The Tools I Would Use To Start Building A Paid Media Program

The marketing world operates through an array of different types of technology.

Even the most basic marketing teams probably have a suite of tools larger than what they might realize at a glance. While shiny new tools are fun (for marketing nerds like myself), this post focuses on the basics.

I work with a handful of clients who have newer paid media programs, so I’ve been able to develop a good sense of what tools are a need to have, compared to a nice to have. I’ve also been able to test which tools can save teams time and money by allowing them to get scrappy with their limited resources.

Below I breakdown the tools that I use in my day-to-day work, which also happen to be the tools I would recommend a newer marketing program invest in before spending a dollar on ads.

I don’t have any sort of affiliation or partnership with any of these tools.

Creative/Design

When it comes to building out creative mockups, landing page wireframes, or even finished ads, I almost always turn to Canva.

Canva has an intuitive drag and drop interface which makes it easy to pick up in minutes, and it also has a suite of AI tools that allow you to easily leverage previous creative to fuel new variations.

Sure it might not have some of the more advanced features of an Adobe product, but at $199.00/year, the convenience, affordability, and functionality are hard to beat.

Landing Pages

I use a few different landing page tools across clients, but my favorite is  Unbounce.

Compared to some of the other tools, Unbounce has a ton of native integrations which make it easy to track and share lead data across ad platforms and CRMs. Also, similarly to Canva, it’s got an easy-to-use drag and drop interface that provides more flexibility than a lot of other more stringent landing page tools.

Lastly, Unbounce has built in A/B testing features that allow you to quickly scale and implement landing page tests, without some of the heavy lifting that might be required to do so in ad platforms themselves.

CRM

Although it’s not the cheapest option, my favorite CRM tool to use is HubSpot.

While the themes of this post center around resourcefulness and frugality, I’ve found that a CRM isn’t a place to skimp out on. HubSpot has a seemingly endless list of marketing and sales features that can scale with a company as it grows. There’s a reason that companies ranging from startups to large enterprises use HubSpot as their CRM.

You don’t need to pay for all of the features out of the gate, which makes the cost a bit more palatable. Additionally, if you have plans to scale a business over the next few years, you’ll most likely be accruing technical debt by implementing a CRM with fewer capabilities. At that point, the switching cost (both time and money) will be more than HubSpot’s original up front fees.

Automation

While this tool falls more into the “nice to have” category, Zapier has made my life significantly easier when working with some clients.

Zapier allows non-tech savvy marketers (like me) to easily connect any two platforms without needing to know how to code or operate an API. Not only can you establish connections between tools to share data, you can also automate different actions to help scale your marketing program without taking on additional time to support otherwise manual processes.

Wrapping Up

When starting a paid media program it can be tempting to dive right in with the fancy new tool you’ve seen promoted on LinkedIn, but those tools can often break the bank for a newer program.

There are a handful of easy-to-use, and affordable tools that just about any marketing team can invest in to effectively get their paid media program up and running.

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.