Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising is a powerful strategy for any business that wants to reach and engage a targeted audience and build brand awareness quickly. Although social media marketing is the supporting pillar of all social media efforts, organic social reach is becoming harder to accomplish due to growing competition and changing algorithms. Social media can be a great way to get fast and measurable results if you understand how it works and the costs involved.
How effective is social media advertising?
Check out some of the social media advertising stats below:
- 53.6% of the global population uses social media (Global WebIndex)
- An estimated 928.5 million people can be reached by ads on Instagram (Hootsuite)
- 49% of internet users say they are likely to purchase from brands they see advertised (Global WebIndex)
- 50% of Gen Z and 42% of millennials view social media as the most relevant ad channel (WebFX)
Any type of paid advertising strategy needs to be done strategically and with a good understanding of the different options available. In this guide, we’ll help you understand the fundamentals of social media advertising and how to create different types of social media ad campaigns to achieve your goals.
What is social media advertising?
Social media advertising is a type of digital marketing that involves creating and running paid ads on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter. Social media ads are targeted using specific audience demographics including geographical location, gender, age and interests to help you show highly relevant content to people that are likely to be interested in your brand. Social media ads can maximise conversion while reducing customer acquisition costs.
You can run ad campaigns on a variety of social media platforms such as:
- Social networking - LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit
- Photo sharing - Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr, Pinterest
- Video sharing - YouTube, TikTok, Vimeo, Snapchat, Dailymotion
- Microblogging - Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, Posterous
Traditional advertising vs social media advertising: What is the difference?
Traditional advertising and social media advertising share the same goals ‒ to grow brand awareness and sell your products or services. That said, there are some key differences between the two:
Traditional advertising and social media advertising share the same goals ‒ to grow brand awareness and sell your products or services. That said, there are some key differences between the two:
- Cost: Traditional advertising like newspapers, TV and radio are more expensive than social media marketing and you often need to stick at it for a while to get results. Social media advertising is more affordable as you can start running and testing social media ads on a much smaller budget.
- Flexibility: Traditional ad campaigns are time-consuming to create and once they’re published or live, it’s difficult to make revisions without added costs. Social media ads (and any other type of online ad) are easy to change or customise at any point. This means you can continually edit and test different components of a campaign to help you get the best results.
- Analytics: While it’s possible to measure and report on the effectiveness of traditional advertising, it’s not as clear cut or efficient as social media. You can gather social media data and analytics in real-time and see clearly the campaigns that are performing well.
What are the benefits of social media advertising?
Below are some additional benefits of social media advertising:
- Organic reach is harder to achieve: Building a strong social presence organically is competitive and time-consuming. With so much competition, it’s becoming increasingly hard for your content to show up in news feeds. Ads can complement your unpaid initiatives and speed up the process. Paid ads give you confidence in knowing that you’re getting impressions despite algorithms.
- Targeting options: Social media ads let you target specific user demographics to deliver your messages to niche groups and give your ads the highest chance of being relevant and engaging to your target audience. This is more reliable and cost-effective than some traditional advertising channels that have a more standardized model. Targeting options are vast but include things like age, gender, location, hobbies and personality traits.
- Brand recognition and loyalty: Despite the fact that a lot of people are on social media (over 4 billion, in fact), paid ads guarantee that you’ll show up in people’s feeds. Regardless of whether they convert, they will still get familiar with your brand. You will also increase your overall market visibility over a short period of time. Social media is also interactive, allowing prospects to connect with your business instantaneously.
What are the cons of social media advertising?
Of course, there are also some drawbacks of social media ads to be aware of including:
- Time-consuming: Social media ads are quicker and easier to create than traditional ads, but it still involves a lot of research and works to ensure your content is fresh and engaging, and are being targeted at the right people. You also need to dedicate enough time to track and measure a campaign and make any adjustments if necessary.
- High competition: Ad space is becoming increasingly competitive and with limited ad space comes increased costs. Depending on the competition within the market you operate in, you may need a larger budget to help your ads gain traction.
Having an understanding of these disadvantages will help you create stronger campaigns that garner better results.
What are the different types of social media ads?
Social media advertising has come a long way and continues to evolve as social platforms introduce new features. There are so many different types of ad formats to choose from depending on your goals:
- Image ads
- Carousel ads
- Collection ads
- Video ads
- Product ads
- Interactive ads
- Text ads
- Lead form ads
The key to choosing the right ad format is to have a clear understanding of your target audience, the platforms they use most frequently and the action you want them to take. For example, you should consider using collection ads if you are telling your brand story and want people to visit your website to learn more.
How do I create a social media advertising campaign?
To create an effective ad campaign follow thee steps:
- Set your objective(s)
- Determine your budget
- Identify your target audience
- Choose your social platforms
- Create ad creatives
- Choose your social media tools
The first step is establishing what you want to achieve with a social media ad campaign as it will help you map out your target audience, platforms and metrics. It could be to grow your audience, promote a new product, increase website traffic or get more people into your shop.
You then need to set a budget. The good thing about social media ads is that even a small budget of a few hundred dollars per month can help you reach thousands of people. Try to factor in all tasks and people that will be involved in the process such as:
- Strategy and planning - developing a strategy is vital to a campaign’s success
- Creative work - graphic design, videography, photography, etc.
- Copywriting - visuals steal the show on social ads but the headline, description, URL and hashtags play a vital role in delivering your message.
- In-house vs outsourcing - will you keep your ad campaigns in-house or hire an agency to take care of certain tasks or the entire process?
- Ad spend - you will need to pay the social platforms to show your ads
Once you know what you want to achieve you need to identify and analyse your target audience. What type of content do they engage with most? What are their interests, likes and dislikes? Try to be specific when determining their characteristics and personality traits. Remember, you can always tweak these details later on.
With your audience personas in mind, choose the top platforms to show your ads. Different social networks are better suited to certain audiences and market segments ‒ for example, LinkedIn is great for building a B2B business brand whereas Pinterest is great for lifestyle, wellness and brands looking to promote products and services.
What are the best tools to create social media graphics?
The next step is creating ad copies and visuals to convey your message with your target audience and platform in mind. The type of text, videos and images you use can have a massive impact on how much people engage with your ad. Do your research and customise your creatives for each platform and always do A/B testing to see what does and doesn’t work so well. There are many different tools available to create stunning images, videos and other visuals for your ads including:
- Canva
- Photoslurp
- Lumen5
- Soapbox
- PicMonkey
- Giphy
- Gliffy
- BeFunky
What are the best social media advertising tools?
Lastly, choose your social media marketing software and tools. There are so many tools to choose from nowadays to streamline the entire process of running a campaign ‒ from creating ad budgets and scheduling content to creating new ads for various platforms and tracking performance metrics. Social media tools make your life much easier, give you amazing insights and improve your ads to reduce waste. Popular tools include:
- Facebook Ads Manager
- Twitter Ads
- LinkedIn Marketing Solutions
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- ActiveCampaign
- Constant Contact
- AdRoll
How do I measure the effectiveness of social media ads?
One of the most important pieces of the pie is measuring the performance of your campaigns. choose the metrics you’ll use to measure a campaign's success. The most important metrics to use are:
- Impressions: The total number of people your ad is shown to.
- Reach: The total number of unique people that see and engage with your ad.
- Clicks: The total number of times people click on your ad.
- Click-through rate (CTR): The number of people who view your ad and click through to your website or landing page.
- Traffic: Website traffic generated from your social media ads.
- Cost-per-impression (CPM): A metric used to measure the cost of 1,000 ad impressions. It can help you calculate how much an ad will cost for every thousand people that see it.
- Cost-per-click (CPC): The amount you pay when someone clicks on your ad.
- Cost-per-action (CPA): The amount you pay for each action someone takes as a result of your ad.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of people who click on your ad and convert to paying customers or complete a desired action such as ‘buy’ or ‘read more’.
What are the top social media advertising tips?
Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your strategy:
- Use granular user targeting: Make sure you’ve spent enough time defining your target audience and then get experimental with targeting highly specific demographics. Test out different combinations to get as close to your ideal buyer as possible.
- Experiment with your creatives: Stay away from overused stock imagery and aim to create original, authentic creatives where possible. Using strong imagery that aligns with your brand identity is the key to helping your ad stand out in a saturated market.
- Make testing a key part of your strategy: Running ad campaigns without testing is a waste of time. With so many data insights available, you should be testing and optimising your ads as much as possible to stretch your budget as far as possible.
- Don’t forget about organic marketing efforts: Organic and paid ads go hand in hand and it’s important to spend time on both. Organic efforts support paid ads, and vice versa.
- Explore remarketing: Remarketing is when you show your ad to people who have previously visited your website or viewed your ad. It brings your brand into their awareness and can encourage them to take further action.
How do I advertise my business on social media?
Social media offers a gold mine of opportunities to grow your online presence, build your following and drive sales. As we discussed earlier, social media platforms are saturated with content and require a solid strategy, campaign planning and dedicated campaign management to compete. To start running social media ad campaigns you need to:
- Create a strategy that outlines your objectives and target audience
- Set a budget that factors in planning, creative work and ad spend
- Identify the right social media platforms
- Choose social media tools to assist with campaign management
To get the most out of social media advertising, many businesses hire a social media agency to help them develop a strategy, assist with the creative side of things or manage the entire process. It can give your business a competitive edge to stand out in a growing market. An agency’s expertise and understanding of different industries, audience segments and social media advertising best practices can help you reach your goals. Learn more about social media agencies and the services they offer.
