Spendings on social media ads has been steadily climbing since 2019, and now, with businesses preparing to spend nearly a fifth of their ad budgets on it, it’s clear that social media ads are becoming a key in marketing strategies across small and large businesses
Eventually, paid social media helps with targeting audiences and driving sales just as organic social media does. The advantage to paying is that organic social media traffic can take days to build due to the algorithms at work behind the scenes of social media sites. If you’re running on clock for a short campaign, with paid social media, your campaign can get started with an extra boost at a speed that organic posts just can’t match. In addition to sustaining views, traffic, and engagement for as long as your wallets can stand, you’ll have the benefit of targeting consumers with your ads to achieve your advertisement goals.
Paid promotion on social media can help you increase brand awareness if your marketing objective is to increase brand awareness.
Paid Social Media can also help you to boost reach, from Facebook to Instagram to LinkedIn and Twitter. In today’s competitive digital landscape, organic reach has dropped across all the major platforms. For instance, organic reach on Facebook is now just 5.2 percent, which means roughly one in every 20 fans only sees your page’s non-promoted content. If you have 10,000 followers, those organic posts you’ve lovingly crafted will only reach about 500 of them. If you want to reach a wider social audience to generate more leads or drive more sales then you need to make Paid social media your new best friend.
Paid promotion on social media can also help you to improve results. Just because Facebook and Twitter want you to invest heavily into promotional activities doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, plenty of brands burn through huge advertising budgets on social media only to see terrible results because they didn’t get their strategy right, for investing in the right platforms at the right times, and capturing a ton of leads or sales. Here are some tips to help you avoid those mistakes and effectively leverage paid promotion to maximize results.
1. Increase content quality:
There’s so much activity taking place in the digital space everyday! To cut through the noise, your content can’t just be good; it needs to be exceptional. One additional point here is that a one-size-fits-all approach to social content won’t work no matter how high your ad budget. Rather than trying to incorporate messaging, that resonates across all platforms, concentrate on what the audience on each individual platform wants to see. However, one tactic does appear to work equally well across all social platforms: video. A staggering 96 percent of marketers have run video ads on social media, and 91 percent say they’re satisfied with the return on investment they achieved. What’s more, 93 percent of brands have acquired a new customer because of a video they ran on social media.
2. Optimize ad performance through A/B testing:
If you just run the same old campaigns, targeted at the same audience, time after time, you’ll see the same old results and worse over time, because people get bored of seeing the same ads over and over. A/B testing helps you figure out what works and what doesn’t so you can improve your performance. For A/B testing you can choose to have
- different copy with the same creative
- different creative with the same copy
- the same creative and copy, but different calls to action
Analyze after the testing then keep the top performer, ditch the other variant, then introduce a new element to the test. Rinse and repeat!
3. Research Your Audience Before Choosing Your Platform
It’s better to focus on the platforms that make the biggest impact.
Researching your target audience will allow you to understand where they hang out online. Using tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights, create a profile of your average customer (or multiple profiles, if you have several types of customers), consider factors like:
- age
- gender
- location
- job title and industry
- education level
- household income
- relationship status
Next, it’s time to choose the social platform that aligns most closely with your customer profile.
- Facebook: Widely used by all age ranges, with a strong reach across all demographics.
- Instagram: Skews female, urban-based, and younger, with a big difference between 18 to 29-year-olds and older audiences.
- LinkedIn: An older audience (30-49 is the sweet spot) that skews toward college graduates and non-rural residents.
Paid marketing will allow you to maximize your investment in today’s competitive digital marketing landscape. While it can be complemented with a strong organic growth strategy, the potential of paid promotion to drive awareness, sales, and leads far outclasses what pure organic efforts can produce. So choose what mix of paid promotion activities best suits your brand and objectives to optimize the results it can provide you.
Also Read: 5 Secrets to Launching a Brand in 2022
