Paid media (or biddable media), particularly paid search (PPC) is often overlooked as a strategic lever or channel within an integrated digital marketing mix. It’s commonly seen as the quick-to-market and quick-to-deliver-results channel, using an archaic last-click attribution model to define its success.
However, PPC is reaching a crossroads in its maturity as a product, and too many are still expecting the old recipe to deliver success. Whilst it still can show some benefits, plenty of marketers continue with the tried and tested formula without embracing paid media as the agile channel it really is.
Here at Six & Flow, we view your paid media strategy a little differently. We don't just see it as a tap to gain leads in a last click sense, as is the current outdated model – working to a budget and a pre-defined KPI to work to, such as CPL.
We see it as a valuable integration with our inbound marketing approach, we see paid media and the myriad of channels it encompasses as an important lever to growing a business. Through paid media, we’re not only delivering performance, we’re assisting performance through our attributed views, and we’re collecting valuable data about your target audience at a much quicker rate. Data we then aggregate, cohort and segment to effectively understand your purchasing funnel and sale cycle.
These collection sprints are accrued through a number of effective strategies, in which we can approach your target audience at any given stage of the purchase funnel. This isn’t just ongoing analysis we use to optimise paid media in isolation either; this is data we feed back into our broader inbound strategies.
If a client or business is to grow, it needs to understand its target audience’s behaviour, whether that be on-site, interaction with digital marketing touch points, CRM behaviour, in-app behaviour or even lapsed consumer states. This is an ongoing process, it doesn’t just begin and end in one collection phase; seasonality, technological, competitor and general landscape of the vertical can change rapidly. Therefore, we continue to map data and interrogate data sets to pick out these changes.
Surely it would make sense that in order for a business to grow, each channel would need to be aligned, with their performance and own data sets informing other channels. However, rarely have I seen this in my time within paid media.
Paid media offers an easy way to penetrate the market, collect data and plug the initial gap for a business new to market - but it's ultimately difficult to master, especially when agencies reach a growth plateau in their paid efforts.
Here at Six & Flow, we see it as a vital conduit to inform all other strategies, moving and optimising towards a bigger goal. Only when channels are aligned and synchronised can you scale your growth.
It’s time to start viewing paid media a little differently, especially given that Google themselves are trying to kill the last-click attribution model with the introduction of Google Attribution 360 as a product. This product will pull in data-driven attribution models from AdWords, Google Analytics and DoubleClick in order to show value to more top-of-funnel touchpoints; mobile, display, video, social, etc.
Attribution and data-informed marketing is THE digital marketing trend of 2018 (something we’ll be covering on the Six & Flow blog next!) and it’s time to become an early adopter rather than sitting on the last-click fringes!