Earned media. Effective lobbying. Compelling stories. Strong creative. They’re all important pieces of your advocacy strategy. But sometimes, they’re not enough.

What if you need to generate thousands of emails to lawmakers? Research legislators beyond the committee room? Build large-scale visibility around an issue with a specific constituency? Or mobilize people quickly during a critical moment in a legislative session?

It might be time to add paid media to the mix.

A smart paid strategy can help you reach the right audiences, in the right places, at the right time. Utilizing paid ads to target specific geographic areas or populations can influence public sentiment and quickly drive action.

We’ve written before about the fundamentals of advocacy communications and six steps to amplify your legislative efforts, but paid media deserves its own spotlight.

Here are four examples of times when you should consider adding a paid approach to your advocacy strategy:

1. You Need to Get in Front of Lawmakers

Your lobbyist is doing the inside work. But what happens when a lawmaker closes the meeting room door, heads back to their office or scrolls through their phone between committee hearings? That’s where paid media can extend your reach.

Tactics like geofencing, which allows you to serve digital ads to people based on their physical location, make it possible to target the devices of people inside or near the state Capitol building, in specific legislative office buildings or even at political events and conferences.

Pair that with placements in the statewide political publications lawmakers actually read or their local district newspapers, and you have a direct line to decisionmakers across both their professional and personal media consumption.

The goal here is to amplify the work of your lobby team and make sure your message is impossible to miss, no matter where your key audience is.

2. You Need to Activate Constituents

Often, the most powerful voice a lawmaker can hear is the one of their own constituents. Paid media can be one of the most efficient ways to reach those constituents at scale, whether statewide or in targeted legislative districts, and drive them to take a specific action.

The digital targeting tools available today are remarkably sophisticated. We can reach voters in a specific ZIP code, legislative district or demographic segment and direct them to:

• Send an email or call their lawmaker through an action alert
• Sign a petition
• Attend a rally or community event
• Sign up for your advocacy platform or email list

When Sun King Brewery wanted to change an Indiana law restricting craft brewers, for example, GFM used online action tools and social media to drive nearly 35,000 letters to legislators, ultimately prompting lawmakers to pass the bill. Or when we needed to pass a bill essential to preserving health care access and affordability in Colorado, we quickly activated a month-long campaign to generate thousands of emails to lawmakers and the governor, further amplifying the earned media and lobbying efforts.

Paid media can get your action alert in front of the right people in the right districts at exactly the right moment in a legislative session or during a campaign.

3. You Need to Build Awareness and Shape Public Opinion on an Issue

Not every paid advocacy campaign is about driving immediate action. Sometimes the goal is longer-term: ensuring a critical issue is visible, understood and felt by the public, so that when the moment for action does arrive, the foundation is already laid.

That’s exactly the approach we took with Mind Our Future Colorado, which targeted Colorado voters and youth statewide via social media channels to amplify the importance of youth mental health in the 2026 gubernatorial race and engage youth in the conversation.

This kind of awareness campaign works best when your issue has broad public resonance but still needs visibility, and when you’re playing a longer game of shifting public opinion ahead of a key vote, election or policy window.

4. You Need to Reach an Audience That’s Hard to Reach Any Other Way

Some constituencies are just difficult to reach through traditional earned media or grassroots outreach alone. Young people. Rural communities. Specific professional or demographic groups. Paid media, especially digital, offers targeting capabilities that make it possible to engage these harder-to-reach audiences with precision.

Digital advertising can target by profession, interest, geography, behavior, etc. And niche publications, whether a rural community newspaper or a trade publication read by a specific industry, can put your message in front of a very specific slice of the population that matters to your advocacy goal.

The key is knowing who you need to reach and why, and then building a targeting strategy around that audience rather than defaulting to the cheapest or broadest option.

Paid Media is a Strategy, Not Just a Buy