Do You Really Need to Invest in Social Media Advertising?

Let us state the obvious first. Yes. You do really need social media advertising. Whether you are a big business or a small-time hobby shop, social media has to be a big part of your marketing strategy.

In this article, we will show you why you need social advertising, the benefits of social media for business, and some tips to get started with social media marketing. Do read on.

What Is Social Media Marketing

Any marketing campaign involving social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and more comes under social media marketing. You can use the specific ad platforms provided by these social media networks and use official social handles to interact with your clientele.

Social media helps you better connect with your audience and reach a wider set of people, thereby increasing your brand awareness.

Why Should You Be On Social Media?

When around 3.5 billion people all over the world are using social media platforms, why should you not? The major goal behind every marketing drive is to reach as many target audiences as possible. If a platform with millions of users assures you the same, you have to give it a try and make the best use of it. And guess what, your competition is not waiting for you to start social media advertising. They are probably already there. 73% of existing social media marketers believe that it is effective in creating more business opportunities.

A company without a strong online presence will find it rather difficult to gain a loyal consumer base.  Survey results say that, on average, a person spends about 3 hours on social media. And around 54% of them use social media searches to research products.  Such a huge exposure has to be properly taken care of.

Everything from social media ad campaigns, content, customer reviews, and level of engagement you maintain can play a huge role in helping your business succeed.

In the next section, we will discuss some top benefits of utilizing a social media marketing strategy.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Cost-Effective

Social media advertising is fairly less expensive compared to traditional ad platforms. You can even open a free business account and carry out customer engagement and promotional campaigns using that account. If you choose to go for paid ads on social media, you will still find them cheaper than most other marketing methods.

Social media guarantees a higher ROI and better conversions, thus saving you the costs spent on advertising.

Customer Engagement

Social media platforms offer a unique opportunity to interact directly with your customers and provide meaningful customer engagement. Live streams, comments, messaging, and posts can all be used to interact with customers in real-time and solve customer queries quickly.

Strengthen Brand Loyalty

Improving a brand image organically would take quite a bit of time. But with social media, you can get there faster. Social media helps you solidify your brand image and improve customer loyalty. You can make sure your customers are always kept in the loop about your latest products, upcoming projects, and so on.

It helps you improve customer satisfaction via increased engagement and helps boost your brand image positively.

Increases Web Traffic

Sharing your blog or website content on social media can be easily spread across social media users. The viral speeding nature of information across social media will serve your purpose very well. It will bring your more visitors to your site and consequently help increase your sales.

Enhanced SEO

With the pervasiveness of social media, it comes as no surprise that search engines, too, give some weight age to your social media presence. Sharing your content links on social media can help boost your SEO rankings.

Now that we have clearly laid out social media’s benefits, you should want to start with social media advertising immediately. But before you do jump on to the advertising wagon, take a minute to assess your budget, your marketing goals, do your research, and establish your metrics. If all this sounds too overwhelming to you, contact us today, and we will help you with a realistic roadmap to meet your goals.

It is rather simple to learn the basics of social media advertising.  The key is to be consistent in your efforts and keep testing and refining your strategies for the best possible outcomes. Here are some basic details you should be aware of regarding social media advertising.

Types of Social Media Ads

There are several different social media networks in use today. Each of them has a specific use case and set of the target audience. For instance, LinkedIn is all about professional networking and business-specific. Your target audience would be recruiters, entrepreneurs, and working or non-working professionals. Similarly, TikTok has a huge user base that fall into the 13 to 25 aged demographics.

So before you place your ads, consider the network you are choosing, its average user base, and the basic intent behind the usual Interactions that happen over that specific network.

The following are the most popular social marketing ad platforms that have a wider audience range and a well-defined ad platform.

Facebook Ads

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Stories ads
• Carousel ads
• Slideshow ads
• Collection ads
• Messenger ads
• Playable ads

Instagram Ads

• Photo ads
• Video ads
• Carousel ads
• Collection ads
• Stories ads
• Explore section ads
• IGTV ads

Twitter Ads

• Twitter promote
• Twitter ad campaigns

SnapChat Ads

• Snap ads
• Story ads
• Collection ads
• Filters
• Lenses
• Commercials

LinkedIn Ads

• Sponsored content
• Sponsored InMail
• Text ads
• Dynamic ads

Pinterest Ads

• Pinterest ad manager
• Promote button

YouTube Ads

• In-stream ads that can be skipped
• Ads that cannot be skipped
• Video discovery ads
• Bumper ads
• Out stream ads
• Masthead ads

TikTok Ads

• Self-serving images and videos
• Hash tag challengers
• Custom influencer packages

Cost of Social Media Advertising

We did mention that social media advertising is cost-effective. So how much exactly would it cost you? That figure depends on your ad type, chosen ad platform, type of campaign, keyword selections and bidding cost, ad quality, and so on.

Here are the common factors that will decide your ad cost:

• Ad quality
• The goal of your campaign
• Target audience
• Location targeted
• Time and day of the year
• Ad placement
• The level of competition

Further cost factors may include platform-specific ad types, the cost involved with sponsored content by influencers, and so on.

Usually, you will pay for your ads based on your campaign goals, which could be to increase awareness or to get a higher number of conversions. The methods usually used to pay for ads are

• Cost per click
• Cost per 1000 impressions
• Cost per conversion
• Cost per video view

Tips for Successful Social Media Marketing

Good marketing tips apply to any advertising platform. While some of these tips may sound repetitive, it only indicates them being essential for any advertising effort.

Know Your Goals

Understand your business objectives to know exactly where to place your ads and how much to spend on them. Use your goals to guide your creative strategy and find the best networks to place your ads.

Understand Your Target Audience

Know your target audience and make sure your ads can reach them and look appealing to them. Several social media ad platforms provide target audience filtering and added options that you can use. Construct a detailed user persona and use them effectively.

Track Your Well Performing Social Media Posts

The biggest pet peeve of managing a social media handle is that it allows you to get personal with your target audience. You can gauge what clicks with your customers and focus on developing content and ads that reflect on actual customer interests. High performing organic posts and social media content can be used as a guide to craft well-performing ads.

Choose Your Payment Method Wisely

As mentioned above, you can choose to pay per clicks or impressions/ views.  If you are looking for people to take defined action on seeing your ad, paying for just views may not seem wise. Pay per impressions is to be used for ads where maximum awareness is the goal. While both engagement and impressions are important metrics to assess the success of your ads, do choose the payment method depending on your end goal for the campaign

Design Mobile Friendly Ads

Most social media users use mobile apps to access their social media profiles and feeds. So your ads have a higher probability of being viewed on a mobile device.  Do remember this fact when you design your ads and test them well.

Test Your Ads

You can try several methods to test the effectiveness of your ads. One best way is to keep track of the feedback and level of engagement an ad post drives on social media and refine it based on your feedback. You can also run test ads on small groups of selected audiences and then use high performing ads for a wider audience.

Employ complete A/B testing methods to refine your ads so that you don’t end up spending too much on ads that will end up performing poorly.

Make Use of Analytics

Most social media ad platforms come with corresponding analytics to help you optimize your ad campaigns. You will have to track the set metrics across these platforms and use it for designing better ads.

Your Turn

To sum up, we don’t see any reason you must not be using social media marketing to widen your brand reach. Fire on all cylinders, and get started. And if you feel stuck, take our expert social media marketing services.