Don't jump into paid media. Avoid the blackhole of money.

You may have been told that in order to improve your brand, you need to invest in paid advertising. And while paid media can give your brand a boost, a better piece of advice would be: don’t jump into paid media just yet.

Paid media is like a maze that you need to understand in order to achieve meaningful results and make informed decisions. So… don’t dive into paid media unless you and your brand are truly ready.

Before you start with paid advertising, you need to ensure your brand development is fully in place, so here's a list of things you need to have figured out before venturing into the maze of paid advertising.

1. Understand your audience

Before spending money on ads, you’re going to want to understand your target audience. Who are they? What are their pain points, needs, and desires?

If you don’t know your audience well enough yet, it’s highly likely you won’t see satisfactory results, which will lead to wasted money.

Offering your product to the wrong audience is like showing up in a desert full of camels and putting up a sign that says: Strollers for Sale. If they’re not the right people, they won’t buy.

This comes into play when the different ad platforms provide a dizzying array of demographic segments to choose from. You want to get as specific as you can to both keep your ad spend down, and ensure you’re reaching the people most receptive to what you’re offering.

The other option is to go wide, like anyone who lives in America, wide. And then try to see who clicked on your ad. Sounds good, right? The ad platform does the work for you! Well, that’s great, but only if you want to spend a bunch of money advertising to all the people who aren’t interested in what you’re offering until you eventually hit on the right audience.

Extra Tip: Use organic methods like surveys, social listening, or the engagement you gather from your socials to gain insights into your audience's interests and demographics.

2. Identify your brand voice

Before pushing out paid media, your brand’s voice and identity should be clearly defined. This helps ensure that paid ads are consistent with your brand’s image and message.

Defining your brand identity is a critical first step in creating a memorable and impactful presence in the market. At the core of this process is the creation of clear and comprehensive brand guidelines.

These guidelines serve as a blueprint for everything your brand stands for—its visual elements, tone of voice, color palette, typography, and more. Without them, it's easy for your brand to appear inconsistent or disjointed, which can confuse your audience and dilute your message.

Alongside these visual elements, establishing a consistent brand voice is key to ensuring that your messaging resonates with your target audience across all platforms.

It can be helpful to write these out. Start by putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. What would a customer say about your brand and their experience after having an ideal interaction with you? Where would you like to come down on Inexpensive vs luxury? Happy to engage in talking vs curt but efficient? Family vs professional? Part of defining who you are is defining who you aren’t.

Once you feel like you know your brand voice and look, ask your friends what they think. It’s helpful to give a couple options and ask which they think best exemplifies what you’re going for.

3. Optimizing your website or landing pages

This is essential!

Optimized website—Sending paid traffic to an under-optimized website or landing page can result in wasted ad spend. A website with slow load times, poor UX, or unclear calls to action will turn away visitors, regardless of how well-targeted the ads are.

4. Build a solid organic strategy

Did you know that more than half of social media users research brands on social media before buying?

Now that you’ve locked in on your voice, it’s time to test it with a broader audience. You can do this organically–before you start paying for media–by simply posting on social media. This can be a series of posts promoting your business or blog articles.

Building a strong foundation with organic strategies (like content marketing, SEO, and community engagement) is crucial before considering paid media. Organic growth is a long-term play but it sets you up for paid media success by giving you clearer insights into what resonates with your audience.

One of the most effective ways to optimize your marketing efforts without wasting resources is by running small organic experiments before committing to a larger investment.

A common method is running A/B tests, where you compare two variations of a social media post, email subject line, or ad copy to see which one generates better engagement or higher conversion rates.

For instance, you might test two versions of a Facebook post: one with a question in the caption and one with a bold statement, and track which one gets more likes, comments, or shares.

Make sure to know what your audience thinks of your product before trying to make a bigger awareness with publicity.

5. You’re ready!

Once you feel confident about the above steps, you’re ready for Paid Media.

If you jump into paid media before you’ve locked in your audience, brand, and messaging, you risk wasting money on ineffective ads directed at the wrong people.

And as a final piece of advice, keep in mind that you need to set your budget expectations and goals.

Paid media campaigns, when done right, require an ongoing budget. If you’re not ready to allocate a consistent budget for your ads, it’s better to wait.

Make sure you establish a list of goals, or a number of results that you want to achieve with your paid media, start with a small ad spend, test results, and gradually scale once you see a return on investment.