Executing an effective paid ad strategy can be a lot for marketers. You have to worry about Facebook ads and display ads, constantly monitoring their engagement and conversions to ensure that you're getting the ROI you need.
It's more than just launching an ad campaign featuring a piece of content on an Instagram story and hoping it performs well. You need to focus on having the proper media mix in place to ensure that your content promotion efforts reach your target audience who are browsing those specific media channels.
In this post, I'll outline my strategy and share a few essential resources about paid media, creative, and best practices.
The fluctuating CPM
The greatest thing to happen for your paid media campaign is that ad CPMs have dropped and it's important to take advantage of non-competitive times to launch new media ads. CPMs rise when there’s a lot of competition targeting the same visitor.
Take election season for example. For most brands, I saw a 30-40% drop in mid-November after the election concluded compared to October. That's because there were fewer people running ads than in the lead-up to the election. This can result in a lower CPC, higher CTR, and even higher rankings if on a search engine results page (SERP) if you're running Google ads.
Currently, it's similarly a quiet time with not a ton of major competition, so you should hit the gas pedal. Because of that, I figured it would be great to share some resources to help guide your media plans and pay-per-click ad strategy.
My paid media strategy
My paid media strategy is always evolving. Yours should too. Right now, we're starting to get crafty with how we think about paid media. It's not always about the purchase.
Instead, we're heavily focused on building audiences so we can continue to remarket to them in later social media advertising campaigns. There are a lot of ways to successfully capture these visitors on your owned media accounts to begin laying the foundation for future successful keyword-based and hyper-targeted remarketing campaigns.
That might mean building quizzes with Octane AI to collect emails, using SMS links (like this one) where it puts people into a flow and you have them later, or it might just even mean getting people to more educational landing pages (like this one) to retarget them later with an offer.
Essential paid ad resources
I also wanted to share this deck (click here to view) that came from QuickFrame, one of the vendors I work with often for performance video.
This 3-page update (click here to view) from Ampush Media is also great. They are the OG's of FB advertising (Uber, Dollar Shave Club, etc.)
Finally, this email (click here to read) from my friend Garrison at Facebook is incredible, as well as his full blog post explaining the technical side of performance marketing on the platform.
Launching your campaigns
I hope that these resources and my strategy will give you a jumping-off point to begin with your paid ad campaigns. With the proper PPC advertising media campaigns in your marketing strategy, you can begin to scale your business efficiently and effectively.