What Is Paid Media And How To Use It

In the modern marketing landscape, paid media has become one of the strongest tools for reaching your target audience quickly and effectively. Whether it be generating conversions or awareness, there are plenty of ways to use paid media effectively to get your product or service out to the world. 

Paid media, or paid advertising, is a marketing method in which advertisers pay to place content directly in front of their target audience, whether through search ads, shopping listings, video ads or many other forms. 

Paid media delivers timely results in a way no other form of marketing can, boosting brand awareness and traffic, and improving click-through rates, making it an essential tool in any modern marketing plan. 

What is Paid Media

When it comes to paid media, there are two main areas in the modern marketing landscape, both of which we offer at Search Theory. The first of these is PPC, or pay-per-click.

PPC is a marketing model which is most commonly used on search engines such as Google, where advertisers pay publishers when users click their ads. Advertisers bid on specific keywords or phrases they want to appear for, with the price they pay based on how relevant the keyword is to what they offer, how good their ad is, and how well they target their audience. PPC is a cost-effective form of paid advertising which can drive quick results if they are providing the searcher with a highly relevant ad and experience. 

The other primary form of paid media is paid social, which involves paying to promote your product or service on social media platforms through a range of image and video formats, which can drive engagement, sales and awareness. 

One of the main platforms for paid social ads is Meta, which is both Facebook and Instagram. Meta ads offer detailed audience targeting options, allowing you to completely map out who you want your posts to reach, with a huge active user base on the platforms. 

One of the fastest-growing sites for paid social marketing in recent years is LinkedIn, a huge networking site that offers a unique professional user base for brands to target. LinkedIn is especially useful  for B2B (business-to-business) marketing, with powerful lead-generation tools that enable businesses to drive qualified leads through personalised content. However, this comes at a higher price, with the cost per click significantly higher on LinkedIn than on Meta. 

Two other forms of paid media worth mentioning are display media and connected TV advertisements. Retail media involves placing ads on retailers’ digital sites and through websites and apps. This allows active shoppers to become aware of your product, and they may consider it when in the buying stage on whatever website or app it is being advertised on. Depending on the product you’re promoting, retail media advertisement can be a very effective way to get eyes on your brand. 

How Does Paid Media Work? 

Once you’ve chosen the platform and type of paid media you want to focus on, it is important to have a defined audience you want to reach and defined goals for the campaign. For example, aiming to increase trainer sales from a younger demographic on your website. 

One of the huge strengths of paid marketing is that you can be clear about who your intended audience is, their interests, income, gender, age, etc. This means that if you have a clear idea of your target audience, you can reach them strategically. 

Once you’ve defined your audience and created an ad that will appeal to it, you set your budgets and performance targets for your ads. Once the ad is live, users will see and interact with it, and you can track the ad’s performance. 

The benefits your brand enjoys from using paid advertising can vary depending on what you want from your campaign. Paid advertisements can and should be used strategically to meet objectives, and they can succeed across a range of levels. 

Paid media for awareness 

Awareness campaigns aim to maximise reach across Meta, LinkedIn and Google platforms. If you create engaging, interesting content, this awareness can be crucial to making your brand memorable and driving later action. 

Paid media for conversion 

The objective here is clear: get the audience to complete the desired action, typically buying the product or service. The best way to do it depends on your business; for example, shopping listings and paid social are ideal for an e-commerce business, while search ads are more applicable for a service. 

LinkedIn is also a really strong platform for lead generation, especially as you can target users by their professional identity and perhaps cater more specifically to their needs. 

Paid media for B2B and B2C marketing 

As we mentioned before, , LinkedIn offers a professional and engaged audience, directly applicable to B2B services. It allows precise targeting by job title, industry, seniority, etc. 

With B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing, reach is much wider on platforms such as Meta, allowing users to shop directly from the feed. It really depends on who the target audience is, as Meta allows you to personalise your audience by interests, shopping habits, age and more. 

Paid media remarketing 

Across all advertising platforms, there is the capability to plug in audience data of people who have viewed the website, products, opened emails, watched videos, and much more. Rather than targeting completely new customers, paid media remarketing allows you to focus on people who are already aware of the brand or product, which typically results in higher conversion rates. 

What makes a successful paid media campaign? 

A successful paid campaign is not just about the numbers; it’s about setting clear goals and achieving them through the right messaging to attract the right audience. There are a number of stages which must come together to achieve this: 

• Defining the objective – as listed before, paid media campaigns can be used for a number of objectives, such as awareness, conversions, etc. Being clear on this helps you know, measure and define what a successful campaign is for you. 
• Accurate targeting – your targeting must be accurate so your messaging is approximately shown in the feed, and that feeds into the algorithm correctly.
•  Correct messaging – You want to grab the audience’s attention quickly and keep the message short and snappy. 73% of readers require scannable content, which clearly explains why your product is the solution to something. CTAs (calls to action) are crucial to end the message and show the audience what action they should take. 
• Choosing your platform – Depending on your business goals, content format, and target audience, you should be able to decide which platform to market on. For example, a B2B campaign will typically use LinkedIn, whereas if you’re targeting a young audience, you may use TikTok.
• Continued optimisation – Don’t just leave your campaign once it’s out, slight changes to, for example, the keywords or the messaging can help your campaign be more lucrative for a longer period of time. 
• Brand messaging – This has to be consistent and present the brand’s values, aligning with messaging on site and being key to what your audience expects from your brand.
• Retargeting – As we mentioned before, retargeting users who didn’t convert from this campaign in particular can make future

Key metrics for your paid media campaign 

The most important metrics for your campaign depend on your objectives, but these are some key metrics to measure. Primarily, Google Ads, Analytics, and Meta Ads are used for reporting. These tools contain all the analytics you need to measure your performance, particularly :

• Impressions and reach – If you’re looking for visibility and doing an awareness campaign, the number of times the ad is displayed is a crucial metric to focus on. Reach is the number of unique users, which helps measure audience size. 
• Cost per click – How much you pay for each click. CPCs can be affected by a number of factors, but working towards making them as efficient as possible means a greater return for your ad spend.
• Cost per acquisition – How much it costs you to acquire a lead or conversion , another metric that shows efficiency, as well as how profitable your ad is. 
• Return on ad spend – How much revenue is generated for the amount  spent on advertising.  

Examples of Successful Paid Media Campaigns 

Adidas ‘Backyard Legends’ campaign 

This is paid advertising on the grandest scale possible, and its success has been impossible to ignore. When it comes to producing football products, such as kits, balls, and boots, the big rivalry has always been between Nike and Adidas. And with the World Cup around the corner, it is a crucial time for both brands to gain an advantage over the other, with the two brands putting out huge efforts . 

This advert features the biggest names in football, music and Hollywood in one of the most star-studded casts I’ve ever seen, led by Timothée Chalamet. I have seen this advert appear on social media, YouTube ads and connected TV adverts in the past few weeks.

The 5-minute short film has 3.2 million views on YouTube in 6 days and 3.7 million likes on Instagram. It has created so much conversation, especially about how Adidas are so far ahead of its competitors right now. What I love about the advert is how it doesn’t lead with the product, but with the people. Adidas created an advert so engaging that you almost forget that it’s even an advert. 

Spotify’s “Spreadbeats” 

This campaign shows the effectiveness of data-driven campaigns for B2B marketing. The campaign targeted higher-ups in businesses, who have the power to make the big decisions, on LinkedIn to try and encourage them to use Spotify as a marketing tool, highlighting the brand’s audience data and their huge audience. Spotify weren’t even selling their product here; they were selling business owners an opportunity. They did this by using their data on user behaviour, for example, what they listen to when at the gym, which suggests to marketers that they can offer more personalised advertising. 

Snickers- ‘You’re not you when you’re hungry’ 

This PPC campaign targeted misspelt words as its keywords in a really creative and unique campaign that had never been done to this scale before. The misspelt words weren’t even directly related to chocolate, with them ranging from ‘wierd’ to ‘definately’. In a matter of

a couple of days, they’d had over 500,000 impressions. This just shows that thinking outside the box is so crucial in paid advertising campaigns. 

Paid vs Organic 

Organic marketing is a longer-term strategy that builds trust and sustainability and aims to create a relationship between the brand and the customer. 

In contrast, paid marketing offers more measurable, targeted visibility. A single paid social ad can generate awareness and sales, whilst your organic posts nurture lifelong audiences. Of course, as the name would suggest, you pay for the results of your advertising, whereas the only cost of organic is the time spent on it. 

In our blog on organic social media marketing, we covered the differences between organic and paid social. We highlighted the main difference as being the much more instant reach that paid content achieves. 

Skyrocketing Your Paid Media Strategy 

From PPC to paid social, at Search Theory, our Paid Media scientists run campaigns based on calculated strategies and emotional triggers that maximise conversion. We look to blend modern ad practices with creative storytelling and prepare your brand for the new frontiers of AI and Paid Search. Using our specialised data models to map out your ad performance, we look to expose growth areas and budget waste that most agencies simply miss. 

Successful missions happen when every detail aligns, and our focused approach sharpens every part of your customer’s journey. Partnering with us means working with professionals who treat your budget as if it were their own.