In the dynamic world of marketing, understanding the distinctions between paid, earned, and owned media is essential. In this blog, we will unravel the power of paid , exploring its unique advantages and strategies for maximising marketing success. Our latest blog in our three part series, we explore paid media.
What is Paid Media
Any media type that is explicitly paid for can be defined as paid media – this often involves working directly with third parties to publish ads or content to targeted audiences either through a self-serve model or through an intermediary or agency.
This can include display ads, search engine ads, paid social media posts, as well as ads across TV, radio or print.
How It Affects Strategy
Paid media can significantly amplify your message – or deliver fast reach/results. Highly dynamic and changeable as you have high control over the message and allocations of mediums / placements – can be highly targeted as high inventory and choice of placement.
In addition to amplifying existing campaigns, the highly targeted nature of paid media, alongside its faster deployment capability make it a highly effective choice for running tests. With the ability to schedule and control the delivery of messaging, changes can quickly be made to react to a crisis situation, respond to a trend in the market or run a specific promotion.
It’s important to consider paid media outside of the limited scope of pay-per-click digital marketing. More recent developments in the role of influencer marketing have made it possible and more accessible to blur the lines of paid and earned media, giving you access to different audiences whilst leveraging the increased trust and relationship building opportunities that come with delivering your message through an influencer.
How To Influence
Paid media, although powerful, does represent a significant investment for any brand or business. Making sure your paid strategy is highly measurable, testable and accountable is crucial in influencing which of the many paid channels to focus budget on and how to allocate budget in your marketing mix.
How to Measure Paid Media
Many paid digital advertising platforms provide in-built measurement as part of their platform. Large advertising platforms such as Google and Facebook provide industry standard metrics such as impressions, engagement and click-through-rate (CTR) as well as the ability to track and measure subsequent events or conversions which are valuable to your brand such as sales. Offline media such as out-of-home advertising, print or television can be harder to measure, however maintaining an overall view on metrics such as footfall or brand recall allow brands to measure the longer term impacts of non-digital media.
Discover more about the different media types in our previous blogs. what is owned Media and what is earned Media.
