How to Build the Best Paid Advertising Strategy for Your E-commerce

Paid Media is a vital component of revenue growth and brand awareness for e-commerce. Your paid media strategy does more than just set a budget for your advertising plan. It also sets the vision and goals for your business and executes your advertising strategies in a way that maximizes your budget.

In an ever-expanding digital world, it may seem difficult to make your voice heard over the voices of hundreds of thousands of other online businesses appealing to a similar customer base. Paid marketing offers your business an opportunity to stand out from the crowds.

In this article, we will walk you through 5 great tips for building the best paid media strategy for your e-commerce.

5 t ips for building the best paid media strategy for your e-commerce

With paid media, you have the opportunity to amplify your brand’s voice. Components like paid placements, paid ads, sponsored social media posts, and pay-per-click advertising contribute a great deal towards your e-commerce reaching audiences you might not have been able to engage with otherwise.

With these 5 tips, you can fully exploit these components of paid media to build the ideal paid media strategy for your online business.

1. Define your campaign’s goals

Before you start creating a paid media strategy, ask yourself what its purpose is. What goals do you intend to achieve with paid marketing? What message are you trying to pass across with paid ads? What are the key projects your company needs to execute in a particular timeframe to have a positive impact on your e-commerce?

Clearly define what goals you want to accomplish. Your paid media strategy is essentially a roadmap to accomplishing your goals, and you cannot have a roadmap without a destination. Your goals can be anything from increased traffic, revenue, sales, or a higher Average Order Value, as long as they can be used as a marker of success for the business.

A great way to go about setting clear goals for your paid media strategy is using the S.M.A.R.T. framework.

Defining these parameters as they pertain to your goals will help ensure that your objectives are clearly defined and attainable within a specific timeframe.

This eliminates generalizations and guesswork, sets a clear timeline for achieving goals, and eases the process of tracking progress and identifying missed milestones. It also guides the budget-making process and helps your business eliminate undue losses.

2. Carry out competitor analysis

One of the most important factors to consider when planning a successful paid media strategy is your competitors. Conducting an in-depth competitor analysis goes beyond a quick perusal of the competitors’ websites and social media presence.

It involves intensive research on your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses to gain insight into their products, marketing tactics, and sales. This insight can reveal opportunities for your brand and highlight your failures. You can understand what works and what does not and then build the best paid media strategy for your e-commerce.

The first step of carrying out a competitive analysis is identifying who your competitors are. Using the Scoretize tool, you can not only identify your competitors, but you can also monitor them and use this insight to improve your paid marketing strategy.

Some of the things to look out for in a competitor analysis is what keywords your competitors are targeting for paid and organic search. Are there any keywords they are missing? Can you exploit this gap to improve your own paid media strategy?

You can also use SEO ranking tools to analyze their rankings against keywords and track your own progress against them.

3. Determine the paid media budget

When you inject revenue into your paid media strategy, you definitely hope to see ROI. One of the best ways you can measure ROI is by having a budget for paid ads and media.

However, the process of determining what budget to dedicate to your paid marketing can seem daunting. From customer acquisition, click-through rate, impressions, and leads, there is a lot to consider.

Social Media Examiner recommends an expenditure of 5% to 12% of your revenue on paid ads. According to data from Web Strategies, the total marketing budget should be between 6% and 14% of total revenue.

However, these figures may vary depending on the size of your business. How then can you determine how much you should spend on paid ads?

First, understand your cash flow. How much revenue is your business bringing in? How much are you spending on external and operational costs? Based on this, how much can you afford to allocate for paid marketing?

Second, establish your sales funnel. Understanding your sales funnel is vital to creating your paid media budget because it allows you to pinpoint the areas of weakness where potential customers fall out of the funnel, and guides you to redirect your paid marketing efforts there.

Finally, understand your market. Where do you fit in your market? How competitive is paid advertising for your industry? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you figure out how to increase your market share in the digital industry.

4. Define and understand your target audience

It is crucial to define and understand your target audience, and creating the appropriate buyer persona for your brand is the first step of doing so.

Buyer personas help keep you focused on addressing customer priorities instead of your own. They help you create relatable paid marketing strategies that make your audience feel seen and understood.

Once you have the perfect buyer persona, you can then select the right marketing channels to reach your audience.

There are several free channels you can use, for example, Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Facebook Pages, and Twitter. However, these often require you to already have an audience before you can start driving traffic to your business.

This is where paid marketing channels like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and Influencer Marketing come in. They can help speed up your brand’s growth without requiring that you have a large audience in the first place.

5. Optimize the paid media by choosing to start and end date campaigns and testing multiple channels

According to data from Commerce Signals, almost 40% of all paid media spend is wasted. One of the main reasons for this is marketers’ failure to optimize their paid media campaigns for the best possible ROI.

A great way to optimize your paid media strategy is deciding on a specific timing and duration for your campaigns. Set an intended start and end date for your paid marketing campaign. Establish exact dates for specific dates and milestones to help you track progress and adjust where necessary.

Keeping your campaign time-bound allows you to allocate resources appropriately and keeps team members from creating undue delays in the project.

It is also beneficial to figure out what marketing channels work best for your paid media strategy. The only way to know for sure is by testing multiple channels.

With split testing, you can test your actual campaigns with your real audience using different channels and generate data to show you which channels perform better.

As long as you understand that you have to tailor your strategy uniquely for each channel, you can tackle as many different channels at a go as your budget allows.

Building a paid media strategy with Scoretize

In the ever-expanding world of e-commerce, making yourself heard over the competition can be quite the hassle. Building a great media strategy is a fantastic step towards increasing your market share, but it is not the final step.

To ensure that your paid media strategy remains relevant to the current industry climate, a periodical review of the strategy is an important prerequisite. With regular reviews of your paid media strategy, you stand a better chance of achieving your goals and situating your business as favorably as possible in the market.