Any paid media strategy worth its ad spend drives business growth. But before you make a significant investment in paid advertising, make sure the strategy is sound, and be ready to scale once you prove results.
Align the Budget Before You Spend It
Paid media budget allocations need to align with both your business goals and the recommended spend ranges. That makes alignment between business leadership and your primary paid media strategist critical.
Set up clear channels of communication between the two from the start. The budgets that grow over time are usually the ones where that groundwork was laid early, rather than renegotiated every quarter.
From there, work backward from value. Use average order value for ecommerce, or the average value of a closed/won deal for lead generation, to determine what you can afford to spend on each purchase or qualified lead. When you consistently meet those efficiency targets, be ready to scale.
One caution: efficiency is not the only goal. The best paid media strategies drive efficient returns without sacrificing the upper-funnel advertising that grows your audience and brings in orders and qualified leads from new customers. Reaching new customers drives business growth, and paid media is very good at it.
Measuring Success Is Harder Than It Used to Be
Making sense of each ad platform’s attribution windows has become harder, thanks to tracking limitations like website cookie consent settings. Third-, second-, and first-party data will only get more scarce over time.
As those customer data signals dwindle, in-platform tracking alone tells you less and less about whether your campaigns are working. So how do you know which ads work best for your business? How do you decide where to allocate your dollars, and why?
The answer is to use both. A strong paid media strategy uses business metrics alongside ad platform metrics, so you can see which ads are meeting their goals and understand what is driving the results.
With a sound strategy and a sound set of key performance indicators in place, you are ready to dial in your allocations.
Allocating for Lead Generation
For B2B and B2C lead generation, optimizing for lead value lets you measure the true return on your paid media spend.
If you haven’t built the infrastructure to pass lead value back into the ad platforms through offline conversion uploads, start there. Understanding the relative value of the leads you’re driving is business-critical.
Next, assess the paid search and paid social campaigns you already have running. Two questions tend to surface the most opportunity. Are there paid search campaigns driving a high volume of valuable leads that still have available search impression share? And are there paid social campaigns targeting a narrow audience at high frequency, where the same few people keep seeing the same ads over and over?
Adjust spend levels so your target audience gets the right message at the right stage of the funnel, without oversaturating any particular group.
With those adjustments made, you can see where the strategy is limited in its current state. Is a testing framework in place so variables like the hook, call to action, and messaging theme can be isolated and improved over time? If not, make sure critical variables are tested each time a new set of ads launches.
Then look for the bottlenecks. If your reach to new prospects is limited because the ad mix leans primarily on capturing existing demand through paid search, it’s time to expand methodically.
Add Budget Incrementally
As a general rule, additional paid media budget should be added in steps rather than all at once.
Say your creative testing framework on Meta Ads is steadily yielding better click-through rates, and your website is converting traffic at a higher rate. That may be the moment to add Meta Ads budget, rather than shifting dollars from another platform and keeping your overall budget flat.
Stair-step your investments. Assess performance as a team, then keep increasing spend until you reach diminishing returns.
Let’s Scale Your Business
The paid media team at Mad Fish Digital is ready to scale your business. Whether you need a B2B lead generation strategy, a B2C lead generation strategy, or an e-commerce strategy, we’re ready to help.