Paid acquisition is one of the most successful ways to reach your customers. However, it only works if you know your target audience and create ads that deliver value.
In this article, you learn,
- What is paid acquisition?
- The benefits of paid acquisition
- Types of paid acquisition
- Paid acquisition best practices.
What Is Paid Acquisition?
Customer acquisition is critical to business growth. The only way to thrive in a competitive marketplace is to acquire new customers and retain your existing customer base.
Paid acquisition is when you acquire new customers through a paid marketing channel. In other words, you’re paying to secure new leads, buyers, and customers rather than accessing them organically.
Benefits Of Paid Acquisition
The digital marketplace is highly competitive, yet at the same time, B2B buyers today complete almost the entire buyer journey on digital channels. Therefore, you must have a robust, omnichannel presence on the internet. By using paid acquisition strategies, you’ll,
- Gain more exposure
- Experience higher engagement rates
- Improve customer retention
- Generate more traffic to your website
- Reduce marketing costs.
Types Of Paid Acquisition
Social Media Ads
Social media offers unlimited opportunities to build brand awareness and acquire leads and conversions.
When using social media channels for paid acquisition, you’ll want your content to have more of an “organic” feel. Story ads, for instance, do well on social media feeds. You’ll create an unforgettable memory by telling your company’s story in a way that addresses the pain points of your target customers. Then, when buyers begin searching for solutions to their problems, they’ll remember your story ads.
Other types of paid acquisition content appropriate for social media include
- Newsfeed ads
- Video ads that run before and during videos on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook
- Influencer ads
Search Engine Ads
Google is one of the premier digital spaces for paid acquisition content. Sponsored ads are displayed at the top or side of the search engine results pages. Your ads will display when a customer searches for something similar to your products or services. In addition, you have the option to provide target keywords to show up.
Display Ads
Unlike social media or search engine ads, display ads are banner ads that show up on a website depending on the user’s previous search or website visit. For instance, a buyer might be looking for an artificial intelligence solution to solve a problem. After that, your display ad that talks about your artificial intelligence solutions will appear on subsequent websites that the buyer visits.
PPC Ads
Pay-per-click ads can be displayed across all digital media channels. As the name suggests, you only pay when a customer clicks on the ad.
Paid Acquisition Best Practices
Test, Track and Optimize
Paid acquisition content strategies cost money. Therefore, you want to be sure to invest time in optimizing your ads’ performance.
- Understand your customers’ pain points.
- Create customer personas.
- Research the competition.
- Use cutting-edge tools to access buyer intent data.
Consider where your customers are in the funnel and create paid acquisition content with the right keywords, delivered at the right time in the buyer journey.
Awareness: Your customer becomes aware of a problem but doesn’t have a solution. They’re researching to understand more about the issue. Your paid ads should focus on the problem itself, extrapolating to discuss its impact on business growth. You’ll identify yourself as a possible solution to the problem in a very low-key way.
Interest: At this stage in the funnel, your potential customer has learned everything about their problem and is now looking for solutions. They’re still in the research stage, so paid acquisition content should focus on how your products or services address these problems.
Decision: Your potential customer has decided which solution will solve the problem. At this stage in the funnel, they’re comparing vendors before making contact to finalize a sale. Your paid content should highlight why the buyer should choose your company’s product or service. This is the time to run customer video testimonials.
Once your paid ads are running, you need to track, test, and monitor conversion rates. If you’re not meeting your objectives, modify your ad content, distribution channels, or timing/frequency.
Retargeting
Your paid acquisition content may have brought a potential customer to your website, but they didn’t contact you to learn more about your products or services. Retargeting ads enable you to nurture those leads through the funnel until they convert.
With the use of cookies and cutting-edge analytics, you’ll be able to track your potential customers’ journeys across digital channels so that you can display your paid content where they are.
You want to be careful with your retargeting strategy. Your ad content should provide value to your customers. Be sensitive to where your potential customer is in the funnel. Indiscriminate use of retargeted ads can result in lost leads, so
Bottom Line
- Paid acquisition content boosts your digital visibility in the competitive marketplace.
- Unless you offer a unique product or service, you’ll be competing for the attention of your target buyers.
- As discussed in previous articles, the B2B buyer journey is cyclical and digital.
- Buyers have shifted from reaching out to sales teams to looking for digital content that addresses their pain points.
- They’ve already decided about your company’s products or services when they contact your company.
- Paid acquisition helps you acquire a digital footprint that you would struggle to secure with organic content.
- With a metrics-based strategy, you’ll reach your target customers at the right time in the buyer funnel and optimize your marketing budget.
