Paid Social
What is Paid Social Media?
Paid social media is the practice of paying to promote content, products, or services on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. Paid social media advertising allows businesses to reach target audiences and generate measurable business results.
Advertisers can target specific demographics, interests, behaviors, and locations to ensure their ads are shown to the right people. The different targeting options vary by social media platforms. Advertisers can also set their budget and bid for ad placement, which determines how often their ads are shown and where they are placed on the social media platform.
Why Paid Social
Social media has become an essential part of our daily lives, with the average American spending 33 minutes per day on Facebook alone. It provides us with a platform to connect with friends and family, share our experiences, and stay up-to-date with current events.
Social media has also become an effective marketing tool for businesses. Outside of TV campaigns, one of the next highest spend allocation goes to Paid Social when we look at many clients’ media mix.
There are many benefits of running Paid Social for your business, to include the ability to:
- Target Specific Audiences
- Increase Reach
- Drive Measurable Results
- Cost Effective Marketing
- Increase Brand Awareness
Target Specific Audiences
One of the main benefits of paid social media is the ability to target specific audiences. With paid social media advertising, businesses can create custom audiences based on demographics, interests, behavior, and location. This allows businesses to reach people who are most likely to be interested in their products or services, which can result in a higher return on investment (ROI)
Increase Reach
Paid social media advertising can help businesses increase their reach and visibility on social media platforms. Organic reach on social media has been declining in recent years, where many organic posts only reach around 1% to 2% of their followers. Paid social media can also help businesses reach people who may not have otherwise seen their content
Drive Measurable Results
Paid social media advertising provides businesses with measurable results. Businesses can track clicks, impressions, conversions, and other metrics to determine the effectiveness of their campaigns. Whether it’s static image ads or videos, performance can be seen for all tactics. This allows businesses to adjust their strategies and optimize their campaigns to improve their ROI
Cost Effective Marketing
Paid social media advertising can be cost-effective compared to other forms of advertising. Businesses can set their own budgets and only pay when someone clicks on their ad or takes a specific action. This allows businesses to control their spending and get the most out of their advertising budget. There’s minimal commitment to start, however keep a test budget within reason to achieve statistical significant results for assessment
Increase Brand Awareness
Paid social media advertising can help businesses increase their brand awareness. By reaching a larger audience and targeting people who are most likely to be interested in their products or services, businesses can build brand recognition and increase their visibility on social media platforms. Paid social platforms are also designed to effectively intercept the attention of the audience and get your message across compared to many other types of media
Social Media - Best Practices
Latest studies indicate that 74% of consumers use social media during moments of purchase intent. Social media plays a crucial role in steering consumers towards your product or services. Social media is also an excellent facilitator in reaching and exposing your brand to new prospects. Below are some social campaign best practices to help make the most of your invested dollars in driving metrics that’ll make an impact for your business.
Know your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience profile will ultimately determine the success of your campaign. Common attributes across social platforms can include age range, gender, marital status, occupation, hobbies and interest, income level, etc. By knowing your target audience, your creative message will resonate more which will help yield better metrics
Choosing Social Media Platforms
There are several popular social media platforms that exist today. While you may want to be present on all, it’s important to focus your resources to make an impact on the right platforms. Understanding your target audience will help you narrow down the platforms. Research can be conducted so you understand which platforms tend to have your ideal audience
Set Campaign Goals
To run a successful campaign, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve. Your advertising goals should align with your business goals, whether that may be to gain new customers, drive leads to fill a sales funnel, site traffic, etc. When you develop creative for your campaign, your ad copy should speak to that goal. Call to actions should help persuade and induce the target audience to move in that direction
Have a Consistent Brand Tone
Establishing a tone and style early on helps your audience build brand recognition with your brand. This can be applied to both paid and organic content. Your content may have a lot of photos. Whether you’re whimsical, casual, fact-based, or humorous, keep it consistent across platforms and content
Use High Quality Imagery
Imagery quality will have significant impact on your campaign’s performance. Low quality photos or videos reduce the credibility of your creative. That will in turn reduce the credibility of your company. Whether your images are of products, lifestyle, or people, high quality visuals will work better to capture their attention. Pairing your images with your copy and objective of the campaign will help yield better success. Creative testing will help give insight into the best pairing to consistently drive results
Create Relevant Landing Pages
Visually appealing landing pages and ads are only half the battle. The other end of the equation requires relevant information for your consumers once they reach your landing page. Ensure your landing page has concise information with clear call to action. Any forms for them to submit information should be easily accessible to reduce drop off rates
Using Call-to-Actions
With any ad campaign, the right CTA is critical in facilitating the consumer to the next step. Most social media ads have pre-defined CTAs. Make sure to select the best suited one, whether that may be sign up, book now, send message, etc
Testing Ads
Aim to have several ad iterations. It’s likely they will have varying performance even if similar in look and feel. When testing ads, try to focus on specific elements so results are easier to decipher. One test may be for image only, another for CTA, while another may be for the headline text. Testing too many variables at once will muddy up the results. Precise results will help optimize your ads for better performance yielding better results
Track Ad Performance
If you aren’t checking your ads, you’re not getting the best ROI for your ads. Monitoring your metrics is vital to the success of your campaign. For example, you may be running a campaign where you’re not generating a lot of conversions. However, you didn’t notice that your campaign was generating a lot of click traffic. As a result, if you had changed or updated your landing page earlier, there would have been less wasted ad spend. Social ads also tend to have ad fatigue over time as we may overexpose the same audience. Ad fatigue is when your audience consistently sees the same ad and become num to the ad. When this occurs, you’ll likely see flattening of metrics over time compared to initial launch. New iterations of similar ads can help combat ad fatigue. You don’t necessarily need to recreate totally new creative to go in market with. Most advertisers have multiple versions of the same ad to cycle through
Retarget Audiences
Retargeting is one of the most effective ways to achieve cost effective results. Through many platforms, there are options to retarget those who have visited your site or engaged with your ad, however, didn’t convert on the desired action you’d wanted them to take the first time. Retargeting serves as a reminder to a consumer to complete a transaction or take another action on your website after an initial action