If the millions of active social media users haven’t convinced you that you need digital marketing services on social media, perhaps this will:
Over 300 million businesses all over the world advertise on social media platforms. In addition, global spending on social media advertising is projected to reach $207 billion by 2023, with an estimated annual growth rate of 4.53%.
If that’s any indication of where marketers are focusing their efforts these days, social media is clearly a key tool for driving the bottom line and increasing brand awareness.
Benefits of Paid Social Media Advertising
Both organic and paid social media are effective marketing tools, so why pay to advertise on social media? Is it even worth it?
The short answer is yes.
Here are just some of the main downsides to organic or free social media marketing:
- It takes longer to build a campaign and, consequently, to generate results. In a fast-paced marketplace, time is of the essence. Considering that 43% of Internet users are “social media shoppers”, businesses need to have a sense of urgency when running campaigns to target their share of these online consumers.
- Inability to target segmented audiences. With organic social media, segmented audience targeting is practically impossible. Because of this, posts don’t generate desired results or reach objectives.
However, with enough creativity, knowledge of your audience, and consistency, you can reach your social media objectives without having to pay for ads. In fact, you don’t have to let go of organic efforts and go full-on paid advertising.
The better approach is to employ a combination of both organic and paid social media advertising. Why?
You’ll want these benefits of paid advertising to complement the slower but long-term results of your organic campaigns:
- Ad launch speed. With paid advertising, your market gets to view your content as soon as you go live.
- Audience targeting. One of the most useful benefits of paid social media is that you get to target specific audiences where they are. This maximizes your ROI by sending your content to audiences that are most likely to be interested or ready to convert or engage.
- Expanded reach. Paid social media also brings your ads in front of more users, increasing your exposure and brand awareness.
- Ability to determine what works. Thanks to analytic tools that come with paid advertising, businesses are able to gauge which strategies work, and which don’t, enabling them to tailor future campaigns according to what’s effective.
Why Measure ROI?
Paid social media advertising is an investment. In order for you to determine how well it’s helping you attain your objectives, specifically monetary ones, you need to measure your return on investment or ROI.
This is the value that your campaigns generate compared against the value that you spend to build those campaigns. Ideally, your ROI should be greater than your investment. This means that your campaigns are achieving the intended monetary metrics.
Without timely tracking and measuring your ROI, it’s hard to determine a campaign’s success. The values that you get also give insight on where you can improve–and how.
5 Ways to Boost Social Media Advertising ROI
If you’re unsatisfied with your existing social media ROI, here are things you can do to gain better results:
Define Clear Objectives
The way you measure your ROI will depend on the specific objectives that you set. For instance, one business may want to focus on increasing video views and engagement for a campaign.
This has to be clearly identified at the planning stage in order for the proper metrics to be in place. The more specific you are when defining what you want to achieve, the better.
This will help you be more accurate when determining whether your investment has generated the kind of results that you want to see, based on your intended outcome. It’s easy to get sidetracked by other insights, especially when those are doing pretty well!
Measure Results According to Your Goals
Social media platforms like Facebook give valuable insights on certain metrics. But you don’t have to rely purely on these insights to monitor your campaign’s performance and ROI.
You can use other methods that draw data on specific activities around your posts, such as:
- URL shortening services. These can draw important data on how many times people clicked on your social media posts.
- Sophisticated analytics tools. You can use a suite of tools to perform real-time tracking of every post in your campaign, breaking down data on ROI per individual post and as a whole campaign.
- UTM parameters. You can manually insert UTM parameters in your social media posts to gain more organized and accurate insights, but you can also use tools that can do this automatically for you. This way, you won’t go scratching your head, trying to figure out which posts belong in which campaign.
Tweak Posts to Fit Social Media Channels
If you’re cross-posting across various platforms, don’t! What may work on Twitter may not be so effective on Facebook. So if you want to post on several platforms, make sure to tweak your content to fit where you’re posting.
For instance, Twitter is best for short-form content that’s all about opinion-sharing and community building, while Instagram is ideal for sharing eye-catching images and videos.
Remember that you don’t necessarily have to be on every existing social media platform. You just have to know where your audience is and focus on it.
Run Social Media Experiments
The thing about social media is that it changes fast. The trends that people rave about now may be forgotten tomorrow. What works for your campaigns now may not be the best course of action for your future campaigns.
And there’s no better way to test the waters than to run experiments to see how people respond, what gets them to act, and what turns them off.
Create Informed Campaigns
To constantly improve your campaigns, inform your strategies with data from social media experiments, research, and social listening.
This can only be done with a dedicated digital marketing agency that can help you create informed, tailor-fit strategies.
If you aren’t working with one yet, get in touch with us to jumpstart your social media marketing campaign!
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.
