Paid Media Foundations For Growing Businesses

When I started my career in paid media, most of the clients I got the opportunity to work with already had established businesses.

In most cases, this meant that they had already figured out at least one marketing strategy that worked, and we’re simply looking to get more out of their ad campaigns. While I always enjoyed these projects, and learned a ton, I never got the opportunity to help a client build a paid media program from (close to) the ground up.

Over the past year I’ve been working with clients who had been running a bit of paid media, but had either:

• Someone in-house managing campaigns who was stretching outside of their current role or

• An agency that was providing some basic paid media work, but the structure of that agency didn’t suit what the business needed at that time

As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to help these businesses set the foundation for their paid media programs. Below I’ll share my own experience and perspective on what skill sets and resources growing businesses need to find success in paid media.

Identifying The Required Skill Sets Before Spending A Single Dollar

When speaking with potential clients, or reviewing listings for freelancer/agency support, a common sentiment that I see is businesses are looking for someone to come in and “just run ads.”

I’ll hear things like: “My current Facebook guy isn’t doing a good job, I need these ads to be making me money.”

A common misunderstanding I find here is that the “current Facebook guy” might be doing fine actually, it’s just that he’s only handling in-platform management. Based on my own experience and observations, the majority of paid media success happens outside of ad platforms.

To be more specific, when looking to launch paid media for the first time, or bring on a new partner, a business will need someone to provide the below skills in order to give any ad investment the best chance possible at success.

• Positioning and Messaging - Paid media doesn’t work unless advertisers understand how a product/service fits in a customer’s life, and how they communicate the value of this product/service.

• Offer Development - This is more relevant for businesses in the lead gen space. It can be difficult to try to sell something that costs thousands of dollars with one ad interaction. Therefore, it’s important to be able to break down the value of a company into multiple different (usually free) offers that can be tested to understand what brings prospects in the door.

• Creative Strategy - This is similar to messaging, but having the ability to develop different creative angles and testing frameworks is critical for just about every ad type other than paid search. Most ads are visual by nature, so it can be difficult to generate results without a solid creative plan in place.

• Landing Page Development - Many ads send users to a business’s website, so being able to design and develop landing pages is critical. Most ad campaigns can’t run without this component. Landing pages are a huge opportunity to communicate some of the nuances of an offer that can’t all be packed into one singular ad.

• Measurement Strategy & Implementation - Tracking paid media performance is more difficult than ever with the waning effectiveness of third party cookies. Planning and implementing a measurement strategy around what tools and methodology a business plans to use is necessary to understand if that company’s ad campaigns are working.

• Data Analysis & Reporting - Related to the point above, paid media is a data-heavy discipline. Even with the proper measurement system in place, setting up some reporting automation can save a marketing team hours every week that can then be redeployed to other types of high-value work.

I’ve seen that building a paid media program around team members that have these skills tends to set that program up with a better chance at success in the long run. Fortunately enough for newer businesses, you don’t need to hire multiple FTEs or an army of freelancers to accomplish this.

A Team of Full Time Employees Isn’t Necessary

I break this concept down more in this post, but automation and technology is giving paid media practitioners like myself more time back to invest in building out complementary skill sets such as those listed in the section above.

Hiring is tough on all sides right now; but businesses don’t need to struggle to find premium quality talent for expensive in-house roles, or spend weeks to months finding a handful of freelancers to just get a few campaigns up and running.

When working with my own clients, I’ve found that we can drive results and progress best as a team when the business has one or two marketers internally focusing on content and overarching marketing activity, with me taking on all of the paid media responsibilities outlined above (in addition to in-platform management).

This dynamic allows my clients and I to move quickly, and iterate faster than a larger team. Also, working with one party to handle multiple disciplines is often cheaper than multiple FTEs or even freelancers.

Wrapping Up

In order for a business to successfully run digital ad campaigns, they’ll need more than a few hundred dollars and a home page. The success of paid media is often determined by the work that takes place outside of the ad platforms, which involves a variety of different, but related, skill sets.

Fortunately, modern technology has enabled paid media service providers like myself to stretch into these other areas, and provide more value to a business.

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.