We have the people, products/services, website, and vision. But how do we get people actually to buy from us? Paid media is any form of advertising we pay for, unlike earned or owned media (see chart). And while it may seem like a quick and easy way to get our name out there, there are some things we should know before we dive in headfirst and exploit our budget without focus.

The fastest way to get new business:

Paid media is a great way to get new business, but it can be expensive. This world is a "pay to play" medium going forward — whether it's time or currency, you'll be spending it. The good news is that there are ways to get new business without spending much money on paid media. One way is to use social media to reach out to potential customers. Another way is to use search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure our website appears as the top result for relevant keywords. There are also many free or low-cost online directories where we can list our business. Finally, word-of-mouth marketing can be very effective, so make sure our current customers are happy with our products or services.

Black Book Tactics:

• The other guys: Bing Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and AOL Advertising. These platforms offer different features and benefits that may be more advantageous for certain businesses. For example, Bing Ads offers demographic targeting and dayparting, while Microsoft Advertising provides in-market audiences and advanced location targeting. Additionally, each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, so it's important to choose the one that will work best for your business needs.

• Manual Spotify marketing: If you're looking for an alternative to traditional marketing methods, consider manual Spotify marketing. This approach can be extremely effective in promoting your products, brands and services and reaching new and like-minded listeners. With manual Spotify marketing, you'll need to put in some time and effort to submit your advertising to the right playlist curators and work on targeting profiles for your audio ads. But the payoff can be huge, with thousands of new/younger consumers. Mind you, to ‘keep on the cheap’ cut the audio yourself and start off with minimal budget parsed over variable audience types.

• Podcast advertising: this marketing strategy that allows you to speak directly to potential customers with mini audio ads. You can have select podcast hosts speak about your brand, or hire voice actors to help create audio ads for placement at the beginning, middle, or end of an episode. If you're not sure how to get started with podcast advertising, we offer sponsored segments on many of our titles that run up to two or three minutes - typically around 15 seconds.

• Guerrilla marketing: this time tested force multiplier of alternate campaigning. Guerrilla marketing is all about being creative and thinking outside the box. It's about coming up with new and innovative ways to market your product or service, and then using those methods to reach your target audience. Guerrilla marketing can be very effective, as it allows you to reach people in new and unexpected ways. If you're looking for a lead generation method that will get people talking, then guerrilla marketing is definitely worth considering.

Your Website Is Key:

Having a great website is key to successful paid media campaigns. When we’re ready to launch a campaign, our website needs to be easy for people to find and navigate. This means having clear product descriptions, clear calls to action, and plenty of visuals that draw people in. With the right design elements on our site, we can ensure that visitors stay longer and come back more often. We should also make sure our site is mobile-friendly (it feels like I shouldn’t even NEED to say this but I have been for a decade) so it looks good on all devices. Finally, focusing on analytics will help us measure how effective our paid media campaigns are. By taking an analytical approach to optimizing our ads – making changes based on what works and doesn't work – we can get the most out of every dollar spent on advertising.

Try Before You Buy:

Progressive development and use of content marketing to provide valuable resources our potential customers may be looking for. From blog posts and videos to white papers and ebooks, content is a great way to demonstrate expertise in our industry while also driving traffic back to our website. With carefully planned and executed paid media campaigns, combined with strategic content creation, we can get the word out about what we have to offer without breaking the bank. Think of this as more of an "organic play" initially but with a wicked caveat — it's A/B testing for your paid media submissions.

Who Dat?

List segmentation doesn’t seem on the surface to be a new business tactic, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is key to using a sales funnel and dropping prospects into our email marketing at the right point of their relationship with us. No business should rest its new business initiatives on a single CRM cycle. Personalization of messaging is KEY to ensuring that our prospects feel that we’re speaking to them in a one-on-one dynamic and not simply pushed boilerplate messaging. Therefore, the segmentation of our prospects can look like any number of variables:

• Cold Prospects;

• Referral prospects;

• Related to a seminar;

• From [X] event;

• From leads form;

• From a specific paid advertisement;

• From a specific email;

• “Friends of”;

• Purchased list;

• Current client;

• Etc.;

If you’re going blindly into paid media, you’ll get lift, but without segmentation, a/b testing, and a consistent churn of [rinse and repeat], you’re wasting money and getting a fractional return.