Overreliance On Paid Media Is Risky

Paid media is a great marketing channel for quickly sending a message to a target audience. At the core of this channel, advertisers are paying for the distribution.

The ability to reach a wider audience is critical for growing brands as they strive to bring in new customers month-over-month. The big catch is: relying only on paid media to acquire new customers can get expensive. So much so that an overreliance on paid media might put a marketing team in a position where they’re actually losing money on their marketing efforts.

This is coming from someone who runs campaigns for a living.

As I continue to analyze data across marketing channels and attribution sources in my own client work, it’s becoming more clear to me that prospects conduct thorough research before making a purchase, and often require multiple touch points with a brand before converting.

If a brand were to rely solely on paid media for customer acquisition, that means that brand would have to pay for every touch point that a prospect requires. Studies from companies like HockeyStack estimate that this can be as many as 75 touch points.

Let’s explore a quick example where a marketing team is using only paid media for their content distribution. At an average CPC of $5, that would mean it would cost $375 to generate a sufficient volume of interactions for a prospect to become a lead. This doesn’t account for all of the audience members who won’t become leads, and all of the leads who won’t become customers. This approach can get expensive quickly.

While most brands have at least one other source of content distribution (their website), I’ve still seen this dynamic play out in other capacities.

Most commonly, when brands run ads trying to get a cold audience to convert without any other supporting marketing efforts. This can be a fairly common approach in the DTC world, and a slippery slope in the high ticket B2C or B2B spaces.

As a result, there have been a few instances where I’ve recommended pausing campaigns to clients while we focus on building a stronger content foundation. My analysis of their own customer data revealed that our campaigns weren’t set up for success because we were expecting too much from customers based on only one ad interaction.

When looking deeper at attribution data, I found that many customers were actually engaging with the brand more than once before becoming a converting lead.

This meant that without some sort of organic social presence, blog section on the website, or email nurture campaigns, these clients would most likely continue to have a difficult time driving efficient performance from paid media.

Based on my analysis and experience here, it can be helpful to build a solid marketing foundation with a clear and concise website coupled with some organic social content before investing anything into paid media.

Otherwise, I’ve seen teams make countless optimizations to their campaigns because their focus was on the wrong issue. This resulted in lost marketing dollars, as well as lost opportunities to build long-term growth programs.

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn.

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