Social media advertising is a paid digital marketing strategy. Unlike unpaid marketing strategies that create organic reach, such as SEO marketing, it involves paying social media platforms to place ads in front of targeted audiences.
In essence, paid marketing tactics give brands an extra boost in terms of exposure and reach, without which it is now nearly impossible to create an effective marketing campaign.
In fact, the most effective marketing plans involve a mixture of both unpaid and paid methods to build audiences, expand reach, and drive the bottom line.
Five Reasons Social Media Advertising Is a Must
If you don’t have a social media advertising plan in place, you might be wondering why this particular tactic may just be what you need.
Let’s take a look at five reasons why you can’t pass up on this strategy in your marketing campaigns:
Increases Brand Awareness
The first and most obvious reason why brands need social media advertising is the massive number of active social media users worldwide. There are nearly 5 billion people that use social media, and platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tiktok have now become a daily part of people’s daily lives.
A typical Gen Z, for instance, spends the first part of the morning checking their phone and browsing on social media. Placing ads on platforms where your audiences are already increases brand exposure and awareness.
But that’s not the only reason why advertising on social media works so well.
Paid social media ads allow brands to hyper-target specific demographics, which helps make ads relevant and increases the chances of engagement.
Effective Social Proofing Tactic
Advertising on social media is an effective way to highlight customers’ positive experiences, reviews, and recommendations. This not only builds trust and credibility, but it also affects consumer buying behavior.
The more positive reviews and testimonials you get to showcase, the more effectively you will be able to entice people into being buyers instead of merely viewers.
This also allows you to nurture customer relationships so you don’t end up with one-time transactions. It helps foster long-term engagement.
Targets Specific Audiences
Social media platforms can provide crucial user data that allows businesses to target specific audiences.
This ensures that you don’t waste advertising budgets on campaigns that fail at reaching the people that matter to your business. For instance, it can help you bring your brand in front of audiences that can be found in a specific location, belong to a particular age group, or have certain behaviors that favor your campaigns.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube also give valuable insights into the type of behaviors that are happening around your ads.
This data can be used not just to measure your campaign’s success but also to build an audience and craft strategies that will retarget audiences that engage but don’t follow through to a purchase.
Generates Leads
Not enough leads? No problem. Social media advertising is an effective tool for generating leads and even warming up ones that have turned cold. Social media platforms run ads that are meant particularly for lead generation, such as LinkedIn’n InMail, which is ideal when targeting other businesses.
One trick that you can use on your ad campaigns is using clickable action buttons that get your customers straight to the activity that you want them to do. These CTAs can be anything from “Book Now” to “Buy” and should follow an ad that’s creative, attention-grabbing, and engaging.
Simply because Facebook has the largest user base, it is the best platform to use for lead generation, with 82% of B2B marketers preferring it over other sites. However, the largest platform isn’t always the most suitable one for generating leads.
Factors like your audience and industry should play a role when deciding which site is best for generating leads.
Helps You Track ROI
When you advertise on social media, you instantly get insights on your ads’ performance. You will be able to efficiently track ROI using built-in tools that measure metrics, such as cost per lead and return on ad spend.
On Facebook, for example, you get to use Ads Manager tools that give you everything you need to know about your campaign–at a click of a button.
This is invaluable when it comes to determining an ad campaign’s success and when reshaping ads to better match what currently works.
4 Tips for Creating Engaging Social Media Ads
We now know that social media advertising is a necessary tool for driving the success of a brand, regardless of whether it’s new or established.
The Internet is far too saturated with too many brands, which means exposure is now more important than ever if you want to stay relevant.
Here are some tips that you can use when crafting social media ads to make sure they gain the widest possible reach, generate quality leads, and boost conversion.
Know Your Goals and Your Audience
Defining the goals that you want to attain is key to crafting a successful ad campaign. When doing this, strive to be specific, and focus on one main thing. It’s easy to get sidetracked or lose sight of what’s important when you’re trying to reach too many things at once.
So sit down, get a pen and paper, and list your ad’s objectives.
Pro Tip: Define measurable goals instead of vague ideas. This way, they’re easier to track and measure.
Choose the Right Types of Social Media Ads
Once your goals have been established, the next thing to do is choose the types of ads that will give you the results that you need.
To do this, you can do the following:
- Select the most suitable platform. Not all social media sites are alike. Some work best for B2B, some for younger demographics, and some for community building. Knowing your audience will help you determine which platforms are best for ad placement.
- Know what different ad types do. On Facebook alone, you have countless ad type options to choose from. There are your image ads, Messenger ads, and video ads, just to name a few. The same goes for other sites.
Different ad types have varying benefits. For instance, Messenger ads are great for a more personal advertising approach and encourages audiences to start a conversation with a business.
Create Informed Ads
Using insights that you gain from your campaigns, craft ads that are targeted, personalized, and tailor-fit to your audience.
Informed ads, or those that are created using already available information about your market, have a much better chance of success–simply because you’re not shooting in the dark in terms of knowing what gets them to click.
Build a Compelling Advertising Plan with Experts
A campaign that’s not built on an in-depth understanding of how advertising works, your target market, and your business is better not executed at all!
Chances are, you will be spending money on ads that won’t generate the kind of results that you need.
If you want real impact, you can partner with an advertising company that knows how to put your brand right in front of your target market.
NGP-IMC is a trusted name in the PR and advertising industry, with 25 years of success in bridging brands and customers.
Let’s make it happen for your business. Contact us today!
Jossaine Nunez is a freelance article writer, blogger, and SEO-driven maven. While her true passion lies in writing fiction, her love for storytelling extends to helping brands convey their message in ways that are both engaging and helpful for attaining their business goals.
Jossaine’s interests in writing particularly about people, for people – which translates to brand audience engagement – stems from her experience as the Editor-In-Chief of Siliman University’s The Weekly Silimanian, which published slices of life and educational pieces surrounding university life. Her piece, A Review of Leoncio Deriada’s People on Guerrero Street, published in the Silliman Journal on discussions and investigations in the humanities and sciences, earmarks her foray into the world of writing about, and writing for, humans that make the world go round.
