3 min read

20 things to get you thinking in paid marketing

The coronavirus pandemic is continuing to impact businesses globally. During this time, we’re seeing many brands adapting their paid marketing strategies to ensure spend is being used on the right tactics and audiences remain engaged. Read our 20 tips to get you thinking in paid marketing below, including ways to improve performance and explore new strategies.

1. Reassess your marketing goals.

If you are seeing a huge drop in sales/leads, but this is usually your primary focus as a business, review your short term strategy. Focus more on driving brand awareness, being more empathetic with users, teaching your customers about your products/services or re-engaging with your current customer set.

2. Associate your brand with good.

People remember brands for their acts of good in a time of crisis, particularly if done with true heart and generosity. Enhance your brand with feel-good content to alleviate anxiety and promote positive messaging.

3. Review search query reports.

If new searches are coming through, now is the time to act in in terms of ad copy/landing page content to help answer the query.

4. Engage with new audiences while CPCs are lower.

Demand is still there in a lot of industries. Use this opportunity to be exposed to new customers and become front of mind. When buying patterns improve, your brand will be the one users search for.

5. Run those tests you never got around to.

Run an experiment: Use the lower CPC period now to give them a go and try them out.

6. Check ad copy & imagery relevance.

Whilst also checking for sensitive creative during this situation.

7. Prepare ad copy in advance, ready for the eventual up-turn.

Get ad copy created and uploaded to the account, so this can go live in the click of a button.

8. Review quality scores

Go back to basics on account best practices and get your account in the best position possible for the long term.

9. If you have physical stores, check your search queries.

Make sure you aren’t still spending on store related queries whilst you’re shut.

10. Could content creation be more beneficial right now?

Have a think about shifting resources from PPC to SEO work if your business is seeing downtime, or if your business is cutting back on media spend.

11. Brush up on your paid marketing skills or learn something new.

Use this time to read through Google Skillshops and Facebook Blueprint.

12. Master the Google Skillshop.

Take the time to get certified in Google Search, Display, Shopping, Video etc.

13. Assess how your business is being portrayed.

Do this through ad copy and on your social accounts during this time.

14. Consider moving budget from your usual sales/leads focused campaigns.

If performance is poor then trial new platforms, such as Pinterest. In April 2020, there was an all-time high around the world on this platform, with more saves and searches than any other weekend in its history. Users are turning to the likes of Pinterest for visual inspirations and to discover new ideas that can help them adapt to their new reality.

15. Create case studies.

Help take stock of the great work and strategy you’ve carried out, including successes, learnings and challenges faced. This can then be used if pitching for additional budget or internal marketing efforts.

16. Interact with your customers.

It costs nothing! Whether it’s being more conversational on social media, sending updates via email or even asking them questions about their personal preferences regarding your business, what they’d like to see more of etc. This will help you to understand your customer base more.

17. Check conversion tracking.

Make sure it is 100% accurate, as well as ensuring that you are reporting on the correct goals for your business objectives.

18. Explore new territory opportunities for longer term business plans.

Check in your Google Analytics account to assess which other countries you aren’t currently running Paid activity on, but are still driving high amounts of sales/leads.

Could this be a new territory you could capitalise on?

Use free tools such as Market Finder and Google Trends to learn how you could start to expand into new territories, as well as understanding which countries are the most popular for your business’ key search terms.

19. Improve your mobile site speed.

With more time than ever being spend online during the pandemic, now is as good a time as ever. You can get a FREE mobile site speed test here. This also gives you the option to compare your results to your competitors’. Google ranks any site/page speed taking longer than 2.5 seconds to load as slow.

20. Track trends and build scenarios.

Having eyes on behavioural trends, for example search trends/demand and social interactions, will help marketers gain better insights in real time. This means you can react quickly to major changes and less will come as a shock to you!

Hopefully, you took some valuable insights from our 20 top paid marketing tips. Want to join the wealth of businesses that have boosted sales, raised brand awareness, engaged new audiences and more through paid marketing? Get in touch with the AGY47 team.