Digital Marketing For Startups: Paid Media Marketing
There’s a school of thought that says startups should spend as little as possible on marketing. We believe that marketing should focus on positive ROI (return on investment). If a paid media channel can profitably drive qualified users for your startup, it’d be foolish to refuse it on the basis that it’s paid for. Another reason for using paid media is to establish a cost-per-acquisition, as this will act as a benchmark to compare all other marketing activity.
Paid media channels fall into three broad categories:
display,
search, and
affiliate marketing.
Below are some of the main online channels We would recommend lookin into, along with some tips on each.
#1 Facebook Advertising
Use page promoted posts targeting people in the news feed. These ads have the highest click-through and engagement rates.
Test as many advert variations as possible. The weirder, brighter, and more unique your ad is, the better. When everyone else zigs, zag.
Don’t create ads using the Facebook Ad Manager (it’s awful). Either use the power editor, or a dedicated tool like. This will make segmentation much easier.
Use conversion tracking – by installing the conversion pixel you enable oCPM for conversion bidding. This basically means that Facebook will algorithmically optimise your budget for more conversions.
Use fine segmentation – use a tool that enable you to split your ad campaign into tens or hundreds of individual ads each targeting a specific segment of your audience. This enables you to quickly see which ad segments perform well and which don’t, so you can move your budget to the segments that are most profitable.
#2 Google Ads (Search)
If your product solves an issue that people search for, there’s a high likelihood that Google Ads will be a great acquisition channel for you. For example, if your startup helps people find the cheapest gig tickets, you may want to bid on terms like ‘cheap gig ticket’, ‘London gig tickets’, and ‘Gaslight Anthem London Roundhouse tickets’.
#3 Google Adwords (Display)
Similarly to above, Google enable you to purchase banner adverts through their display network. You can specify which websites your banner ad appears on, or bid to appear on websites related to certain keywords.
#4 Reddit Advertising
Reddit is often overlooked as a paid marketing channel, but it’s very cheap and always worth testing.
Reddit advertising works by running ads at the top of any subreddit of your choice. For example, for a music client, we may advertise in the subreddits ‘WeAretheMusicMakers’, ‘Music’, and ‘Guitar’. Each subreddit has a very distinct community, so it pays to get involved in each one for a bit of time first before running ads. It’s a great place for getting honest feedback and targeting people who are likely to be receptive regardless of what stage your product’s at.
#5 Google Remarketing
Google Remarketing goes one step beyond the standard display advertising mentioned above. Essentially, when someone visits your website a cookie is dropped on their computer. When they visit other websites, an ad will appear encouraging them to come back to your website.
You can get very smart with this by running different remarketing ads for different stages of your sign-up funnel. For example, if they visited the sign-up page but didn’t complete the form, you could run an ad with an incentive to finish signing up.
Google Remarketing is generally very effective as the people you’re advertising to are qualified and already aware of your product. The trick is to get the frequency right and not be overly annoying!
#6 Facebook Exchange
Facebook Exchange works in a very similar to Google Remarketing, but using Facebook Ads instead. In other words, someone visits your website and bounces. When they go to Facebook they’ll find your ads encouraging them to come back.
To use Facebook Exchange you’ll need to use one of their partners. I’ve tested a handful of them and recommend AdRoll.
#7 StumbleUpon Advertising
While the quality of visitors from StumbleUpon is generally quite low, the cost per click is exceptionally low also, enabling you to buy a large amount of traffic for a low cost.
StumbleUpon is very visual social network where inspirational and stimulating content seems to spread virally. If you’re a luxury travel operator, this is a gold mine. If you a SAAS company promoting an app, it may be a bit trickier.
#8 Twitter Advertising
Twitter Ads can be very effective, but due to the budget limitations currently, the minimum budget for a Twitter Ad campaign is £5,000/month, which is outside of most startup’s budget. If you do have this sort of budget to invest, then Twitter Ads do tend to be pretty effective when done right.
Our advice would be to promote an amazing piece of content rather than directly promoting your services. View Twitter as a 1 of many platform where, if you run your ads correctly, you can launch your content to a large audience who will introduce your content to an even larger audience.
If your campaign dies after being promoted to the initial audience, start again.
#9 Content Discovery Platforms
There are a number of content discovery platforms that promote your content alongside articles on major news sites such as the New York Times and The Guardian. For driving backlinks and launching content they’re a powerful tool, although they can get quite expensive depending on the quality of your content.
#10 Video Pre-Roll Advertising
If your startup has produced a compelling promo video, pre-roll advertising could be a powerful paid marketing channel for you.
One interesting ‘trick’ with pre-roll advertising is that you do not pay if your ad is skipped within the first five seconds (which most people do skip). The trick, then, is to go down one of two routes. The first route is to get the message out about your service within the first five seconds of the video hoping that people skip so that you can expose your message to a huge number of people without paying too much.
The second option is to make the first five seconds ambiguous and weird enough to intrigue people to watch the rest of the video.
#11 Affiliate marketing
If your startup benefits from offering a high margin product and has a good conversion rate, then you may benefit from offering an affiliate programme through a network such as Affiliate Window or ClickBank.
We wouldn’t advise diving into affiliate marketing until you’ve already established your brand and found other marketing channels. Consider it more of an accelerant rather than a base fuel for your online marketing strategy.
