paid media

Organic ranking, let them find you!

Back to the basics, companies have to be visible for their audience and/or have recognition in the clients mind. Social media is very useful to get your brand exposed and to persuade others potential consumers to find about your goods or services and hopefully to engage with your pages in twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

But having a good quality score on your website helps to direct people to your website, even if you use paid search as Google Adwords the price to pay will different as the quality score or ranking of your website is taken into account for the price per click that you will have to pay for the same position of the ad.

It is very important that you understand your audience and their needs and to reflect it in your website, in other word it should be relevant for them, the content is original, transparent, relevant to your business and the audience’s needs, the platform and navigation easy and fast, free of pop-ups and pop-under, website updated often with relevant content, relevant links to your business from trustful and well ranked sites, integrate social media in effecting way. Also it is a key factor to make the site relevant and understandable to the search engines using appropriate the meta tag, headers tag, alt tags, sitemap, content, keywords and in general to do a Search Engine Optimization.

All these elements should be used and integrated, they will bring more dynamist and they will bring not only more traffic to your site but also brand awareness and in general more business.

Paid Media vs Trust

Adwords Nowadays, you have more options how to make publicity to your business. However, the trends are changing very fast and it is important to understand what is actually reaching your potential customers and revising your strategy ongoing basis. It is very important looking at medium and long term, what is building trust and creating recognition of the brand.

The strategy of some companies to reach their target market can sometimes cross the line and it could make the audience feel that they privacy has been violated, it can create a very negative perception of the company and could be difficult to reverse.

Homepage takeover ads can be effective to “hijack” the attention of the target audience for some seconds but at the same time it can be very irritating and it could even make feel some people disrespected. With desktops, laptops, tablets and smart phones users are feeling that they are 100% in control of what they want to see or read in contrast with TV and radio where users are more passive and they are used to interruption with ads as part of the push system.

The more effective way to reach your audience is through trust, people are more likely to visit your website if people they know recommend it through likes, followers, reviews and sponsored story. This last one is very effective at the moment, one reason is that most people are not fully aware that who owns the story is paying facebook to reach more people using the network of the user, and it is shown as recommendation of someone that you know.

Looking at a research done by Nielsen survey in trust advertising – Paid, owned and earned  consumers-don-t-trust-paid-media-report people trust 92% recommendations  from someone they know, 70% from  reviews, 58% branded websites and 58% editorial contain such as articles in the newspaper. In contrast with online banner add 33% consumers trust, text add in mobile phone with 29%, adds in social media and online video add with 33%.

It is more effective and positive in long term to use the audience’s network that they trust to build up the recognition of you brand, also direct traffic to your website from this channel and the website should respond to audience expectation.

Let see your POEM! – Paid, Owned & Earned Media

Picture from smartinsights.com With the importance that social media and PR have been taken in the last few years, it has put more dynamic and channels have been diversified. As the same time became more difficult for brands to influence people and now they have more control and play a more active role.

From the 3 types of media; owned media, earned media and paid media, this last one is losing territory as credibility is decreasing, getting people attention is harder and with the massive advertising clutter is more difficult to stand out. Earned media is increasing and the audience is displacing the effect of the other 2 types of media.

For instance people often search for reviews, scores and general feedbacks from consumers  regarding products as they trust the source so what the seller or brand is saying about their product is losing relevance. For companies it is more important than ever to engage with the audience and to use them as a channel to reach more customers. However it depends on the type of business and the strategy and objectives of each brand. For instance companies such as Ryanair wouldn’t use their customer as a channel in social media as most customers actually don’t like Ryanair, just the prices.

Just a short definition of the 3 types of media:

Owned Media: The brand owns the channel and controls it, such as website, blog, and twitter account. It takes time to be consolidated and company communication is not quite trusted.

Paid media: Brand pay to expose them to the audience thought display ads, paid ads, sponsorship. It has immediate effect and helps to shift owned media and earned media. But it has low credibility and declining response.

Earned Media: When your clients became your channel though voice of mouth, social media, blogs, communities make possible that a campaign go viral. It has very high credibility. However, it is difficult to control, difficult to measure, can be negative.

These channels don’t work totally independent, paid media help to promote owned and earned media and earned is supported at early stages by owned and paid media. They have converged areas, to reach success usually is necessary a well coordinated use of earned, owned and paid media.

OwnedMedia