Paid Media Masterclass: How to Effectively Brand Your Business with Paid Ads

All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed that meditation music because I sure did. So we're going to wait maybe another minute or two before we get started here. Today we're going to be talking about a lot around paid media, paid media versus Brand, so performance marketing, sorry, versus brand marketing. Why paid branding matters, which we'll talk about in a second as well. And when to brand. So there's a lot to cover in this session. But before we get going, if you all can type in the chat right now, tell us where you're coming from. And that way, it's always good to just see where people are coming from. Because I know Steph, you're calling in from, is it still Amsterdam?

I'm in Belgium.

Why did I say Amsterdam? Belgium. So Belgium, what time is it right now?

It is 6:32 PM.

6:32 PM. Okay. All right. Well, guys, Steph's working overtime for this webinar. So everyone, everyone stay till the end. It's going to be good. If you stay till the very end, we're going to have some extra goodies for you. We got people coming in from Astoria. It looks like Oregon. We got people coming in from London, Canada as well. We got Beth and Mexico. So we've got people coming in from everywhere, all around the world, just to listen to this wonderful webinar. So without further ado, what's gonna happen here is I'm gonna let Stephanie introduce herself. She's our wonderful Director of Paid Media over here at Single Grain. So Steph, without further ado, it is yours. The stage is yours.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Eric. So we'll start with a quick introduction into who I am, and then we'll dig more into how to effectively brand with paid advertising. So diving on in, who am I? I am the director of paid media here at Single Grain. I have over 12 years of paid ad experience. I've helped manage over $125 million in paid ad spend and launched over a million campaigns. So I've managed budgets as small as $500, as large as $20 million a month, everything in between. I've also run ads on things like Snapchat, Pinterest, Google, Bing, TikTok, Amazon, obviously Meta. Name a platform, I've probably run an ad there at some point in my tenure. So that's a little bit more into my background. And as Eric mentioned, I'm currently in Belgium. So to get started today, we're going to start talking through performance marketing versus brand marketing. And what's the difference? Why you need to run both and when is a good time to lean into brand marketing. What are those key moments that go, yes, I absolutely need to run this brand? Also, we're going to talk about how to measure it, since a lot of times something like this, as you can see this Nike commercial here, how would you measure that? It's on your TV. Maybe you can see how many people have cable, got to see it, but what does that really do for your bottom line? We're gonna talk about that. We're also gonna dig into a few case studies. So how we've seen it work for a couple of our clients here at Single Grain. And then a few practical next steps for you guys so you can take away something to really implement in your business. So to start with, performance marketing versus brand marketing. You need both, to be fair, but most businesses we see lean very heavy into performance marketing. These are those campaigns that are built to drive the all-powerful ROAS. So you have that last-click attribution on something like here, Google Nike shoes. These are people who search for you, they know you by name, and then they click and they buy. You can also run performance marketing on Meta where you're steering people right to maybe your Meta Shop or a very specific product page, things like that. So that's where more performance marketing comes from. Now brand marketing is getting people to know Your brand. So how do they know to search for you? How do they know that they want that Nike shoe? How do they have that investment, that feeling, that emotion of, you know, triumph, of joy? You know, maybe that negative emotion of frustration. Slack's really good at some of their commercials of building that frustration with, you know, all these different ways to communicate, and then Slack's the answer. So that's where a lot of that brand marketing comes in.

Yeah.

you are able to position yourself in front of people before they're even necessarily looking to buy. So when that moment hits and they go, you know what? That's what I need. And your performance marketing kicks in, they know to search for you. So brand marketing is a big part of the funnel. It's these top 3 pieces. That's 75% of the marketing funnel. This action piece at the bottom, that 25%, that's where you really focus on, okay, conversions, people searching for you, people looking for your solution. But how do you make them aware that they even need your solution or that your solution exists? You do that through brand marketing. Maybe you create awareness that, hey, I, you know, Nike has these new shoes out. Oh, look, that's my favorite athlete in those shoes. That's kind of cool. You know what? They do look really cool. I need, I want that performance too. I'm going to now go and search for Nike. So that's where brand marketing can really help walk people through the funnel to build this bottom bucket of action, of purchases, of revenue even higher. So when do you want to run brand ads? Obviously, I want to say always, but that's not always practical for people. So sometimes you do have, you know, some constraints in your budget. So when are the key moments that you absolutely have to run brand ads? I would say number one, if you're opening up a new location or expanding to a new area. So say you are big in Nashville and you really want to take over the Nashville, Tennessee market. And then all of a sudden you decide, okay, we're doing really well here, but we want to move to Memphis. Well, no one in Memphis yet knows to search for you. So that's where you have to do some branding, some top of funnel, some awareness, get people to know who you are, get people to know your brand and connect to it. Yeah. So that they will go, yes, I like this brand. I do want to work with them, or I want to purchase from them. Another time when you should really kind of look into some of that branding is if you've tapped out your current addressable market. So this happens sometimes when you look at your brand impression shares, maybe on Google or Bing, and you go, hey, we're at 90% impression share for our brand name, and we just can't scale. No one's searching for us. To create that search volume, if you run more of that brand awareness, those brand ads, you can see that search volume actually increase. You will grow your total addressable market by just hitting more people, getting new customers interested. And then another time is those key moments that happen throughout the year. We have Q4 is full of them, but ahead of Halloween, if you are, you know, selling clothes and you have a certain set of orange t-shirts or something. That could be a good time to tie into pumpkins and things like that and then build some of that awareness. Or leading up to Christmas and Black Friday, you want to build awareness for all of the products that you have because come Black Friday, people know probably where they're buying from. So running ads on Black Friday might not get you that return that you want. But if you build up to Black Friday with all of those awareness pieces, getting people interested, then come Black Friday, where they go, Oh, I need to, you know, I should get something for my mom, dad, husband, wife, kid, whomever. I wonder what this business has. I wonder what sale they have. They know to search for you already because they've already thought of you. And again, like I'll say, there's always an opportunity to be running some brand awareness because you should always be looking to scale and get new customers and new people. Make them product aware. So where do you run these ads? There's a bunch of different platform options. Meta is a really strong one a lot of people will use. So is YouTube. But there's no one-size-fits-all strategy here. And of course, these are all just the digital opportunities that you have. You can always run billboards. You can do some mailers. You can put out, you know, maybe wrap a bus. Plus with your company name, the sky's the limit. Now, as far as what we'd recommend for your business, you can't really track a lot of things. And that's where, you know, that branding and that lift kind of comes into play. And there's definitely an aspect of what works for each company. So again, we just took that list on the last screen and divided it into some general buckets. So B2B, you see here, these are the ones that we typically would start with for a lot of B2B clients, whether you be a B2B SaaS customer or maybe you're looking to even just sell products like computers to another business. These are some of the places that people would hang out when they're either in that business mindset or they're looking to shop for that business. B2C, a lot of times these are, again, the places we'd recommend those clients come into play because You'll see more, you know, I don't know of many people who go onto TikTok when they're thinking about their business, but it can be a really strong play if you're targeting a younger demographic. Same thing with something like Pinterest. It can be really good for people who are selling things that are really visually appealing and can really tie into a wider bucket of people. Pinterest can be great for that. If you're selling cookware, Pinterest is awesome. And, but that being said, there's no one size fits all here. So you definitely need to look at where your audience is and that's where you should probably run your ads. Okay. So we're all going to run top of funnel because if people don't know who you are, they can't search for you. So how do you measure it? A lot of times people look at these top of funnel, these leading metrics. And overall, these leading metrics are video view rate, impressions, video completions, hook rate, reach, click-through rate. They're all— we all know this isn't the bottom line. These are your leading metrics, but they are still important to start to evaluate if your campaign's working or not. So yes, you should measure these, but these aren't the metric that you're going to ultimately make your decision off of. You're probably going to make your decision off of more of these metrics. So I'll start from the bottom and I'll work towards number 5. Number 5 is my favorite. But first of all, available branded impressions. Did your brand impression share increase? Did you have more searches month over month? That's a good indication that more people know about you to search for you. Now, tying to that, because again, it only matters if you get more sales. Did you get, did you get more sales? Did you get more leads? Did you, do you have more revenue from that increase in branded impressions? Tying also to that available branded impressions, new customer acquisition. A lot of times these branding campaigns, the new YouTube video that you put out, the Meta video campaign, the Pinterest ads that you're running, they can all lead to new customers discovering you and then buying from you. So that's where that new customer acquisition comes into play. If your revenue stays the same, but you all of a sudden have a much higher new customer acquisition percentage. A lot of times that means you're increasing your overall LTV. Because once you have people's data and they know about you, they'll come back and purchase again. And then LTV growth. So tying into that again, are you increasing the number of times people will come back? Because maybe you do have an aspect of remarketing to this top of funnel. So Nike's a great example of this. I feel like everyone's bought something from Nike at some point, but if they sponsor your country's Olympic team, you might be more likely to go buy a t-shirt from them or something. And they can maybe attribute some of that to a larger lifetime value for you as a customer. Then finally, this is my favorite KPI to look at for almost every marketing campaign that I run, and it's marketing efficiency ratio. So this is the total revenue your business makes divided by your total marketing spend. And this is something you should do across the board for all of your revenue divided by all of your spend. Obviously, we all know that, but for marketing specifically, this helps you to understand exactly how that top-of-funnel campaign plays into that bottom-of-funnel purchase volume versus just giving Google the credit for the increase in branded sales. Because no one knows, no one knows you, no one buys from you. So that's where you have to increase that brand awareness, that brand knowledge, and then eventually you'll increase your overall revenue. So this marketing efficiency ratio, you'll hear me bring this up again later on. Highly recommend you start tracking that if you're not already. All right. So we'll get into a couple of case studies, how this has played out for a few of our clients, and then we'll get to the part I'm sure you're all waiting for about how can we really, you know, nail this for ourselves. So the first case study is from a custom home builder. Overall, they have a very heavy reliance on bottom of funnel with Google to drive MQLs and sales. And our available search volume has was starting to flatten, especially in specific metro areas where we weren't as well known. So our cost per MQL, excuse me, and ultimately cost per customer was starting to creep up because there was a lack of demand on search. So get more people to know who you are so they search for you. What we ended up doing was implementing a Meta top-of-funnel video campaign to get more interest and awareness of Custom Homes and of our brand name in general in specific markets, the ones where we were really struggling. Ultimately, what this ended up doing, we got an increase in branded impressions by almost 20,000 month over month, an increase of MQLs of almost 35 month over month, and a decrease in cost per MQL of $125 to $72 month over month. Now, this has a much bigger impact on your bottom line by just running a $5,000 to $10,000 top-of-funnel campaign. You can drive so much more incremental growth at the bottom of the funnel. Sometimes you'll start that top-of-funnel campaign and your results maybe won't be as quick. As you can see here, we ran the campaign, we saw the improved results pretty much the next month. Sometimes it will take a few months to see this kind of this traffic. And that's where some of those leading indicators come into play, where whether it be video watch rate, video views, website visits from these top of funnel campaigns, time on site, things like that, especially if you have a high ticket item, it can be a longer sales cycle. So that's something to keep in mind as well. But here you can see that you definitely saw a pretty dramatic improvement just from introducing ourselves to our potential clients. Here's the second case study I have for you guys. So one of the challenges we had with a particular e-com client was they always saw really big surges in sales whenever they had a new product drop, but they didn't really do a lot of awareness before this that told people, hey, we have this new toy coming out. It's gonna be really cool. You should definitely look for it on Thursday. No one knew it was coming. So maybe their existing customers did. They'd send emails.

Cool.

Well, they'll go buy the toy. But people who had never heard from them weren't going to come and buy. So that made it really difficult to reach new customers and to really scale your business. So because we knew, all right, these emails are working, they're getting sales off of emails, we're not doing a lot of promotion beforehand. Let's try collecting more emails and targeting some unique audiences. And we'll do it 4 days before the drop. We'll get everyone hyped and excited. We'll collect just the email, so it's a really low lift on the consumer's part in filling out that form. And then when we have that new product go into market 4 days later, we'll send everyone an email that, hey, it's available now, come buy it. And they'll know to come back to the site. Look and purchase it and everyone will win. So essentially, this was something that we decided to test out, pretty low spend, and we targeted about 3 or 4 different audiences. We targeted a music-specific audience, we targeted a soccer-specific audience, we targeted a Comic-Con-specific audience because you can see this product is That's kind of the niche it falls into, just to see where we could get the best performance. And with each of those, we had messaging that matched that audience. So overall, we acquired 508 emails for $0.77 per email, and the drops sold out in 1 minute. So just by creating that hype, by letting people know, hey, here's this new product that's going to drop. Here's when it's going to drop. We already got that initial yes. We already got that email because if you give someone your email, you're much more likely to follow up with them. It's a very easy lift on their part to just type in their email and not have— we didn't even collect name, just email. And once you give someone that initial yes, there's a psychology study where once you get that first little indication that they're interested in you, they're more likely to follow up. So that was a part of what this did, but it also one drove brand awareness. Everyone knew that here's this new drop, here's this new toy that's going to come out. And 2, we were able to sell out without spending an additional advertising dollar during the sale. All right. The part you've all been waiting for, how to get started and implement this for your business. So as I mentioned earlier, first, figure out where your audience hangs out online. There's a bunch of different ways to do this. I listed out 6 of the ways that most people tend to start with here. But pick the one that works best for you. So first, look at your organic social performance. Do— does your Facebook page have a large following? Are the posts shared a lot? Is it Instagram for you? TikTok? Do your tweets or X posts go viral? Look at where people are hanging out and interacting with your business already and test running ads there. Look at your referral pages in GA4. What's sending traffic back to your site? Is it Google? Is great. Then maybe you should invest in some more display stuff. Is it going to be YouTube? Is are you seeing traffic from Facebook? Are you seeing traffic from TikTok? Are people sharing your images on Pinterest and sending a bunch of traffic to the site? Those can all be indications of a new site that you should test out. If you have social buttons on your site, which one has the most clicks? That can be an indication of your current audience, where they hang out, and where they hang out, probably their friends who would also buy from you would also hang out. Tying into that, I'll jump to number 5, survey your current customer base. Again, you can do this through a simple email where maybe they get 10% off shipping next time or They get a free sticker with their next purchase or something little just to get that data. So, you know, okay, here's where they hang out online. This is how they spend their time. That's where I need to advertise. Circling back to 4, audience research through third-party tools or pixels. So there's SparkToro that's out there. And then I would highly recommend you install the LinkedIn pixel on your site if you haven't already. LinkedIn has some really good free data about who visits your site in the LinkedIn Ads Manager. Which you can look through without even running ads. So you can see, especially for my B2B clients, you know, what companies are visiting my site the most often, what job titles, and tailor your messaging towards those. Finally, you can ask ChatGPT, hey, here's my ICP, here's my ideal customer, where are they online? And get your answers that way too. No list is complete without having a little bit of AI on there. Now you know where to start. Now you can narrow it down to how. There's a lot of different ad types out there, whether you want to do carousel ads, single image, video. That's going to vary by platform for which ad type you should look into. I will say though that video on most platforms is definitely worth testing into. Single images at times can be a good winner, and if you have some really pretty visuals, carousel ads can definitely take off. So again, all worth testing. It's just what capabilities do you have today and where do you want to go from here? Exactly. Tying right into my last point, not just the ad type, but the messaging. So maybe you want to test your key value propositions. Maybe you want to test out something about how you beat your competition. Maybe you're a higher quality product and they don't know that. Maybe you have other aspects that your product can do multiple things. Your competition can only do one. That's always really great to test into your messaging. And I would always, always, always recommend testing emotion. A lot of people buy off of emotion, whether you realize it or not. B2B frustration comes into play a lot. The problem that you have, really just, you need to solve that problem so you can highlight that frustration that the person's feeling. For a lot of your other e-com, you know, you can tie into nostalgia, you can tie into joy, you can tie into, you know, determination. So just find that emotion and test what emotion works best for the product that you're trying to deliver. And calling back to measurement, what leading metrics do you want to measure? Do you want to measure video views? Do you want to measure click-through rate, time on site? How do you want to say this creative is working? Because again, a lot of times you have to measure that before you get to your overall revenue numbers, especially with this top of funnel. So do you want to say like overall reach? Do you want to talk about your hook rate and making sure you're really getting people hooked and invested in your video? Those are all can be— there's a different answer for every company, but you definitely want to outline that before you launch your test. And then finally, What metric do you want to use to measure your overall success? I would highly recommend looking into your marketing efficiency ratio. But you know, if you want to just look at your overall branded impressions or your brand's lift, there's a lot of different ways you can do that. So I'll end with this quick pitch with: If you don't know where to start, have a lot of questions, you can reach out to our team here at Single Grain. There's a nice QR code there that you can scan. And we can recommend the top 3 platforms for you to test your business and the key KPIs that you should consider. All right. I think we have a few minutes left. I went over a lot of data. I think I have time to answer maybe 1 or 2 questions depending on how detailed they are. So if anybody has anything they want to drop into the chat, please feel free. And I'll give you guys a few seconds since I know you have to type your question up, and I don't want to just jump on the first one here so we can make sure that we're giving a question that is a little bit more suited for the entire audience. All right, so Here's one of the questions coming in. If I am about to bring a new product line to my local area, um, in my Korean skincare, should I run informational education ads targeted to acquire new customers who might be interested, or should I run an ad-based giveaway free products? So I think it depends on how you really want to what your end-all goal is. I think if people are already searching for Korean skincare in your area, then they don't need the educational side of it. And then maybe just giving away a couple of free products can be a good way to get a lot of chatter and have other people talk about you, which is a great way to really start boosting overall volume and getting more of the organic presence there. But if you don't think people in your area know about the benefits of your product, I would definitely start with a little bit of education and getting more people out there to search for you. And then once they search for you, maybe you have an offer giving people, you know, buy 2, get 1 free, or, you know, buy 1 and have free shipping for the trial size or something like that. What's your favorite channel for someone just starting with paid ads for B2B? So for B2B, I really like LinkedIn because that's where your audience is. But with that, you have to be willing to accept a really high cost per click. And you will have a higher cost per lead, but often your lead is a much higher quality. So that's where, you know, that's a great place to do more of that bottom of funnel. Let's capture people. For overall awareness, LinkedIn just rolled out a video feature and doing more video on LinkedIn can be a really good way to have a lot of awareness without having quite as high of a cost. And you can remarket off of those video viewers with a lower funnel ad. So that's something you can move into for your B2B business. But if you find that you don't have a large enough budget to test there, I would look at maybe testing an on-platform form on Meta since most people are actually on Meta as well. All right. Um, how would you go about measuring branded impression share if you're running both brand search and PMax? I would recommend there's a script you can add by Mike Rhodes. He wrote the script. So if you search for him on LinkedIn and go to his site, you can find it there. But he will have where you can get all of your search terms for your PMax campaign. So you can definitely pull out all those branded terms, but you can also look at adding an exclusion for brand search on PMax. And then that way filter all of your traffic just to your search campaign. A lot of that, a lot of times that's how we like to do it simply because because we want our Performance Max campaigns to be a little bit more for customer acquisition versus just having a lot of our branded search, which we'll put into that brand campaign. Now, for some of our brands, we do run a brand-specific PMax campaign, in which case we'll look at the overall available impressions through, you know, some of those other scripts that Mike Rhodes has really written. So I'd recommend checking those out. All right. With that, we're at time. So thank you guys for all of your time and insights and attention during this. And, you know, hopefully we'll see you all soon. All right.

Bye.

Bye.