Here’s Everything You Need to Know About Paid Advertising

Chances are, you've seen paid ads on social media, in Google search results, and on other websites. The opportunity to promote your own site through advertisements can be attractive. However, taking advantage of these types of campaigns can be more complicated than you think.

Fortunately, by familiarizing yourself with the requirements of paid advertising on various platforms, you can use it to its full potential. As you generate more clicks, you can increase your brand awareness and sales and generate new business and revenue for your brand.

What Is Paid Advertising?

Paid advertising, put simply, is when a company or person pays for their content to appear in certain places on the internet, targeting specific demographic groups.

If you have a growing business and finally have the resources to invest in marketing, you want to ensure that your promotion is done in a way that maximizes your budget and return on investment (ROI) using the optimal advertising channels.

For most businesses, the indispensable natural advertising channel is through social media. Experts believe that by the end of 2025, more than 5.42 billion people will use social networks. In the U.S. alone, almost 80% of the total population is present on social media.

Any size business can use social media advertising to increase brand awareness and to connect with potential customers. So, how does paid advertising work?

While each advertising platform (Google, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, etc.) has a different interface and ad setup process, the bulk of the setup is very similar as far as the information each platform requests.

There’s a lot that goes into a successful ad buildout, from goals, A/B testing, targeting, messaging, and much more. First, we’ll talk through choosing the right platform and the benefits of paid advertising, then we’ll break down the considerations you’ll need to make when creating your next campaign.

How to Choose the Right Paid Advertising Platform

The decision to invest in advertising through social media is not that simple; there are many platforms, and each has its own pros and cons for businesses of all sizes depending on your industry, goals, and budget.

When reviewing the different social media channels that you would like to promote on, keep the following questions in mind:

• Where is your target audience?
• What are the goals or objectives of your advertising?
• What is your budget?

Knowing the answers to those questions will help you understand which channel will be the best avenue for you to experience better results. While platform choice is important, understanding that the work you do at the forefront of each campaign will set your ads up for success.

For example, if you have a software agency and are looking to establish yourself as an industry expert to attract business abroad, consider investing in creating videos and distributing them through YouTube.

Audience Demographics to Consider When Choosing LinkedIn as an Advertising Avenue

Let’s take a look at some of the audience demographics for LinkedIn.

• Age: In the U.S., the majority of users on LinkedIn are between the ages of 25 and 34, followed by those aged 18 to 24.
• Gender: As of January 2024, 56.4% of LinkedIn users are male, and 43.6% are female.
• Locations: The United States has the most users on the platform, followed by India, Brazil, China, and the United Kingdom.

Audience Demographics to Consider When Choosing Meta as an Advertising Avenue

Next, let’s take a look at some of the audience demographics for Meta, which includes apps like Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

• Age and Gender: As of January 2024, the largest demographic on Meta in the U.S. consisted of women aged 25 to 34 years, comprising 12.4% of users, closely followed by men in the same age bracket, representing 11.9% of the user base.
• Locations: For Facebook in particular, India has the most users on the platform, followed by the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines.

Audience Demographics to Consider When Choosing Google as an Advertising Avenue

The U.S. has the most desktop traffic to Google, followed by India, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

Specific data on the exact age and gender of Google ad viewers are not readily available due to the platform’s privacy policies and practices.

However, when creating Google ad campaigns, there are demographic targeting options that allow you to target ads based on gender, among other factors. The effectiveness of demographic targeting can vary depending on the industry, product, or service being advertised, as well as other factors such as geographic location and user behavior.

Benefits of Paid Advertising

If you want to achieve measurable goals, paid social media ad campaigns are the right way to go. Paid campaigns can be launched to generate leads, increase likes, drive engagement, drive traffic to your website, or even achieve conversions.

Let’s dive into the various benefits of paid advertising.

Paid Ads Help Extend Your Reach

Paid social media advertising is the best way to expand your reach, especially internationally.

Paid campaigns give you the ability to control your target audience and their location, giving you the ability to instantly reach the right audience where you think they are. This is because paid advertising guarantees the visibility of the source, so you can ensure that your potential customers will see your campaign.

Paid Ads Can Fit Any Budget

Paid campaigns can be launched on any budget, making them an excellent solution for businesses of all sizes. Most social channels offer a pay-per-click model to ensure that the budget set is not exceeded.

The average price per click on Facebook is $1.72 and on Instagram, it’s $6.70. If your budget is lower, Facebook may be a more successful avenue depending on your industry, goals, and target audience.

However, if you want the audience you’re targeting to engage with your content, it may be more suitable to choose Instagram, as ads on this channel tend to yield a higher level of engagement.

Paid Ads Help Maximize Content Marketing Efforts

You spend a lot of time creating content for your ideal audience to find value in. Paid ads are a great way to maximize the efficiency of your content advertising.

Because of the variety of targeting options available, you can push a particular piece of content (such as an eBook or article) to segmented audiences based on their interests. This allows you to deliver content that will be impactful or valuable to your target audience.

Doing so will increase your brand visibility, and establish your brand as a thought leader within the topics and industries you deliver content around.

Paid Ads Help You Understand Your Target Audience

When you begin implementing paid campaigns, you can use your results to learn even more about your audience. Campaign results can provide your business with valuable market insight into your industry and your audience.

Facebook, for example, offers continuous metrics throughout your campaign, delivering information about ad performance and results over time. This information can be used to assess ad interactions across different locations, different age groups, and a variety of diverse interests. You can use this information to create hyper-segmented content for your target audience.

Paid Ads Help Increase Brand Awareness

Your paid ads brand and content in front of your ideal audiences. This helps bring traffic to your social channels, potentially yielding an increase in followers, or to your website, for your audience to better understand your company and the solutions you provide.

Because your paid ads have created traffic to your various channels, the followers and prospects that come down your funnel, as a result, can now experience the value you deliver in the organic content you’re delivering. Potential customers will be able to get a clear idea of your brand's unique value just by visiting your social media channels.

As you share content on your social media channels, interest and engagement will increase. By engaging with your followers, addressing issues that concern them, and continually sharing value-added content, you will build more than just followers — you can build a community. This will not only strengthen brand loyalty but increase trust and prove your authenticity to potential customers.

How Does Paid Advertising Work

Currently, almost every company, no matter how small, has social channels with which they interact and provide information to build loyalty and get new customers. This is why social networks have become one of the most important means for creating paid digital campaigns.

Whether you have a marketing team or work with an external agency, here we will explain, step-by-step, how to create campaigns on the most impactful social networks: LinkedIn, Meta, and Google.

Each platform has its own setup process, but what’s included is primarily the same across the board. Each platform will give you options around your campaign objective, budget, audience segmentation, location, optimization, and delivery, and finally, ad creative and display.

Now, let’s dive into creation on each platform.

How to Create a Paid Ad Campaign on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is characterized by a primarily professional audience. Ads on LinkedIn are typically B2B focused, as ads can be targeted to directly impact the key decision-makers of an organization or impact people who work within a specific industry.

Remember that before starting your campaigns, you must have a business profile on LinkedIn and assign the proper permissions to the person who will manage the entire process. By having access, this person on your team will be able to enter the LinkedIn Campaign Manager.

Follow the steps below to create a campaign.

1. Choose Your Goal

The objective of your campaign is related to the action you want your audience to take. LinkedIn breaks these goals down into three segments: Awareness, Consideration, and Conversions.

Here are the goals you’re able to select on LinkedIn when building your campaign:

Awareness

• Brand Awareness: Tell more people about your product, services, company, or LinkedIn Event

Consideration

• Website Visits: Drive traffic to your website, marketing landing pages, or your LinkedIn Event
• Engagement: Increase social engagement with your content or LinkedIn Event, or increase followers to your Company Page
• Video Views: Share your videos with more people

Conversions

• Lead Generation: Capture leads on LinkedIn using a lead generation form pre-filled with LinkedIn profile data, with the ability to directly integrate with a lead management platform
• Website Conversions: Capture leads on your website and drive actions that are valuable to your business
• Job Applicants: Tell people about relevant job opportunities at your company and drive more applications to your job opportunities

2. Establish Your Audience

At this point, you can choose and segment the audiences you want to impact. You will find options such as countries, languages, companies, job functions, company size, experience level, and many more.

The key to a good performing campaign depends on your audience segmentation. LinkedIn support is always available to help you make decisions around optimizations for a successful campaign.

3. Ad Format

The format of your ad is the way you want your advertising to be viewed. It can be through Sponsored Content, Message Ads, Dynamic Ads, Text Ads, or a combination of these. Testing various formats will help you identify which format will generate the most ad interactions.

4. Budget

You can indicate if the budget will be focused on daily or monthly spend. You also choose the start and end date and the bidding strategy that you would like to move forward with.

Remember that the topic of digital advertising revolves around an online auction: The higher your bid, the more your content will be seen. That’s why it is important to establish a balance between what you can spend and the cost per metric on the platform.

5. Ad Creation

Next, it’s time to create your ads. You have the option of creating them from scratch or promoting a post that you have previously published. Here, you’ll include the copy, destination URL or link, image, call to action, and other relevant aspects related to your goal.

6. Evaluation

LinkedIn delivers a variety of metrics that will help you to know how your ads performed, allowing you to evaluate data that drives the creation of a new strategy for successful future campaigns.

How to Create a Paid Ad Campaign on Meta Business Suite

When you advertise on Meta, you can reach potential customers across all company platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Another benefit is the ability to impact a large number of users and prospects in many ways (organic posts, paid advertising, videos, surveys, and more).

If you’ve determined that Meta would be an ideal platform to run paid campaigns for your company, you have two ways to do them.

The first is to create your ads directly from your company page. There you will find the option to boost the posts you have published organically or also promote the page to get new followers. This alternative does not have many segmentation alternatives or many analytics to evaluate campaigns.

A second option is through the Meta Ads Manager. Here you create your campaigns from scratch taking into account the objective you have and audience segmentation. This precision in audience management enhances the profitability of your investment, ensuring your ads reach only the intended target audience.

Keep in mind that before launching your Meta advertising campaign, you’ll need to add a Facebook page to your business portfolio, and then you can explore the ads manager tool and all its functions.

When you’re ready to create a campaign, the first thing that will appear to you is the goal that your campaign will have. After choosing the goal, you’ll choose a name for the campaign, another for the ad set, and finally for the ads. Then you’ll move forward following the steps listed below:

1. Budget

In this section, you must choose the budget your campaign is going to spend. You can choose between daily or total budget. The money allocated will be distributed in each of the ad sets you have created.

2. Segmentation

If you already have your ideal client profile or your defined buyer persona, you already have information and ideal characteristics of your target audience. With this data, you’ll be able to build out audience segmentation so that it reaches the people you want and will determine the success of your strategy once your campaign is complete.

3. Location and Delivery

Here you can choose the locations where you want your ads to be seen, such as Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger.

4. Optimization and Delivery

Next is ad optimization. This means that you choose the method by which you are going to be charged: click per link, visits to the destination page, impressions, or daily unique reach.

5. Ad Creation

The last point of digital advertising campaigns on Meta is the creation of ads. Here you will choose the type of format (video, images, sequence of images), the copy or main text, the destination URL (link), and the respective call to action (action that you want the user to perform).

6. Performance and Analysis

At the end of your campaigns, it’s essential that you analyze with your marketing team what aspects work and what aspects need to be improved.

The ads manager will display various metrics including the number of impressions, reach, frequency, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), new followers, and number of video views, among others.

How to Create a Paid Ad Campaign on Google

To select the appropriate campaign type for Google Ads, first determine what you want to achieve with your Google Ads campaign, whether it's driving website traffic, generating leads, increasing sales, boosting brand awareness, or promoting app downloads.

Familiarize yourself with the different campaign types available on Google Ads, including Search, Display, Video, Shopping, and App campaigns. Each type has its own features, targeting options, and ad formats designed to achieve specific objectives.

Next, choose the campaign type that aligns best with your advertising goals. For example, if your goal is to increase website traffic and leads, a Search campaign might be suitable. If you want to raise brand awareness, consider a Display or Video campaign.

Take into account your target audience and available budget when selecting a campaign type. Some campaign types may be more effective for reaching specific demographics or industries, while others may require higher budgets to achieve desired results.

Additionally, assess the performance metrics associated with each campaign type, such as click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, and return on investment. Choose the campaign type that offers the most favorable performance indicators based on your goals and budget.

To create a paid ad campaign on Google, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account or create a new one if you don't have an account already.
2. Click on the "+Campaign" button to start creating a new campaign.
3. Choose your campaign goal, such as website traffic, leads, sales, or brand awareness.
4. Select the campaign type based on your goal, such as Search, Display, Video, Shopping, or App.
5. Set your campaign settings, including campaign name, budget, bidding strategy, and targeting options.
6. Create your ad groups within the campaign, each focusing on specific keywords, audiences, or placements.
7. Write compelling ad copy and select relevant keywords or targeting options for each ad group.
8. Set up ad extensions to provide additional information with your ads, such as site links, callouts, or location information.
9. Review and finalize your campaign settings, ad groups, and ads.
10. Launch your campaign and monitor its performance regularly to optimize for better results.

Remember to adhere to Google's advertising policies and guidelines throughout the campaign creation process.

Key Takeaways

As you can see, there are a lot of considerations to make when implementing a paid campaign on any platform.

It’s important for you to have a strong grasp of your buyer personas, what platforms they’re most active on, content that’s relevant to your audience, and the variety of parameters you can set to ensure that your campaign is impactful.

Successful ad strategy blooms from running and rerunning campaigns, reviewing metrics, and optimizing your audiences, creatives, and messaging. You may not see the results you’re hoping for until you’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with the process of learning from your ads and taking that information into account when building future campaigns.

Each of these platforms offers support for those creating paid campaigns to ensure success. While you’re getting started, lean on these kinds of resources to help you make informed decisions around your ad creation. You’ll be glad you did.

If you’re looking for a rock-solid strategy around campaign creation, connect with our team to discuss if LAIRE is the right fit for your company.