Paid media isn’t exclusive to one platform. There are a variety of ways to customize your paid media strategy to support your specific goals. Each individual paid media platform is unique and can be used to reach different audiences with different creative and at different points in the purchasing journey. By sticking to only one paid media platform, you may be missing opportunities to engage influential audiences. Below we present four ways diversification in Paid Media can help improve your ROAS.
Reason 1. Your audience moves between platforms.
Fortunately for us, we don’t have to physically follow our audience around.
Do you advertise where your audience goes, or in the place you think they go?
Unless your budget is very limited, you can use performance data from multiple paid media platforms to really know the most effective placements. While you likely wouldn’t promote children’s toys on LinkedIn, do you know if your promotions would perform better using Facebook or Google Ads? Even different toys could have a different answer. The real solution is gathering and using data to find out where your audience goes, and which paid media platforms are most effective.
In addition, placing your products on multiple paid media platforms helps you build impression share and stay top of mind. This has shown to significantly increase advertisement performance.
Context is just as important as messaging, and since your audience’s context changes between platforms, it presents a great opportunity to show off your products in multiple ways…
Reason 2. You can use different platforms to deliver a variety of messages and content.
We’ve moved past using newspapers as a crude form of demographic targeting. Thankfully.
Google Ads search campaigns are great at reaching high-intent buyers with targeted ad copy, but they won’t promote your downloadable content nearly as well as LinkedIn, where business-minded users actively seek out high-quality eBooks and whitepapers.
LinkedIn, however, is not going to allow your brand to connect with its audience in the same way that Facebook and Instagram can foster legitimate B2C brand loyalty with visual and interactive content. And neither of them will let you place 6-second video ads on YouTube for people who have already visited your website.
Every paid media platform offers something unique and valuable. Even if the message on all of your content is the same, the delivery is equally important.
Reason 3. You can compare performance across platforms to make educated decisions.
Comparing performance across platforms is like converting between inches and centimeters: at the end of the day, they’re just different units measuring the same thing.
If you only run paid media on one platform, there is nothing concrete to compare your numbers to. You may like your ROI, but is a 5% conversion rate good? Bad? There is no way to tell for sure.
When you add in another platform and see that its ROI is better even though it gets a 2% conversion rate, maybe because each conversion is ¼ the price, suddenly you have data to compare and ROI optimizations to make.
Conversion rates are one of several secondary metrics which play into ROI. How about optimizing click-through rates or finding ways to decrease cost? With multiple platforms, you will have more points of reference to use when optimizing all of your paid media campaigns.
You may even find that some paid media platforms provide the best conversion rate, but since the cost-per-click is so high, you need tailored audience lists to only deliver the ads to the most likely users to convert. Those lists, as well as other sections of the funnel, can be provided by your other paid media platforms.
Reason 4. The effectiveness of paid media effort is compounded with diverse platforms.
Just like cookies and milk… good separately, but better together.
Retargeting and remarketing lists can be incredibly effective—and slow to build. But when you have multiple platforms’ worth of traffic to build a site visitors list for every single platform to target, suddenly the barrier is lower.
Seeing ads in multiple places, with messaging that gets more and more compelling or targeted, will make your audience members more likely to convert. If you’ve already visited a website, you will be more likely to remember them when you see another ad showing you the products you viewed or with another selling point for the service.
This also helps to strengthen your company’s visibility. By appearing in many places, your brand will be more memorable and seen as more authoritative—being seen once and forgotten is worse than not being seen at all since your company’s money has already been spent.