In the world of digital marketing where every click counts, industries are turning to a variety of tactics to reach their audience at the right place, at the right time, with the right message. Paid marketing is a powerful tool that businesses utilize to enhance visibility and drive conversions, allowing them to appear exactly when and where their customers are whether that’s searching for solutions or browsing the web. The focus with this strategy is on seizing attention, sparking engagement, and driving sales.
Welcome to our multi-part series created for manufacturers navigating the marketing world. In this post, we’ll tackle paid media for manufacturers, discussing various tools and strategies that contribute to real-world success. Let’s explore how manufacturers can harness paid advertising to optimize their marketing initiatives.
What is Paid Media Marketing?
Paid marketing involves targeting audiences online by placing ads on digital platforms where potential customers are likely to engage. This includes search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google or Bing, social media such as Meta, LinkedIn, or Reddit, display ads that appear on websites, and more.
Manufacturers should employ a comprehensive approach when it comes to paid media, taking advantage of a variety of channels where their target audience is likely to be found.
Search Marketing for Manufacturers
Search marketing encompasses two primary methods- search engine optimization (SEO), focusing on organic efforts, and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising which lives in the paid media realm.
PPC advertising involves paying for ad space on search engine results pages like Google or Bing. Ads are triggered when specific keywords or search queries are used, ensuring businesses appear when users are actively seeking related products or services.
Many businesses are utilizing this space to reach their target audience which is why manufacturers can ensure they’re capitalizing on their efforts by:
- Investing time in keyword research. Identifying relevant terms and phrases that potential customers are searching for allows you to tailor campaigns to target keywords effectively.
- Optimizing landing pages to ensure they closely align with the ad messaging and keywords being used. This makes it easy for users to find what they need and take action.
- Utilizing features such as geo-targeting to focus ads on specific demographics or regions that are relevant to your business.
- Taking advantage of tools that help maximize reach and optimize conversions across various channels.
- Continuously monitoring campaign performance metrics and optimizing based on insights to improve the ads over time.
- Regularly analyzing competitor strategies and ad placements to identify opportunities to refine your approach and differentiate your offerings and messaging.
Paid Advertising Tools to Help Manufacturers with Campaigns
Paid media strategy doesn’t just consist of understanding your own business (or in our case, our client’s business). A crucial component of these strategies lies in understanding competitors whether locally or nationally and the types of creatives they are putting into the ad space.
As a result, we’ve turned to using Google’s Transparency Center, a great tool to help marketers gauge the competitive landscape. It works by scraping any brand or URLs that ads run across all of the Google Networks (Search, Display, YouTube, etc.) and compiling them for analysis purposes. This comes in handy when comparing our copy and creative against competitors we or the client admire to identify areas of opportunity in our creative strategy.
Another tool to take advantage of is AI. It’s useful for getting those first drafts of ad copy and keyword lists on paper. Like most AI outputs, it has the ability to get you most of the way there. Although AI-driven content may initially lack a personal touch, it lays a solid foundation that we can refine.
While we may tweak copy to align with brand voice and customer expectations, we usually end up leaving a lot of the structure in place. Because Google is very algorithm-based, AI is better able to mimic its way of thinking than a human could. So, while the ad copy that AI creates may feel robotic or impersonal, it’s more likely to receive high ad scores from Google which ultimately leads to better ad placement and engagement.
Manufacturing Success Stories with Paid Media
We’re always staying up to date with the latest industry news on paid media, testing new tools, and exploring different strategies to reach our clients’ goals. One example of the success we’ve seen this year comes from leaning into Google’s new product, Performance Max.
Performance Max allows marketers to take advantage of Google Ads’ entire inventory and promote across YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, Gmail, and Maps from a single campaign while complementing keyword-based Search campaigns.
Using this, we were able to increase engagement for our manufacturer client’s eCommerce business as well as increase overall conversions on their local equipment and rental businesses.
When using Performance Max campaigns to drive shopping ads, the click-through rate (CTR) increased by 16% year over year (YoY), and the conversion rate by 13%. This is due to Performance Max using smart signals so that Google can more accurately predict which users are more likely to engage with the ads and show users more ads across different channels creating a multi-channeled approach.
Using Performance Max campaigns at a local level to drive in-store traffic and overall brand awareness also led to positive results. When used on their equipment business, we saw over 3 million impressions and increased conversions by 127%. On the rental side of their business, impressions grew 12% YoY, and conversions grew by 627% YoY.
Staying at the forefront of industry trends and harnessing new tools can lead to remarkable success and help manufacturers thrive in a competitive landscape. These outcomes emphasize the impact of paid media strategies in achieving measurable results for manufacturers.
The Takeaway
For manufacturing businesses looking to stay competitive in a digital-first world, leveraging paid media marketing is crucial. Implementing these strategies can effectively boost visibility, achieve sustained growth, and increase ROI.
Looking for a partner to lead you through your next paid media strategy? Learn about our one-to-one and then some relationships we build with clients ready to optimize their campaigns.
Ready to jump right into collaborating? Contact our team today to set up a chat with your new strategic marketing partner.
