Paid Media Advertisements
As we enter a new decade, it’s time to reflect on what was happened in the world of digital advertising and to look ahead at the trends that will shape your strategy in the coming year ahead.
An effective marketing strategy is built on several tactics, with paid media becoming increasingly important to reach the right audience at the right time and with the right messaging. With the decline of organic social traffic and search engines increasingly dedicating more of the search engine results page (SERP) to paid advertising placements, you need to pay to maximize your brand visibility online.
What is paid media today?
Paid media is a digital marketing tactic that enables brands to promote their content using paid search results, video advertising, display ads, and paid social media posts.
These advertising channels provide an opportunity to increase brand visibility, drive more traffic to your website, and reach new audiences online.
Sponsored content helps companies to attract potential customers that they wouldn’t be able to reach through their existing organic online presence.
How does paid media work in 2021?
With so much content being published online every day, it can be a significant challenge to cut through the noise and get your brand’s message across to your target audience.
Paid media is a way to promote your brand message, increase exposure, and connect with the people that would be interested in your products and services. There are a variety of paid media options to amplify your content and drive more traffic to your website.
Social media platforms provide excellent targeted advertising opportunities to get your message in front of the right audience. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are vital channels for increasing exposure with messaging and content tailored to the preferences of the individual consumer.
Paid search enables brands to connect with consumers at the exact moment they are actively searching for information related to their products and services.
Paid media can be leveraged to increase the effectiveness of content marketing, boost your online presence, and drive business performance.
The 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Paid Media
1. Paid Media Automation
If your company already utilizes Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you’ll already be familiar with the increasing proliferation of automated PPC account management.
Google Ads has steadily been introducing more automation options to its dashboard. Looking ahead, we can expect automation and AI to be an increasing factor in paid media advertising and account management.
With automation freeing up the time spent on day-to-day tasks like adjusting bids, adding negative keywords, and optimizing for device type, marketing teams can focus on refining strategy and scaling paid media efforts to achieve new heights of engagement and brand awareness.
According to Venture Harbour, 79% of top-performing companies have utilized marketing automation for over three years. Automation will become more and more integral to paid media, enabling you to achieve greater efficiency, reach more people with tailored messaging, and increase ROI of paid media campaigns.
2. Increasing Social Media Budgets and Enhanced Targeting
Social media ad spend grew by 20% in 2019, accounting for 13% of the world’s total advertising spend. Companies are increasing their social ad budgets, and it’s easy to see why.
Consumers are increasingly embracing social shopping into their everyday lives, and social media advertising platforms are becoming increasingly more advanced at targeting consumers with personalized content and ads.
Facebook has been at the forefront of personalized advertising for the last decade. The introduction of their personalized ad experiences is the latest offering for brands to target consumers with ads tailored to consumer preferences. Brands can target consumers with dynamic ads that are personalized to the Facebook user, with the ad format, CTA, and other elements being adapted to the individual user they are displayed to.
While Facebook has been increasing the level of personalization available in Facebook ads, they have also rolled out Instagram Shopping. Brands now have an opportunity to sell directly on Instagram, without having to direct users to the link in their Instagram bio.
As we look ahead, we can predict that the opportunity for social selling and paid media targeting is going to get more sophisticated. Every major social media platform has been increasing the targeting and effectiveness of their advertising platforms.
3. Video Paid Media
Video has seen massive growth in paid media over the last decade. As the rollout of 5G approaches, we can predict that increasing internet speeds will see the medium become even more effective, especially for mobile advertising.
Key Paid Media Video Statistics:
64% of consumers will make a purchase after watching branded video content on social media.
93% of brands have acquired a new customer through video content digital advertising.
87% of brands use video as a marketing tool.
When it comes to promoting your organic video media, Google states that for every two paid YouTube views, at least one earned view is generated. That’s an impressive increase in organic reach as a result of paid media.
The way Instagram users have rapidly embraced video content on the platform has provided brands new opportunities to connect with consumers through paid media. Over half of brands utilize video in Instagram stories, with video content achieving a 5.65% lower skip rate than static images.
With the increased speeds of 5G around the corner, we can predict that video content will continue to rise in importance for brands utilizing paid media.
4. The Rise of Stories Ads
The last few years have seen Stories become a dominant trend in social media and paid media advertising. While Instagram has become synonymous with sponsored Stories through the successful HiSmile campaign with Connor McGreggor and other influencer campaigns, Facebook has caught up with the level of engagement and now boasts 500 million daily stories users.
Brands are using dynamic and creative stories ads to engage consumers. As smartphone penetration reaches 72.2% of the U.S. population, brands are utilizing story ads to forge meaningful and natural interactions with consumers on their mobile devices. The full-screen portrait format is an absorbing and user-friendly way for brands to expand their paid media efforts and connect with consumers.
As we look ahead, we can predict that brands will continue to prioritize story ads, with news feed ads overtaken as the key format for social paid media.
5. Transparent Paid Media Ad Practices
While story ads have contributed to social media platforms becoming an increasingly important channel for paid media, the last two years have seen scandals that have brought ad transparency into public thinking.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal has brought social media advertising to the attention of both governments and consumers. Facebook has been under increasing pressure to bolster the transparency and security of its advertising platform. At the same time, Twitter has been facing the challenges of overcoming vast numbers of fake profiles and bots.
While it didn’t generate the same kind of headlines, influencer marketing has seen a dramatic rise and fall over the last few years. If we go back to the start of the 2010s, this form of marketing was relatively unknown and underused. But as we enter a new decade, it appears that influencer marketing is on the decline.
ASA regulations have been catching up with influencer marketing, with sponsored content and gifted products needing to be clearly acknowledged in social posts. Social media advertising has boomed in the last decade, but we can expect to see increasing regulation in the coming decade.
For brands utilizing paid media on social, it’s essential to be transparent with your advertising. Make sure you abide by local legislation and focus on building consumer trust by being open about your ad practices.
According to the 2019 Eldman Trust Barometer Report, 80% of U.S. consumers state that being able to trust a brand to do the right thing is a deciding factor in their purchasing decisions.
