There is no shame in paying for online advertisements. You can invest a considerable amount of time and effort attempting to expand your business’s organic reach through strategic content marketing only to fall significantly short of your goals. Opt for paid ads and you will rest easy knowing your value proposition is positioned directly in front of the target audience in a truly artful and effective manner.
Online paid ads, also referred to as pay-per-click advertising or PPC for short, catalyze coveted traffic to your website, heightening brand awareness, boosting leads and moving prospects through the metaphorical sales pipeline for conversions into paying clients. Examples of paid ads include ads placed on social media platforms such as Facebook and those placed on search engines such as Google in the form of Google Ads.
The Many Benefits of Online Paid Advertising
Paid ads on the web are much more of a direct approach than content marketing featuring keywords, key phrases and localized information web sleuths are most likely to search for. Instead of waiting for online searchers to type specific words and phrases into Google and other search engines, those who use the paid ads approach present their company, product or service directly to the target audience.
Though paid ads require paying a fee for the placement of the ad on a social media platform or a search engine, it is almost always worth it. Keep in mind, around 300 million individuals use the web with regularity in the United States alone. The average individual spends about 24 hours on the web every single week. Making the prospect of reaching target buyers through the web even more appealing is the fact that two-thirds of those age 65 and older are using the web.
Plenty of businesses and other organizations shy away from paid ads as they are not free. However, the often-ignored truth is the fact that content marketing and other forms of comparably latent inbound marketing are expensive in the sense that they require a considerable investment of time and effort. If a business doesn’t have a meritorious content creation specialist in-house, the work will be outsourced at a cost.
So don’t let the fact that paid ads cost money sway you toward other inbound marketing strategies. Contrary to popular opinion, paid ads are surprisingly affordable. In fact, businesses are now advertising on Facebook and other social media platforms for as little as $5 per day. Give paid ads a try, test them out, pivot accordingly (or not at all) based on the results and you’ll eventually maximize the return on your investment.
Paid Ads are Targeted Ads
Take a moment to consider how many target customers would see a billboard, newspaper ad or blog post published on a company’s web-based blog. Though these inbound marketing efforts certainly might reach a considerable number of people, there is no guarantee they will reach the specific target audience the organization covers.
Paid ads are different from traditional outbound marketing and even the content marketing component of inbound marketing in that they proactively zero in on those who are most likely to need or desire the value proposition in question. These highly-specific and carefully targeted ads are presented directly before target customers. As an example, Facebook and other social media platforms go to great lengths to collect data about their users so businesses that pay for paid ads can present their online advertisements to directly target specific customers.
The platform’s users strictly see the ads that are relevant to them. This targeted approach ensures the maximum return on investment for every single penny spent on paid ads. The icing on the cake is the fact that the vast majority of social media platforms, search engines and other sites that provide paid advertising opportunities typically charge per click, meaning only the ads that are the most successful cost money to run.
Enhanced Marketing Control for Fast Results
Paid ads empower advertisers to closely monitor important metrics ranging from impressions to conversions, bounce rates, site traffic and more. Even the cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion of each ad is conveniently quantified for analysis. Seize the opportunity to learn from this information, strategically alter the ads based on this information, remove ads or update them and you’ll find it doesn’t take long to make the intended impact.
Paid ads work much faster than content marketing and other inbound marketing strategies as they present the merits of a value proposition directly in front of the target buyer without delay. The individuals who see paid ads are prepared to make a purchase as they are actively searching the web or other platforms for products, services and other value offerings. These are the most coveted customers as they are that much more inclined to swiftly move all the way through to the bottom of the sales funnel for rapid conversion.