Build reach by building a solid media plan.

Test, optimize, and scale your reach through online advertising.

Utilize paid media advertising in the digital space to bring awareness to your brand, test your messaging, get your core value proposition in front of your audience, and/or drive well-targeted leads in volume to your offers. It’s a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal, and our strategic experience putting it into action for fintech and financial services companies can help you hit your goals.

Our Paid Media Advertising services include:

Acquisition & advertising strategy development
Audience targeting
Paid media campaign management
Campaign testing & optimization
Tracking, analytics, and reporting
Creative concept & ad development
Design and copywriting
SEM – Google Ads, AdWords, Bing/Microsoft
Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads & other social media advertising
Display advertising
Programmatic ad buying
Native ad buying
Video advertising
Remarketing & lead nurturing

Digital Advertising is Not About Short-Term Gains

While some companies elect to inconsistently dabble in paid media advertising, the real gains are found through a well-planned, well-executed digital advertising strategy that tests, refines, optimizes and grows its effectiveness over time. The learnings from your campaigns in the early days can be significant, leading to massive jumps in cost efficiency per click or lead as you build up. Too many times though, online advertising campaigns and programs are abandoned early, interpreting early results as failure instead of having the commitment and patience to learn and optimize to hit your goals. A long-term outlook can prove to be highly fruitful.

Working with you, we set up clear milestones and objectives to focus our work as part of the advertising strategy we compile to direct the ad campaigns. We define and segment the target market and audience, identify the key platforms and tools that make sense for that audience, and develop unique creative ads to deliver the message. From the strategy, we often recommend to start slow, learn from early data we collect, and then methodically optimize and increase volume in a controlled, sustainable way towards your goals. Once optimized, we can shift the strategy and approach to find the most efficient path to scaling real, meaningful volume and manage those campaigns over time.

Our team of copywriters and designers work collaboratively with our paid media channel experts to develop unique, compelling ads that aim to reflect your brand and transform leads into conversions. By understanding the relationships between strategy, design, content, and marketing, we work together to understand the right space for your message to reach your audience – from paid search on Google Ads and social media advertising on the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn, to video, display, programmatic, and native advertising. Then we utilize strategies such as ad retargeting and email nurturing to continue to reinforce your message and ensure the audience is well aware of the unique value you provide.

All of our digital advertising work is directly tied to our core as digital marketing expertise in the financial sector. Aligning your marketing strategy and paid media strategy only serve to amplify your efforts and brand. Marketing through organic SEO, content marketing, social media and other channels can augment advertising, balance costs, and be the fuel to power your entire marketing engine. Whether you’re a fintech start-up or established financial services business, we employ the necessary tactics you need to reach audiences, boost customer conversions, and increase ROI.

The Power of Paid Media Advertising for Capturing Your Audience

Imagine your ideal customer is in the market for just the service your fintech or financial services brand offers. Probably the first thing they do, what we all do in this digital age, is search online.
And they’re faced with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of search results for them to trawl through. Let’s face it, they’re not going to look at every single one of those results, so it pays for your business to be up there at the top.

They might not even be searching, because they might not yet realize that they need what you can give them. But they’re still online, browsing, reading, watching videos, or using social media. And everywhere they are online is an opportunity for your business to show up in the form of paid ads.

With a seemingly limitless amount of information available to us online, using paid media advertising to get you in front of your audience isn’t just something to do if you have leftover budget. It should be an essential part of your overall growth plan via your marketing and digital advertising program.

Here’s everything you need to know about paid media.

What is Paid Media Advertising?

You might have also heard paid media advertising be referred to by other names, like digital advertising, online advertising, or paid media. It’s any marketing strategy that involves paid placement, including things like ‘pay-per-click’ (PPC), social media ads, native advertising, and more.

The aim of paid media is to get you in front of the right audience, in the right place, and at the right time. It’s strategic, targeted, and works fast. It can be throttled and optimized in very controlled ways. As well as specifically crafting paid ads, you can pay to promote your existing content or social media activity to really reinforce your brand’s message.

Here are some of the most common types of paid digital advertising that could benefit your fintech or financial services business:

Search Advertising (SEM)

The aim of SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is for your business to be visible to potential customers in the search results. While SEO offers a free, holistic way to show up in the search engines, it’s a long-term strategy that takes time to build value. Combining SEO with SEM gives you the most effective and strategic recipe to draw attention to your business.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is a SEM model where you pay, as the name suggests, for every click on your advert. It’s most commonly offered by search engines and social media platforms. Of course, the aim is that the value your business gets from each click outweighs the cost of that click (often around $1-2).

Display Advertising

You know those visual ads you see when you visit websites or you’re on social media? That’s display advertising. Display ads, usually including images or videos, are designed to entice people to click through to the brand’s website. While typically more expensive than SEM ads, they can pack a much larger brand and message impact, and those visual cues can often be remembered and recalled more easily by your audience in the future.

Programmatic Advertising

A sophisticated method of placing digital ads, programmatic advertising uses automation to buy digital selling space. Platforms (demand side, or DSP, for brands and supply side, or PSP, for publishers) use data and algorithms to place ads in the most optimized space. It’s an effective way of making sure you’re spending your ad money in the most fruitful way.

Social Media Advertising

You can run ads on pretty much all of the social media platforms, and you can target your ads as broadly or tightly as you want (and your budget allows!). We know how many people behave on social media, so advertising where your potential customers hang out online, and on platforms that collect and utilize their data to more accurately target them, is a relatively simple way of getting your brand in front of the right folks.

Native Advertising

Native advertising is paid media advertising that’s crafted to blend in with the existing page or platform content. Their goal is usually brand awareness and value over sell, sell, sell, so they’re not as obvious as most paid ads. While you need to understand the platform you’re advertising to get your content to match, it’s a successful way of boosting conversions and growing your brand awareness.

Retargeting

Retargeting uses Javascript code, ‘cookies’, to follow your website visitors once they click away and visit other sites. The cookie lets retargeting platforms know who to serve ads to, meaning they’re reminded that your business exists and, hopefully, they come back to your site to take action.

Paid Media Advertising Platforms

There are many different platforms for paid media advertising, including but not limited to:

Search engines:

  • Google Ads
  • Bing Ads
  • YouTube (yes, it’s a massive search engine)

Social media:

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest

Ad networks:

  • Facebook Audience Network
  • Google AdSense
  • mMedia
  • Adknowledge
  • Yahoo Network
  • Apple Advertising

Other:

  • Direct ad placements with websites and publishers

This list might seem sizable, and it isn’t even all of it. When you’re looking for support with paid media advertising, you need to make sure you’re working with strategists that are more than just experts in digital advertising. You need an agency partner that understands the fintech and financial services world, the spectrum of digital marketing, and be able to produce great creative concepts and campaigns.

In a digital landscape that’s extremely competitive, what’s going to make your digital ads stand out, and stand out to the right audience?

CSTMR offers creative and informed paid media advertising as part of an overall growth strategy that aligns perfectly with your brand’s needs and audience. Laser focused and measurable, the digital advertising campaigns we create can support you on your journey to smashing your business goals.

Certifications

Customer Stories

UniTeller needed to compete with bigger names in the crowded and competitive global payments space.

Looking to grow, optimize, or launch your financial services marketing?