Recently, our Paid Media experts have been hosting a whole lot of training sessions for our clients, helping them to understand the ins and outs of paid media and the benefits it can bring.
As an agency, we’ve been harnessing its power to effectively market and produce return for our clients for over five years. We’re so passionate about it that we want to share our expertise with you.
In this blog, you’ll find out what it takes to make a great cross-channel marketing campaign; or one that combines your organic and paid media efforts for maximum return. It’s time to make your brand omnipresent in your consumers’ minds. Let’s go!
What is a cross-channel approach?
Time and time again, brands have wondered which targeting option is best for achieving brand awareness – a cross-channel approach is the answer.
This approach allows your brand to be omnipresent and designed to connect the dots in your customers’ minds and remind them about your brand wherever they are – Twitter, your website or on their commute to work.
Why should you consider a cross-channel approach?
A cross-channel approach is a marketing solution that’s guaranteed to boost your brand awareness while nurturing your audience towards conversion.
Plus, it saves brands money as they can combine their organic and paid media campaigns to speed up the conversion process.
Why is a cross-channel approach so effective?
Bolstering organic media with paid activity allows brands to put budget behind their brand message and re-target those most interested in / engaged with their brand.
In fact, paid advertising alone can increase brand awareness by 80%. Using a combination of paid and organic activity will only increase this figure further. What’s unique about paid media is its flexibility, allowing brands to pull or increase budget while offering on-the-go optimisation capabilities.
What’s more, most people use six social media platforms, so targeting them on each of these platforms is key to increasing brand recall. Whether you’ve got the budget to target them on two platforms or ten, being present where your audience spends their time is key to building up a better awareness of your brand and your offerings.
How can you get started on paid media?
- Set SMART targets
Don’t begin your cross-channel campaign without outlining what you want to achieve. Getting SMART with your targets will ensure you’ve got something to refer back to throughout the campaign to keep you on track.
This is particularly important when you’re putting budget behind your campaigns, as you’ll want to be able to measure the results against your objectives and calculate your return on investment.
- Know your keywords
Paid media is driven by keywords, as it’s essentially a bidding process whereby the highest bidder for certain keywords gets their advert shown above their competition. However, if you’re clever with your choice of keywords, you can do this on the cheap.
There are some keyword tools that will help you plan out your ad campaigns. We suggest using Google Keyword Planner, Google Search Console and Google trends to begin with.
Another tip is to create long-tail keywords, i.e. those which are made up of multiple words to help reach your audience while beating the competition. For example, ‘unisex hand-printed dungaree company in Brighton’ is a longer tail keyword than just ‘dungarees’.
While fewer people search for the longer tail keywords, those who do are more likely to be looking for your product, making them more likely to make a purchase.
Meanwhile, highly competitive keywords like ‘dungarees’ will produce a variety of results that might not be what your audience is looking for. You’ll also be up against other brands bidding on that keyword, meaning you’ll need more budget to show up high in the search engine results pages.
- Start small
Test out Google Search and social media to begin with. Pick a platform you know your audience is active on based on their demographics and their user behaviours. Once you know how they interact with the platform, it’s time to make an ad.
The best part is that most platforms don’t have a minimum spend, so you can test out paid advertising, whatever your budget. Once you’ve launched your first paid media campaign, review it and analyse what worked well and what didn’t. From this, you can tweak your next campaign for better performance; this is called optimisation.
- Make your ads stand out
While strategy plays a key role when it comes to increasing your brand awareness, without kick-ass creative, you’ll fail to create campaigns that are seen by, or resonate with, your audience, which can result in disappointing conversion rates (which is not what we want!)
Here are some key design considerations when creating adverts:
- Which areas of your advert design will be seen?
- Is there an area that will be cut off by the platform?
- What design and dimension specifications do you need to adhere to?
- How can you make sure your logo is seen on each design?
- Are there any interactive elements that you could incorporate into your design to make your ads more native, i.e ads that play into the existing best practices on the platform?
- How do people interact with adverts on the platform? How can you increase the user experience of your ads and direct them to your conversion action?
- How can you use a combination of ad types to build up a narrative around your brand?
- Nail your tone of voice
Once you’ve got your ad in front of your audience and settled on a great design, it’s time to convince them to take the next step. The best way to do that is with clever copywriting.
Luckily for you, we recently launched our messaging framework for brands, guiding them on how to communicate effectively with their audience/s. By downloading your copy, you’ll get free insights from our Paid Media and Copywriting experts on how to engage your audience at each stage of the funnel and on different platforms.
Want to build your brand’s presence with a multi-award-winning team by your side? We’re an experienced team of experts specialising in advertising, creative and digital fields who love producing results for our clients. Get in touch to discuss how we can boost your brand awareness.
