Wanting to know how to build a paid media strategy usually means that you’re ready to present your brand to the world and start making money (or increase your sales). It could also mean that you may have been testing tactics on your own and you’re ready to partner with an agency that can either give you guidance or run your paid advertising for you.

Either way, this will help you figure out what paid media is, the basics for making a winning strategy, and what to look for in a media marketing agency that can help your campaigns succeed.

First Things First: What Is Paid Media?

Before we get into it, though, let’s start at the beginning: What is paid media? The easiest way to explain it is to break marketing content down into two categories:

• Owned: Also known as organic, or unpaid. One example of this is the Facebook post that you publish without putting any money behind it to boost engagement or site traffic. It’s also the blogs you publish to improve your site’s SEO
• Earned: Also known as paid media. This is the “Sponsored” ad you see in your Facebook or Instagram feed, the banner ad that pops up on your favorite news site, the billboard you about a car dealer in your town, or the unskippable ad that pops up when you’re watching a show on YouTube TV

In a nutshell, paid (earned) media is the advertising that you pay for, from paid social to TV to influencers and banner ads. So how do you create paid marketing strategies that use those tactics and win?

Go for the Goals

When you or your media marketing agency need to consider how to build a paid media strategy, first be honest about your goals. If you have a range of products, is there one that you specifically need to increase sales for? Another example would be a global luxury brand that needs to increase sales in a particular region.

Being clear-eyed about what paid marketing strategies need to achieve will help you identify the right:

• Audiences: Who to speak to, where to display your ads (physically or online), and geographic regions to target
• Tactics: For direct sales, you might want a carousel ad on social that drives directly to a product page, while experiential activations could help you generate brand awareness through PR buzz
• Creative Ideas: Pairing the goal you need to achieve with what you know about your audience can lead to unique insights that your internal team or external agency can turn into a striking ad campaign

Build to Your Budget

Something else that all successful paid marketing strategies do is set a clearly defined budget. Here are a few ways you or your agency partner can do that:

Budget by revenue

Setting a budget by allocating a specific segment of your total company income to paid media could be for you because it’s simple. You just take a percentage, then multiple by your projected annual revenue to see what your paid media budget will be for the year. This makes it easy for you to grow your budget at pace with your income as your business succeeds over time, but it depends on consistent revenue—or consistent growth. If the revenue dips or drops to far, it can automatically whittle away at your paid media budget until your spend is too small to be effective.

Budget by Acquisition Cost

How much are you willing to pay for a new lead or sale? That’s the philosophy behind budgeting for cost per acquisition. You (or your media marketing agency) can figure this out by:

• Determining how much money each new customer will bring over the course of their entire relationship with you (also called the customer lifetime value, or CLTV), whether that’s one purchase or an ongoing relationship with potential for many transactions.
• Identifying the minimum profit you need to make per new customer, accounting for the costs of acquiring them.
• Dividing that profit by the number that represents the customer’s lifetime value. The result is the maximum you can spend per new customer to achieve your company’s goals. It’s a great approach because it  prompts data-driven decision making, but accurately measuring some of the necessary quantities like CLTV can be a challenge, making this feel like one of the tougher paid marketing to get right.

Select—or Change—Your Channels

This should be one of the last steps to think about when considering how to build a paid media strategy. If you’re wondering why, it’s because prioritizing goals and budget first will help you select that channels while accounting for:

Where the audience is

When you first refine your targeting, defining personas helps you define more than demographics. It gives you an opportunity to understand your audience’s personal interests and content consumption habits, too. If they like sports, for instance, and make frequent visits to Barstool, that may be a good place to advertise. Then again, if you find that they spend more than 90 minutes each day watching video content online, chances are TikTok will make it into the mix.

Creative Needs

Another aspect of targeting is know the audience’s creative needs, and which platforms help you achieve the creative formats you need while reaching the desired audience. Need a video-heavy approach for education-oriented, 35-40 year old audience? YouTube would be a good bet. Does your audience consume lots of podcasts? Then maybe live reads on Spotify’s advertising network are for you.

Cost Threshold for Entry

Knowing your budget before selecting advertising channels will save you trouble here. With your budget info in hand, you want to look at what the minimum cost is to run your ads on a given platform. This will help you easily determine if you can afford a campaign for gamers that uses influencers on Twitch (potentially $10 USD per impression) or on Meta (where the right media marketing agency can help you keep cost per click under $1 USD).

Partner with an Agency That Does It All

Shaping the fleshed-out, detailed paid media strategy your company deserves can be challenging.

It can be easier if your business has a strong internal team with experts in paid search, paid social, programmatic/banner advertising, print ads, and more. If your department is lean, though, and you find it difficult to keep on top of the changing media landscape, you might wish you had some help.

That’s especially true if you’re at the “what is paid media?” stage of your advertising journey.

That’s why you should consider reaching out to Mascola Group. Yes, you could call us a media marketing agency. But we’re also more: a full-service marketing partner that exceeds goals by building client relationships that prioritize honest, accountability, transparency, and respect.

To learn more about how we can help you develop successful paid marketing strategies for your needs, contact us today.