Social advertising: some important things to consider
Organic posts are often not enough if you want to grow your business on social media. Usually, you need to have a mix of organic and paid advertising. Social media advertising is a kind of digital marketing that uses social channels to deliver paid ads to your target audience.
These types of ads are a fast and effective way to connect with your customers. They allow you to hyper-target your audience and deliver personalised content based on both user behaviour and demographics. Social advertising is incredibly cost-effective, too, offering the potential for considerable rates of return.
More and more brands are implementing social advertising into their digital marketing strategy to grow their business and reach new audiences. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, our recommendation is to get familiar with social advertising. However, there are a few important things to consider before you get started. Let’s dive into them below!
How can social advertising benefit businesses?
Social advertising has many advantages for businesses. If your marketing strategy does not already include social media ads, you could potentially miss out on an opportunity. That is an opportunity to connect with more people, nurture better customer satisfaction levels, and generate greater conversions.
1. Improved brand visibility and awareness
The biggest benefit of social advertising is that it makes more people aware of your business. Promoting your business and its services and products across social channels only improves brand awareness. Even before conversions and clicks happen, you are showcasing your brand to millions of people by utilising social media ads.
Showcasing your brand this way boosts your brand visibility and gets people thinking and talking about you. Whether you are a new business or well-established, the exposure social media ads create can lead to greater conversions and new leads for your brand.
2. Increased brand loyalty
Along with improving brand visibility and awareness, you can also expect social advertising to increase brand loyalty. This is because you are engaging with customers where they are: on social media and creating a customer base that feels valued.
Social advertising can be a great way of showing social proof, which ultimately transforms potential customers into lifelong buyers. Through social advertising, you can share case studies and customer testimonials to drive this social proof.
3. It comes at a low cost
Out of all the advertising options out there, social advertising is one of the most affordable. It is also very cost-effective. Most of the models operate on a pay-per-view (PPV) or pay-per-click (PPC) basis.
This means you only actually pay when a person views or clicks on the ad. With this in mind, you can keep your advertising costs down and only pay money when a genuine action is taken.
4. Social advertising is easy to use
Advertising on social media is incredibly easy, thanks to having such a user-friendly interface. You can easily manage your ad campaigns through managers like Facebook Ads Manager. Here you can set up the demographics and set the goals you would like to achieve.
Additionally, most of the platforms have guides, so you know exactly how to set up your campaign. When you are about to publish your ad, you can also monitor its performance easily and use the results to make decisions o how to optimise future advertisements. Some of these platforms even allow you to create reports so you can see what worked and what didn’t.
5.You’ll receive in-depth results
Another great thing about social advertising is that you have a wealth of statistics and analytics to review. You will be able to view how well the campaign is performing and how your past advertising campaigns performed. This means you can make changes, so future campaigns are more successful.
Additionally, you can use these insights to improve other parts of your business. For example, you might realise people are really responding to the social advertisements, so it may be time to up your organic social game.
6. Boost leads and get higher conversion rates
Finally, social advertising helps you boost leads and get higher conversion rates. According to Survey Monkey, nearly half of all social media users (48 per cent) have purchased something after seeing an ad on social media. If you want to boost website traffic and increase conversions, social advertising is the place to begin.
On the topic of leads, social advertising helps you get your business in front of more people and widen your customer base. Creating and running specific lead-generation ads helps your business grow immensely.
They are the ideal solution for customer-facing businesses. You can utilise these ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even TikTok now. In fact, TikTok has a helpful lead generation tool we spoke about in a previous social blog.
What to consider with social advertising
The benefits of social advertising are clear, but there are still a number of things you should consider before getting started. Firstly, think about where your specific audience is spending their time. For instance, do you get a lot of engagement from Facebook or Instagram?
Is TikTok where most of your DMs are coming from? You want to be as strategic as possible, and selecting the platform where your audience is is a great place to start with social advertising. Secondly, what action do you want them to take from your advertisement? Do you want them to visit your website?
Perhaps you want them to sign up for an event or get in touch about a service you offer. Either way, you need to be clear about what you want your audience to do before you set up your ads. Once you understand these two elements and the results you would like to achieve, you are ready to set up your first advertising campaign on social.
Advertising MUSTS
Now that you understand the basics let’s get into best practices for running social media advertisements. The first thing to look at is audience targeting. You want to make sure you are targeting potential customers and existing customers.
In the ads manager section of most social platforms, you can select demographics like gender, interest, age, and occupation. These are really helpful for narrowing down who you want to target.
Making sure you target the right people is ultimately more cost-effective! Another important aspect of social advertising is improving your social media game. You should repurpose and promote your organic content across your various profiles to support your ads.
Doing so will help you stand out from the crowd and communicate your brand story. Making sure your ads are suitable for mobile is also a must considering the digital age we are currently in. Your ads should fit on a mobile screen but also be designed with smartphone users in mind. What does this mean exactly?
The ad should have large and clear text, legible branding, and intriguing graphics. Including the right keywords and working is essential too. The imagery alone will not convert customers; the content of your ad will also play a vital role in converting users into customers.
Summary
Social media marketing is a powerful way to grow your brand, but social advertising should play an important role in any strategy. There are so many benefits of social advertising for businesses, and we have witnessed this first-hand with our clients. If you are interested in delving into social advertising to get more leads and higher conversions, get in touch with us!