Whether your goal is to increase awareness of a new service, sell more products, or expand an email-marketing list, paid search and paid social ad campaigns can be a powerful tool for accomplishing large and small business goals. There a few things business leaders and marketers need to keep in mind when implementing paid digital ad campaigns.

1. Start with an end goal: It is important for marketers to consider what their goal outcome will be. Decide who you want your campaign to reach and why. Once you target specific job titles, seniority and an industry for their audience, you can select the best channels to share your digital ad campaign. For example, if you’re looking to promote a business product, email or LinkedIn is likely a stronger choice than Facebook.

2. Prepare a solid foundation: Every aspect of a paid ad campaign can be controlled from keywords, ad copy and ad extensions to the landing page, so it’s important to create a strong foundation of knowledge to make sure you know what your goals are and how to get there. Paid digital ad campaigns offer you a chance to show ads based off of users’ previous intent. Spend time researching your target audience and identifying relevant keywords related to the content, products or services you are promoting on search as well as social channels like LinkedIn.

3. Measure and test: Paid digital ad campaigns allow you the flexibility to make optimizations and changes based on success or failures. Be sure to set KPIs to determine if you are meeting goals — for example, how many people saw your ad and clicked a link. Test different methods to best meet and exceed those goals. Try different keywords to measure what yields more visits to your webpage. Ad platforms enable you to view who is engaging with the advertisements and then determine if the channel reaches the right audience. Be sure to utilize those metrics, tweak and try again.

Paid digital ad campaigns empower new tech companies to reach their audiences on the right platform. By setting a clear goal, doing your research and iterating based on what you learn, paid ads can be a powerful strategy for engaging potential buyers and expanding your reach.