Advertising on social media has many advantages when choosing where to put your ad spend as part of your digital advertising and wider marketing strategy. It can increase brand awareness, brand loyalty, deliver leads and conversions and strengthen customer relationships.
A survey found social media to be the second most popular channel for online brand research. Social media has become an everyday tool for visitors to not only interact with friends and family, but businesses too. Which is why it could be a fantastic way for your business to reach your ideal target audience.
Our blog post will look at the main benefits to delivering social media ad campaigns and the ways it could be utilised for your business to help achieve your marketing objectives.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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Social Media Advertising
First lets cover what we mean when referring to social media advertising. Social ads are a visual method of advertising, which are shown on popular social media networks such as Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn ads and YouTube ads.
Social media ads are shown to your target audience and delivered based on the objective selected. Often social media advertisements are non disruptive as they only show a small indication of being an advert, which can drive higher engagement with the adverts.
Similarly to other digital marketing services adverts are shown by social media platforms in an auction style. The algorithm used will consider factors such as campaign objectives, audience targeting, advert quality and maximum bid.
Targeting
The micro targeting social media advertising offers when used effectively can deliver huge success from social ad campaigns. Businesses can target users based on demographics, interests and behaviours.
The target market can be kept broader, for example if aiming to achieve a high reach and brand awareness with the campaign objective. Or if looking for lead generation and conversions, it may be better suited to be more specific with your target audience.
It is important to fully understand your target users so that no ad budget is wasted showing the advertising campaigns to social media users who are unlikely to be interested in your business. For example, if your target audience is women age 25-40 with an interest in shoes based in London, then targeting men age 45+ based in Manchester is going to be a waste of the monthly ad spend when post ads.
Another benefit to the targeting available for Facebook advertising and different social media platforms is the ability to create re-marketing audiences and also lookalike audiences on the social media network.
Cart abandonment can be improved through social ads by targeting previous website traffic or if they abandoned their cart to keep your business front of mind with the same audience. Increasing the likelihood of converting both new customers and repeat customers.
Flexibility
Social advertising typically is a visual led marketing approach which can be used in many different advert formats and ad placements to suit your advertising campaign objective. With the flexibility social media advertising provides it can be used to achieve a multitude of goals for a business.
Looking specifically at Facebook ads and Instagram ads, below are just some of the different ad formats to consider on these social media platforms:
- Image based ads
- Video ads or reels
- Stories ads
- Carousel ads
- Sponsored ads
Each have their own set of benefits and advantages for an ad campaign. As an example, if launching a new product range then carousel ads could be the ideal ad type for the ad campaign as up to ten images can be featured. Or if your product or service is best seen in action such as product demos, then video ads or reels could perform well.
It is worth noting that research found as part of social media advertising statistics that 3.25 billion active social media users access social media networks on mobile devices. Therefore when planning and creating an ad campaign designing with mobile devices in mind is an essential.
Testing and Reporting
With some marketing methods it can be difficult to identify exactly what and if the ad budget contributed to new leads or purchases. Whereas social media advertising costs can be analysed to break down exactly what did and did not perform well to improve and make changes to benefit future adverts on each social media platform.
To generate the best set of data then running testing to compare different factors will help to identify clearly which part of the monthly ad spend performed the best. This could include testing a specific target audience against another. Or testing different ad creative including the imagery or the ad copy in your social media marketing.
Not only does this level of testing and reporting social media advertising services offer benefit future social media advertising campaigns and help identify the best use of the social media advertising cost. It also can help to give useful data and knowledge for organic content.
If a particular style or approach has worked well with paid ads, it is likely to have similar success to use similar content within the organic social media posts. Likewise taking learnings from how your organic posts are performing to see what drives the best reach and engagement with your audience can feed into the paid ad element of the social media strategy.
Strong Customer Base
When social media advertising is delivered right it can lead to your adverts not only reaching your target audience, but also it can lead to a high engagement, interaction, shares and direct messages. Delivering relevant and engaging paid ads cannot only generate increased brand awareness, it can build a loyal customer base.
To give an example a customer who purchased your product through Instagram advertising may go onto post themselves with the product whilst tagging your business and giving a glowing review for your business.
In turn potentially leading to further sales made as a result of the social proof and user generated content achieved, making the most from the social media ads cost.
As part of our social media advertising tips, using advertising campaigns whether it be a Facebook ad, story ads or dynamic ads can be effectively used alongside to compliment and improve other marketing efforts.
If email marketing is a main advertising channel for your business, then paid ads can be used to increase the sign ups to your emails and newsletters by the right audience who are most likely to convert to a new or repeat customer.
Controllable Costs
When it comes to social media advertising pricing, the right amount to spend as minimum ad budgets will vary by business and industry. For example, some industries can be more competitive, audience targeting and ad placement.
The quality of your adverts plays a factor too, another reason why testing and optimisation is important to achieve the best results from the social media advertising costs.
One of the great advantages with social media advertising is the ability to adjust and scale your ad budget. Therefore it works well to run tests to begin with and see how they perform to review if it is delivering results with the aim to then increase your ad spend.
Once you know the best performing ad types etc. then it is easy to continue to scale which is similar to how Google ads are managed.
We hope our blog post demonstrates some of the benefits for businesses to include social media advertising as part of your advertising strategy. It is an impactful way to reach your target audience to reach your objectives, such as to build brand awareness or increase conversions.
At 1PCS Creative we have the right knowledge and expertise to deliver social media advert campaigns. If you are considering running social ads or reviewing your existing adverts, please feel free to get in touch to discuss how we can help.