Want to launch a paid media advertising campaign for your brand or company, but don’t know where to start?
Here is a beginner’s guide to help you get started, with tips on everything from identifying your audience to choosing the advertising platform that works best for your needs.
5 Key Steps to Launching a Successful Paid Media Campaign:
- Identify Your Target Audience
There is a reason that every paid media campaign starts with identifying a target audience: your audience will inform nearly every decision that follows, including campaign platforms, landing pages, creative and more.
Questions to consider here include:
- Where is my target audience located geographically?
- What demographics (age, gender, income, etc.) best fit my target audience?
- Do they have any specific interests or other helpful identifying characteristics?
Once these questions are answered, it is also important to consider where your audience is in their buying journey. Are they top-of-funnel and unfamiliar with your brand? Or do they already have some familiarity and interest, but might need a reminder or additional information before making a decision?
- Set Campaign Goals & KPIs
Next, it is important to clearly identify the objective and goals for your campaign, including measurable key performance indicators (KPIs), to give you benchmarks for tracking performance once the campaign is live.
For example, campaigns focused on building awareness are often tracked by metrics such as reach and impressions, while campaigns focused on driving action may prioritize clicks, conversions, or other performance metrics.
Once the campaign is launched, measuring against these KPIs will allow you to make more informed decisions around optimizations to creative, targeting parameters and budget.
- Decide on a Campaign Timeline
Once your campaign goals and audience are established, it is time to prepare a timeline to run your ads. This is essential as a campaign that is too rushed will not have as much time to optimize within the platform and will lead to less successful results.
This also helps inform our next step, which is budget. While these two steps often go together in the decision-making process, it is important to consider timeline first to account for any potential changes in spend determined by seasonality and other factors surrounding campaign length.
- Determine Your Paid Media Budget
It is important to determine how much you have set aside to run your paid media campaign(s).
Once you have a total number set aside, you can then begin to move into the final step here which includes choosing the right platforms to run your campaign. Your budget will affect your ability to successfully reach your target audience and can vary depending on factors like the competitive nature of certain industries on particular platforms.
Luckily, in the next step as you decide on which platforms you would like to use, most offer tools to determine what budget will be needed to reach a particular audience size and results to help inform your decision.
- Choose Your Platform(s) & Creative
Finally, it is time to choose where you’d like to run your campaign and begin to put everything together.
Thinking about your spend and using tools within the platforms to look at where your budget might be most useful is one part of this, but also considering what ad format (search ads, video ads, single-image ads) the platforms offer is important to take into account as well.
Will your audience react better to a written ad on Google or Reddit as they seek information? Or will video on TikTok or Meta be a more captivating, visual format for your advertised offerings? Also thinking about age can make a difference in reaching your targeted demographic on the platforms they use more often.
Now you are ready to launch your next paid media campaign! Of course, this process takes ongoing optimizations, research and expertise across multiple platforms to perfect, however these steps will allow you to get started on thinking about your next campaign. And if you need any assistance along the way – the Belfort Group is here to help be your strategic partner!
