If you are just getting to start optimizing or maximizing your business online, the phrase ‘Paid Advertising’ is one digital marketing terminology that you will often hear marketers throw around.

It is one marketing concept that any online business owner or marketer need to really understand.

Paid advertising is one of the components of digital marketing you can’t afford to ignore because it’s one marketing strategy digital marketers use to turn profits and build viable business or brand online.

When it comes to finding your customers online there are two major ways you can do that, organic reach or paid reach.

Maybe in another post we will discuss more about organic reach, but in this post, we are going to look at the paid reach aspecst, paid advertising, what is all about and the various methods it can be implemented.

What is paid advertising?

Paid Advertising, always abbreviated as paid ads, is different from what you already know about social media marketing, search engine marketing or any other components of digital marketing.

Paid advertising is marketing concept that involve using your financial resources to find customer/client or prospective customer/client on other peoples platform.

Here is how it works, let say a platform online has a lot of traffic (lots people visiting a platform) and let say you as a business or brand you figured out that some of your ideal customer hang out on that platform, in this scenario what you need to reach your ideal customers or client that hang out on that platform is to pay the platform owners to allow you access their data, tools and resources for use in sourcing your ideal customers or client on their platform.

This is basically how paid advertising works.

Simply put its all about paying to reach your ideal customers on other peoples platform.

This marketing concept has proven to be viable for online business owners and entrepreneurs, simply because it allows you to reach wide range of people who are likely to going to be interested in what you offer.

With that basic idea of what paid advertising is all about let’s quickly look at the methods of implicating paid advertising on different online marketing channels.

Paid Ads on Search Engine

Talking about Search Engine, our focus here is going to be on Google, as you may already know Google control over 80% of the search engine space.

Moreover, when it comes to paid advertising on search engine it’s almost the same implication in every search engine.

In the case of Google, Google uses its AdWords tools to sell paid ads to marketers on their platforms.

Google AdWords allows marketers to use their marketing budget to reach potential customers on google various online platforms including search engine.

Paid advertising on search engine like google entails that you pay to display your products or offer at the top and strategic position on google search results page.

Look at the above screenshot you might have seen a result page with ads like the one on this screenshot, that is an example of paid advertising on search engine like Google.

Video advertising (YouTube)

How often do you see advertising videos before, within or after watching a video on YouTube?

I Guess more often.

That is another example of paid advertising, but this one, on video streaming channel.

Whenever you are interrupted by ads while watching a video on any platform, that ads is shown to you as a result of paid advertising.

There are other video streaming platforms online, in whatever case it maybe, paid advertising on a video streaming platforms entails you paid the video platform to allow you use their data, tools and resources to find your ideal customers that comes to the platform to watch videos from their favorite channels

YouTube paid advertising is also implemented using Google AdWords tools.

Display advertising

You probably have seen banners, images or words fixed or poping out, most times with a caption ads, as you surf around your favourite website or blog, that is how display ads works.

There are different approach that different kind of platforms use to implementing display ads on their platforms, it includes manual placement or using a software or plug-in to automatically display them.

How this can happens is that, you may observe that a particular platform attract a lot of audience and after a brief research you discovered that your ideal custoners also hang out on that platform, to implement display ads on your business you can reach out to the platform and negotiate arrangement to display a banner of your business at strategic position on the platform.

This is basically how display ads works, which is a method of implementing paid advertising.

Google AdWords can also be used to execute display ads.

Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram)

Paid Advertising can also be implemented through social media channels.

Social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, have tools in their platforms that allows users to pay to find customers on their platforms.

This is actually how most of the social media platforms out there make their money, first, they building a community and collect data, then they charge individual or business (Paid Advertising) to reach more people using the data they have collected.

This is one of the reasons when you post on these social media platforms your organic reach (reaching people without paying for reach) are limited.

The strategy for them their is that you pay, that is you used their paid advertising features to reach more of your audience or ideal customers.

That is paid ads on social media.

Sponsored Content

Sponsored Content works a bit different from other kinds of paid advertising.

Sponsored Content is all about paying to be featured on a platform that has large audience either through video, Image or articles.

It’s also paid advertising, even though in most case the payment process might happen offline, the implementation still occurs online.

Here is how sponsored content works, let say I’m selling a brand of soap for specific gender, to do pay advertising in the form of a sponsored post, I will have to go online and find channels or platforms that have an audience that matches some vital data in the customer avatar of the products I’m selling and then i will go ahead an negotiate with the platform to allow me have my brand feature in their platform.

Once I’m given permission, it’s left for me figure out the best content style and format that can help me achieve my marketing goal, I can decide to write a review or testimonials of my products, or create a video guide, the content can be in any format.

Native Ads

Native Ads can be tricky in terms of how they are implemented, these are those advertisements that are paid for but are not obviously promoted, native ads are always streamlined with the original channel, platform or content.

They are common in sports, movie and shows.

Have you seen this video of Messi flipping a Pepsi bottles?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDGc9jyX3ls

Ok lets be frank here, there are other bottles Messi could played with, why chose Pepsi?

Actually, he is a brand ambassador for Pepsi, but that is one of the ways Native Ads works, Pepsi is paying for him to play with their brand, but not actually telling everyone to go buy Pepsi, although he can do that in another form of promotion for Pepsi, but in this video, he is not telling anyone to buy Pepsi neither is he telling anyone the benefits Pepsi have, in a nutshell he is not doing direct selling for Pepsi.

But by just playing with the Pepsi bottle, associating himself to the Pepsi brand, his influence (fan base) will definitely have positive impact on the Pepsi brand.

When you see brands name on sport jersey or brand sponsoring a program that is a topical paid advertising through native ads.

Affiliate

Paid advertising through affiliate marketing is simple, it’s either the business or an individual proposed a deal, but this day’s businesses are the once that usually does the proposal.

Affiliate is about referring customers to a business and getting paid for the act of referring, the commission that business pays to referrals, is what makes it a paid advertising.

Final words 

If you are business owner or a marketer or you are considering taking your business online, paid advertising is one marketing concept that you can’t afford to ignore.

Like i mentioned earlier, the two major ways to reach your ideal customers in the online world is through organic reach and paid reach.

The challenge with organic reach is that every platform out there that allows you to publish content and reach people for free are limiting there reach, because they want you to use their paid advertising features to reach more of your ideal customer.

This is understandable because they are all in business to make money.

To reach more people online with your products and services, paid advertising is the most viable option.

Most people ignore paid advertising because it requires initial investment to get started on it, but that also leads to losing market share and leaving money on the table.

The mindset to hold when implementing paid advertising on your business is to see every dim spent in paid advertising as an investment in the growth of your business, when paid advertising is implemented rightly in any business model the ROI (return of investment) is always worth it.

I hope you now have an idea of what paid advertising is all about and how possibl you can implement it in your business.

Let me know what you think on the comments section.

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Emmanuel Onyewuchi

Emmanuel Onyewuchi aka Digitalchuksemma is an Ex Computer Engr/Instructor turned Digital Mentor, a minimalist, Wished to be a father to 3 Kids from a loving wife. He founded the Digital Optimizers Hub in 2021 to fix the problem of an outdated educational system and lack of ICT and digital adaptability by young Africans. He has thought hundreds and Thousands of students ICT and digital skills in the classroom and online. Currently, he is the CEO and Lead Trainer at Learnvale,com, the new school online for the next breed of digital optimizers and is on the mission to help 100,000 people optimize digital tools and resources to build a thriving business that enables a freedom lifestyle.

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5 Genuine Practical Ways To Start Making Money Online - Digitaltopnotch.com · 15/06/2020 at 6:31 pm

[…] It’s by simply bringing billions of people to the Facebook Platform and then giving businesses tools and resources to reach the set of people they have brought together on facebook through what is known as paid advertising. […]

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