What is biddable media, and how can it catapult your growth?

Ever found yourself wondering, what is biddable media and how can it help my marketing efforts? Well, today is your lucky day - here's the lowdown on paid social and paid search. You're welcome!

Before you read on we have a question? Are you confident that your sales and marketing strategy is working?

If theres any doubt in your mind then use our free yet powerful comparison tool and get a full audit of your sales and marketing performance.

Biddable media can increase sales and conversions for your products and services, as you can promote any page you wish from your website. You'll need a budget, though, and a clear vision of the people you're looking to target and turn into customers. In this blog, we've taken a closer look at the different biddable media channels on offer, and how you can use them to achieve amazing results.

An overview of biddable media channels

We've already talked about inbound marketing. A creative, customer-led strategy is essential for long-term business growth online. We've also mentioned how complementing it with outbound techniques can speed up the process. Done well, it can help your inbound strategy to take hold and get your name out in front of potential customers.

In our post about the benefits of an inbound campaign, we pointed out that marketing isn't an exact science. It never has been. However, one of the most effective aspects of outbound marketing with biddable media is the amount of power and options it gives you to connect with your target audience.

We can't stress this enough. Find out as much as you can about your target audience; their interests, age, location and the trends they enjoy. It's essential information that you need to know, and a huge part of the battle in growing your status online.

Biddable media is also a fantastic way of gathering the information you need from those exact prospects through specific data collection services. Especially through social advertising (which we'll get to). Lead generation cards are now available through the world's largest social networks with calls to action to get the most from your outbound campaign.

And the best thing for advertisers is that the technology continues to advance and grow. It's ethical marketing, too; people will only leave their information and data with you if they choose to and if your advertisement connects with them on a creative level.

Powerful paid promotions

New channels and ways of incorporating biddable media into your advertising are always appearing. Better yet, the systems and software used to target people continue to get refined to offer the advertiser more options than ever before.

Here are the most prominent biddable media channels online:

Pay Per Click advertising (PPC)

PPC is probably the most well-known method of biddable media advertising on the internet. A search-engine-based way of advertising, a lot of people can find PPC initially confusing, but the theory behind it is actually very easy to grasp.

Want to know how search works? Search for a keyword or phrase in Google or Bing and links to websites appear. Google ranks the results based on a number of factors, with the aim of putting the most relevant website for that keyword at the top of the pile.

See those results at the very top, though? The ones with a little ‘AD’ box next to them? They’re PPC ads that companies have placed there to appear every time a specific keyword is searched on a search engine.

The clue’s in the name; Pay Per Click. Every time somebody clicks on that ad, the advertiser has to pay a certain set amount to Google or Bing respectively. You can set your own bids, but the more competitive a keyword the higher it’s likely to be.

For example:

• You sell shoes and want to be placed top of Google when people search for ‘shoes’
• You sign up to AdWords and set a price against the keyword ‘shoes’
• You bid 50p against ‘shoes’ and your site appears to a certain customer looking for shoes
• They click on your site and make a purchase. Because they clicked you pay Google 50p, but they bought a £30 pair of shoes, making you a profit

It’s not as easy as that, though. Thousands of websites sell shoes and will be bidding for top spot in search results. To get a higher position you’ll need to up your bid, and for such a highly-searched, popular keyword that’ll decrease your margins significantly. Even worse, what happens if somebody doesn’t buy a pair after clicking to visit your website?

The positives of PPC are incredible, though. You can make your website instantly visible to your target audience. By researching and choosing your keywords carefully you can keep costs low, target different segments of your market, get a higher ROI. More importantly - you're relevant to your customer's needs.

Social Media PPC

Social media PPC works in a similar way, with each social network offering you different biddable options to help you reach a specific social audience. Facebook, for example, lets you target people based on their interests, intent and activity while the majority of networks let you target based on age, gender and location at least.

Be creative with your advertisements, too. Remember above when we mentioned lead generation cards? Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and others give you the ability to create a small advertisement complete with image and descriptions. This can help to create interest and incentivising that all important engagement.

Social lead generation cards can also provide calls to action to encourage those targeted to do something positive such as visit your website, follow your social accounts, sign up to a newsletter, and other useful ways to grow your business.

You can also advertise with video – the concept is the same as search engine PPC, though. You have a set budget and each interaction takes a little bit of a bite out of it. Research and target your audience carefully and creatively for maximum impact.

Video/YouTube PPC

Video has become one of the easiest and most consumed medium across the internet. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube - all rife with "snackable content" and each lets you engage with customers through biddable media channels. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world; no wonder with one billion hours of video viewed daily. And with it being owned by Google, it also has effective bidding software thanks to its unique TrueView platform.

TrueView allows advertisers to display in-stream and in-display adverts to viewers on a cost-per-view basis. Ads can appear before a YouTube video, or can be displayed in search results or next to videos themselves.

You can be charged depending on how long a person decides to watch your advertisement. If they opt out before 30 seconds, for instance, you won’t be charged for an in-stream ad. If they click on an in-display ad, though, you’ll be charged as soon as the ad is clicked no matter if they watch or not.

Other things to consider

These are arguably the most popular and effective forms of biddable media currently available to businesses. There are also other measures such as display advertising, remarketing, sponsored posts on websites and paid social endorsements.

But there are other things to consider alongside the channels you’re using, who to target, and where your budget needs to be spent.

Probably the most important thing to consider is the impact of your website and the pages you’d like potential customers to land on. Think of yourself as a web consumer. If you visited a website you’d never been to before and it didn’t look up to scratch, would you feel comfortable making a purchase on it?

Web design and development features also need to be considered to help raise confidence amongst visitors. Does the site load quickly? Is the checkout process safe and secure? Is the buying cycle smooth and effective? Are your product copy and images optimised, effective, and attractive? Is your social presence clean and helpful?

Biddable media channels provide a quick and effective way to get your brand out to big audiences. You can achieve large returns quickly while your inbound strategy is taking effect. However, a lot of preparation and planning needs to be put into place to get the maximum return possible from your investment.