,
though, for really effective marketing, you need to be aware of the interplay between all
touchpoints - a multi/omnichannel marketing strategy is essential for the best results.
Check out our video for an example of a great multichannel strategy.
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Understanding which digital channels or touchpoints you can use at each stage of the customer
journey is important. Drag and drop to match the channels/touchpoints to their corresponding
stage of the customer journey.
Static items
Draggable items
Awareness and discovery
Social media, PR events, radio, display ads, search ads.
Consideration
Website, email, social media ads.
Purchase
Store, website, app, social media page, call centre.
Loyalty
Website, app, email, order fulfilment.
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SMART objectives
Now you know how to investigate the context in which you’re operating and how to consider the
entire customer journey. Put these together, and you should be able to decide what role you want
your ads to play. What part of the customer journey are they targeting? What do you want your
campaign to achieve?
Answering those questions will give you your objective - and it will also help you decide what
format your ad should be in.
Your objectives should always be SMART - specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and
time-bound. Flip over each card to learn more about what each component refers to.
●
Specific: Set objectives that are clear, detailed and unambiguous, so you know exactly what
you are aiming for. A goal like: “We want more brand awareness” is NOT specific, whereas
“Increase the level of brand awareness by 20%” is specific.
●
Measurable: You can objectively determine if the goal has been reached or not. For
example: “Increase brand awareness” is NOT measurable, but “increase the number of ad
impressions” is measurable.
●
Achievable: Objectives should be possible to achieve based on the resources, skills and
time available at the business.
●
Relevant: Objectives should be aligned with the wider business and marketing objectives.
●
Time bound: Objectives should always have a time limit or deadline so that you can see if
you are moving towards your objective efficiently.
Goals also need to be matched with relevant tactics, goals and metrics. For example:
Achieve 100 clickthroughs per day on all PPC ads for the duration of the 3-month campaign.
Here are some examples of possible SMART objectives for an online advertising campaign:
●
Branding: Reach 1 000 unique users by the end of the year via display ads.
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●
Driving traffic: 4 000 visitors should visit the new product landing page by the end of the
quarter.
●
Competition entries: 2 000 unique individuals should enter the competition by the end of the
current year.
●
Registrations: 1 000 unique individuals should complete the registration process within
November.
●
Sales: Reach 2 000 sales with a minimum value of R 3 000 000 within the end quarter.
Your objectives are critical to your success and inform the tactics, goals and metrics you choose for
your strategy. The more clearly defined your objectives are, the easier it is to create the rest of
your strategy and measure your success.
Check out our video on SMART objectives:
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src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/207595598"
width="640"
height="360"
frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>
You should now have a good idea of what SMART goals are. Drag the following examples of each
term to their corresponding category.
Not SMART Goal
SMART goal
Reduce the bounce rate on the home page.
4 000 clickthroughs on display ads by the end
of the year.
Improve brand awareness across all
channels.
Reach a conversion rate of 3% on search ads
by the end of the second quarter.
Goals, KPIs and targets
Once you know what you want to achieve via paid media, make sure you assign goals, KPIs, and
targets to help you measure whether you’re reaching your objective. We’ll be focusing only on
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various paid media formats. For each objective, choose the best tactic to help you achieve it. Then,
decide what each tactic/format needs to achieve.
Examples of goals and KPIs (Source: Red & Yellow Creative School of Business (Pty) Ltd, 2022).
Here, the conversions - also known as website goals - are what the user needs to do for your
objective to be successful. It’s the minimum user action necessary for success. Monitoring your
daily conversions will give you an indication early on of what changes you need to make to be
successful in your overall objective.
If, in our example, you are only receiving 20 website visitors per month, you know you have to
improve your ad, adjust your campaign, consider another tactic, or rethink whether your overall
objective is realistic.
Then you need to choose your metrics. Metrics are the indicators you track to determine if
you are achieving your goals and delivering on your objectives. A metric is any concrete number or
percentage that can be reliably measured and tracked.
Choose key metrics, based on the objective - that is, the most important metrics that will help you
determine whether your efforts are successful. These metrics can also be referred to as Key
Performance Indicators, or KPIs.
A few examples of metrics:
●
Number of sales;
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●
Average order value;
●
Cart abandonment rate;
●
Number of facebook likes;
●
Reach;
●
Number of impressions;
●
Number of new visitors;
●
Percentage of return visitors to a site;
●
Number of clicks through to site;
●
Number of app installs;
●
Number of newsletter sign ups; and
●
Number of shares of a specific post.
The infographic conveys the kind of tactics and metrics that you can use at each stage of the
funnel.
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The relationship betweenTypes of Media Channels, Purchase Funnel Phase and Metrics (Source: Smart
Insights, n.d.)
What’s the difference between reach and impressions? Impressions refers to the number of times
your ad is seen, while reach refers to the number of people who see your ads. Impressions can be
higher than reach because people can see the same ad multiple times across multiple online
channels.
Key performance indicators will change depending on your objectives. If you want to send more
traffic to your website via a PPC ad, your KPIs will be the number of clickthroughs on the ad and
number of visitors to the site. If your objective is to increase reach on Facebook, your KPI would
be Reach per post on Facebook.
Here’s our video explaining KPIs, targets, and tactics:
<iframe
src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/226288981"
width="640"
height="360"
frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Let’s finish off this section by doing an activity. Match (by dragging and dropping) each stage of the
marketing funnel with its corresponding metric.
Static item
Draggable item
1. Reach
Number of website visitors; inbound links.
2. Act
Time on site; leads; shares, likes.
3. Convert
Orders, Revenue.
4. Engage
Number of repeat purchases; referrals.
Defining your target audience
You need to be able to differentiate between your target market - the people who can, and would
want to buy your product - and your target audience, which is the subset of the target market to
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whom your specific ads are aimed. You have to know who your customers are if you are to market
to them successfully!
Target market, segment, and target audience
The defining characteristics that make up your target market should include demographic and
psychographic factors.
Demographic factors include, among others:
●
Age
●
Gender
●
Location
●
Income bracket
●
Education level
●
Which device(s) the audience uses to access the internet
Demographics are factual, inarguable factors.
Psychographics are the feelings and wants of your market. These include:
●
Wants and needs, both in general and from the brand
●
Values
●
Beliefs
●
Attitudes
●
Aspirations
●
Interests
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For example, someone might be unable to pass up a bargain while wanting to provide quality for
their family and protect the environment. Psychographics are harder to determine as they involve
more in-depth research into your customers and their personal preferences.
You’ll also want to consider digital habits, which include questions like:
●
What device does your target market use to connect to the internet?
●
How often do they do so, and for how long?
●
Why do they go online?
●
What are their preferred websites and social media sites?
Once you have defined your target market, you can refine your market into smaller and more
specific segments. These are specific groups of your target market that share common factors and
slightly (or very) different needs from other segments. The more you have refined your market the
better you can target content and marketing messages to them. You can segment your market in
various ways. Click on each block to learn more about each segmentation grouping.
●
Demographics: Demographics include characteristics such as age, gender, and location.
Gender is a popular choice, and many retailers target men and women differently for
similar products.
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On the Superbalist website, the same watch brand is positioned differently for male and female customers
(Superbalist, n.d.)
●
Purchasing power: Dividing customers by how much they are willing, or have available, to
spend. Travel packages are a good example - luxury travel vs. budget travel.
●
Customer objective: Addressing customers according to what they want from your
product. Buying a luxury item for themselves, as a gift, or for their partner are all different
objectives and can be targeted in different ways.
●
Product or service: Addressing customers of products differently. For example, Ford will
target customers of its family cars, ST sports range, and utility vehicles differently.
●
Customer Lifetime Value: Communicating with loyalty customers more often and
preferentially than sporadic customers.
Your target audience is the specific part of your target market or segment towards whom your
campaign will direct its message. You can have a variety of campaigns addressing different
audiences from different segments of your target market, and each campaign will have its own
target audience.
Target market, segment, and target audience relationship (Source: Red & Yellow Creative School of
Business (Pty) Ltd, 2022).
A little later in the course, we’ll look at how you can use digital tools to target your ads to exactly
the right people.
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Optimising
Build in continual optimisation right from the beginning of your campaign. Probably the biggest benefit
of online marketing is the ability to track and measure campaigns along the way, allowing marketers to
tweak these campaigns and improve performance during the campaign itself. Marketers can refine
their tactics and offerings and learn from their efforts very soon after implementing them.
For example, Facebook offers a type of testing called A/B testing in which marketers are able to test
messages, tone of voice, landing pages and assets against each other to see what resonates best with
their desired audience. We will take a deeper look at A/B testing later in the course.
The key to building successful brands lies in the user experience and journey. Be sure to assign budget
to analysing data and optimising the conversion paths during the campaign. The better the user
experience, the more likely a consumer is to convert.
Campaigns should be designed to be agile so that any developments or knowledge gained through
tracking and reviewing performance can be fed back and implemented into the strategy going forward.
Don’t forget your KPIs! Remember, you are tracking KPIs to determine if you are on course to meet
your objectives. Ultimately, the best strategies are iterative. You need to consistently review your
performance on your identified KPIs and metrics and make the necessary changes to stay on track to
achieve your objectives.
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Iterative campaign process (Source: Red & Yellow Creative School of Business (Pty) Ltd, 2022).
Watch our video on the importance of having a marketing strategy. <iframe
src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/221732870?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0"
height="360"
frameborder="0"
webkitallowfullscreen
allowfullscreen></iframe>
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width="640"
mozallowfullscreen
Delivery formats
We’ve been talking about choosing the right tactic - the right paid media format - to reach your
audience. Let’s take a quick look at your options and then, in later modules, we’ll look at how to
implement each tactic. The major choices for paid media are:
●
Paid search;
●
Programmatic display (in all its formats);
●
Paid Social; and
●
Video.
Let’s explore these!
Paid Search
When you enter a search query into Google (or any other search engine), you get two kinds of
results: organic and paid.
1. Organic: The results that have worked their way up the rankings because their content is
relevant to users and provides a great user experience
2. Paid: The results from brands that pay to place ads at the top of the search engine results
page (SERP)
See the image below for examples of each:
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Red indicates paid results, while blue indicates organic results (Google, n.d.)
How does it work
All search engines function similarly. The algorithms they use to choose which results to serve to
the user and the backend systems are geared toward two points:
1. Understanding the user’s intent when they type in a search query; and
2. Showing the user the most relevant results as quickly as possible.
If you want your paid ad to show on a SERP, it needs to be relevant to the user’s intent when they
type their query. Why is this important? Two reasons:
1. It’s good for the search engine because if the users find what they want, they’ll keep using
the platform; and
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2. It’s good for the advertiser because their ads are shown to users who have intent that
relates to their ad or product.
The two most important elements in search advertising are intent and relevance.
1. Intent: What does the user want? What are they looking for? What do they plan to do?
2. Relevance: Will your product give the user what they want?
Creating a search ad involves:
●
conducting keyword research;
●
creating ad copy;
●
setting up campaigns;
●
implementing location settings;
●
Targeting; and
●
optimising the campaign.
As long as you keep relevance and intent in mind while you follow this process, you’re setting
yourself up for success.
Best uses
When is the best time to use search ads? Search is useful in every stage of the customer journey. It
keeps you relevant and visible - since customers use search engines at every stage of the customer
journey, search ads will have an effect all the way through.
Paid search is useful for awareness early in the customer journey because it can alert customers to
your products when they might not have realised you existed before. Research from Google
indicates that 53% of South Africans turn to Google Search to find new products (Brandeberry,
2022).
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Paid search is great for driving traffic and gives you results faster than simple SEO. They can also
help you generate qualified leads because you can target the kind of people you know will be
interested in your products.
Local search is increasingly important as more people use mobile devices to search for nearby
stores. PPC can direct these motivated, intent-driven users to your location.
Programmatic Display
“Display” covers pretty much every other ad format you’ll encounter online. Below we outline
which ad formats are available - click on the blocks to learn more.
●
Banner ads: Banner ads are placed along the top or sides of web pages. These can include
rich media, videos, ads that expand when you scroll over them, interstitials (full-screen ads
that pop up between clicking from one page to the next), overlays (a transparent pop up
that needs to be closed), and so on.
●
Videos: Including Instream videos (those videos that play before or during videos you want
to watch online)
●
Native ads: Which are ads designed to blend in with their surroundings so that they are
less disruptive to the user
●
Social media ads: A form of display ad on social media platforms. We won’t go into a large
amount of detail on those in this course
Display advertising involves text, audio, and graphics (and by graphics we mean pictures, logos,
videos, animations, and everything else visual).
Programmatic display refers to the way these display ads are bought.
How does it work
Programmatic advertising is the automated ad-buying process of securing ad space based on
targeting criteria that the buyer identifies. It’s all about making the computer do the hard work,
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which makes for better audience targeting as well as faster and more efficient delivery of real-time
messages.
You can buy display banners on an impression basis through an auction that occurs in real time
(this is called RTB - real-time bidding). This way of buying is facilitated by an ad exchange or
supply-side platform that connects publishers to advertisers.
Confused by these terms? Don’t worry. We’ll explain them all in more detail later in the
course.
Best uses
Programmatic used to be utilised mostly for retargeting - right at the end of the purchase funnel.
Now, though, you can use programmatic targeting to reach your customers everywhere, from
awareness to conversion and loyalty programmes, across a number of channels, from websites to
social media to mobile apps.
You can use display to:
●
Bring prospecting new users to your website;
●
Bring back people that haven’t yet converted;
●
Upsell to current customers; and
●
Inform and remind customers about a product.
Paid Social
While Paid Social media forms part of programmatic display, it deserves to be highlighted as a key
delivery format for paid media.
In January 2022, there were a reported 3.69 billion users across all Social Media platforms, making
this one of the most effective platforms for creating brand awareness and generating leads and
sales for your business, while reaching the masses (Barnhart, 2022)..
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With the influence that social media marketing plays in the consumer journey, all marketers should
consider it an integral part of their overall digital marketing strategy.
Video
Video ads are an effective way to drive reach and consideration by connecting with users in an
easy-to-digest format. There are a variety of platforms that serve video ads, the most popular of
which is YouTube. Videos can also show on Connected TV, website placements and native ads.
Longer videos of 20 seconds or more are generally used to drive awareness, while consideration
and action can be driven by shorter, more impactful videos.
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Tracking
One of the biggest benefits of digital paid media is its trackability. Why? If we track how our digital
activities are performing - everything from our website and our ads to our content and social
media activities - then we can find out what’s not performing as well as it could be, optimise those
activities, and increase our ROI.
The most important component in tracking a digital paid campaign is the tracking tag - a little
snippet of code that is added to a website to collect information and send it on to third parties.
Each platform that you use while creating your campaign will have its own code that you’ll need to
add to your website. Platforms include:
●
Google Analytics;
●
Google Ads;
●
The Google Marketing Platform;
●
Facebook / Instagram;
●
Twitter; and
●
And more!
If you add too many tags to the source code, your page will load more slowly, which will negatively
impact your SEO (your ranking on search-engine results pages). To avoid this, you can add the tags
within a container tag.
What is a container tag? What it sounds like - it’s a single code snippet that acts as a
container. All the tracking tags you want to use are included in this container.
Google’s Tag Manager makes this simple. All the tracking codes you want to include can be
placed in the Google Tag Manager (GTM) - off your site - and will be fired from one container tag
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on the site when relevant actions take place. You add just one code snippet on all pages of your
website, and then GTM manages all other tags centrally.
What are tracking tags for?
Now we know that tracking tags are snippets of code that go on your website and are fired when a
specific action or set of actions happens on the site. But what do we use them for?
They’re called tracking tags for a reason - they help us track what’s happening on our website.
With these tags, we can track the metrics that are most important to our campaigns - the KPIs that
we discussed earlier. Among other things, we can track:
●
engagement (time spent on site, actions taken while on site, number of pages visited,
bounce rate, etc.);
●
submissions (tracks form submissions);
●
downloads;
●
clicks;
●
purchases (tracks the number of sales and revenue on product purchases); and
●
number of visitors (how many people arrive on your site)
All of these are useful for measuring how well your ads are performing - or rather, how well people
perform on your site once they arrive via an ad.
Tracking tags also enable remarketing. When someone visits your website, you can add them to a
remarketing audience - and you can create different audiences for different pages on your
website. This means that if someone looks at the women’s boots on your website, you can add
them to a “women’s boots” remarketing audience so that later on, they will receive highly targeted
ads about the women’s boots on your website.
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The Google Marketing Platform
The Google Marketing Platform (GMP) is the platform on which Google unites all of its disparate
products, bringing together Display and Video 360, Campaign Manager 360 and the Google
Analytics 360 suite. It’s a stack solution for unified advertising and analytics, bringing together:
●
Search Ads 360
●
Display and Video 360
●
Campaign manager 360
●
Google Analytics 360 / GA4
●
Data Studio
●
Optimise 360
●
Surveys 360
●
Tag Manager 360
What does this mean? In short, you can plan, buy, measure, and optimise your paid media all in one
place instead of needing to jump between tools.
We’re only going to look at search ads, display ads, and Google Analytics in this course, but you
need to know that the GMP has more products available than that.
Why do we care about the GMP?
Google’s native integration of these various products simplifies workflows, promotes
collaboration within and between marketing teams, and makes it easy to share insights. Overall,
it’s an easier way to get a single view of a brand’s activities and audience behaviour. It’s all about
cross-product integration with an aim to boost ROI. Ultimately, it results in informed decisions
regarding media investments, which means that we can make better, more relevant, and more
effective marketing campaigns for less money.
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Conclusion
This module introduced you to the world of digital paid media. First, we explained where digital
paid media fits in the overall marketing mix and looked at why it’s important.
Then we looked at planning a media strategy and all the elements you need to consider when
setting up a campaign. Remember, everything - your choice of ad type, your copy, your images
(where relevant), your targeting, and even your bid strategy will be determined by which phase of
the customer journey you’re targeting.
Next, we looked at the ad delivery formats you have available. We’ll be delving into these in far
more detail in coming weeks, so stay tuned!
Finally, we introduced you to tracking and its importance in the digital paid media cycle as well as
the Google Marketing Platform and what makes it so useful.
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List of references
Barnhart, B. (2022). 41 of the most important social media marketing statistics for 2022. Sprout Social.
[website] Available at: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics/.
Brandeberry, C. (2022). Shopping trends and behaviours for marketers. Think with Google Available
[website] at:
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-ssa/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/shopping-tren
ds-and-behaviours/ [Accessed 8 Sep. 2022].
‌BrightEdge. (n.d.). SEO and PPC Work Together For Search Marketing. BrightEdge [website] Available
at: https://www.brightedge.com/glossary/how-organic-seo-and-ppc-impact-each-other [Accessed
8 Sep. 2022].
Llewellyn, G. (2015). How Google can help you win the moment. [online] Smart Insights. Available
at:
https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-platforms/google-marketing/google-micro-mo
ments/ [Accessed 8 Sep. 2022].
‌Nelson, G. (2019). Zero Moment of Truth: What is it, and is it still relevant? [website] Available at:
https://www.lambagency.com.au/blog/managing-digital/zero-moment-of-truth.
‌Think with Google. (n.d.). Shopping trends and behaviours for marketers. Think with Google [website]
Available at:
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-ssa/consumer-insights/consumer-trends/shopping-tren
ds-and-behaviours/ [Accessed 8 Sep. 2022].
Image credits
Brandrick, C. (2021). ‘Customer journey mapping: Making sales buyer-centric’ | SEC. [image] Sales
Enablement Collective. Available at:
https://www.salesenablementcollective.com/customer-journey-mapping-making-sales-buyer-cen
tric/.
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‌Business2community.com. (2022). [image] Available at:
http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Trifecta.png [Accessed 8
Sep. 2022].
McKinsey (2009). ‘The Consumer Decision Journey’. [image] McKinsey & Company. Available at:
https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-consumer-d
ecision-journey.
Mobile Mob. (n.d.). ‘Steve Jobs on Marketing: Strategy Lessons from Apple’s Marketing Genius’.
[online] Available at:
https://mobilemob.com.au/blogs/news/steve-jobs-on-marketing-strategy-lessons-from-apples-m
arketing-genius [Accessed 8 Sep. 2022].
‌
‌Pattytalksdigitalcomms.blogspot.co.za. (n.d.). ‘Patty Talks Digital Comms!’ [image] Available at:
http://pattytalksdigitalcomms.blogspot.co.za/2011_04_01_archive.html [Accessed 8 Sep. 2022].
Smart Insights. (n.d.). ‘Convert.’ [image] Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/convert/.
‌Superbalist. (2014). ‘Online Shopping | Buy Shoes, Accessories & Fashion Online’ | Superbalist.
[image] Available at: https://superbalist.com/.
‌Textbroker.com. (n.d.). ‘Paid, Earned, Owned Media - simply explained’ | Textbroker Glossary.
[image] Available at: https://www.textbroker.com/paid-earned-and-owned-media.
‌Think with Google. (n.d.). ‘Zero moment of truth (ZMOT) decision-making moment’. [image]
Available at:
https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/micro-moments/zero-moment-truth/.‌
‌
‌
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