<aside> <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/2c7a8a1f-a60c-4a00-b3ef-ba5c0ff29cbd/information.png" alt="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/2c7a8a1f-a60c-4a00-b3ef-ba5c0ff29cbd/information.png" width="40px" /> There are three main ways to reach people and engage potential customers. Paid media is one of them. Paid media is any media channel that you must pay for. Paid media is often used to reach people you cannot reach for free via owned or earned media, but it can be used to reach and influence customers at every point along their journey. Some examples are below.
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Paid media is often used to reach people you can't reach using earned or owned media, but there are other ways to use it. You can use paid media to reinforce all parts of the marketing funnel, from the very top to create and drive general awareness to the very bottom to optimize for shopping conversions.
The top of your marketing funnel is often labeled as AWARENESS. This is often the very first step along any listener journey. When balancing the interest vs. awareness equation, people must first become aware of your product to possibly become interested in your product. And this is where general awareness comes into play. Your objective with awareness advertising is to make the target population generally awareness and interested to take the next step along their listener journey.
You should not try to ask for a sale at this step. You first need to get people interested. Show them a video, something exciting, a favorable review, etc to engage them and get them interested in taking the next step.
This type of spend is often expensive because listeners need multiple touch points and repeated impressions for the advertising message to sink in. For example, if you're trying to reach every single rap music fan in the United States, you must have a large budget to show the target population your message enough times.
You can use paid media to optimize your acquisition strategy. But your targeting must be precise. A few ideas:
You can also use paid media to optimize engagement. An easy example of propping up engagement with paid spend is to conduct a social media audit and determine your top social media posts. Identify your top social media posts and then put paid spend behind it to show it to more fans or potential fans.
You can also launch a viral sweepstakes that encourages fan engagement and then put paid spend behind the campaign. More people will see the sweepstakes, more people will enter, and more people will engage.
