Your Guide to Paid Social Media Advertising
While paid search continues to dominate the digital advertising space, paid social media advertising isn’t far behind. Hootsuite’s Digital 2022 Global Overview Report revealed that social media makes up 33% of all digital spending in 2022, representing a 17% increase from the previous year. These stats prove that social media has grown to become one of the most important channels for acquiring new customers and reaching out to existing ones. Whether you operate in the B2B or B2C space, having a social media marketing strategy is now key to business growth.
Is paid social media advertising worth the investment?
Curiously, many business owners feel getting started with paid social media advertising is a big leap since we’re used to social media being free. However, the reality is that social media will continue to be an effective channel for businesses to reach out to a wider audience. And since about 75% of digital marketers already run paid social media advertising campaigns, it’s only a matter of time before you have to adopt paid social strategies for your business.
What is paid social media advertising?
Paid social media advertising refers to a method of displaying your marketing messages on your chosen platform. Rather than wait for social media users to find you, paid advertising allows you to push your brand to their faces, in the hope that they’ll make a purchase or at least become aware of your brand.
What are the benefits of paid social media advertising?
If you’re still unsure whether you need to invest in paid social strategies, here are a few benefits that can help you make your mind up quicker:
Increases brand awareness
Paid social media advertising is one of the quickest ways of improving brand awareness and reach. Admittedly, in the early stages, your target audience may not have the patience to watch read your post, watch your video, or follow the link to your website. However, even while ignoring your ads, your brand registers in their subconscious. And if you’re able to target the right audience, the awareness would develop into engagement, and subsequently, patronage.
Bolsters your organic efforts
It’s an open secret that organic social media marketing alone can’t deliver the results most brands need anymore. The best bet would be to combine your organic efforts with paid social media advertising. Since paid media almost guarantees better visibility and reach, your engagement is likely to soar if you have quality organic posts on your feed. On the other hand, if you rely on organic efforts alone, gaining the traction you need would be a Herculean task.
Complements your content marketing strategies
Many content marketers appreciate the value of sharing links to blog posts, infographics, articles, case studies, and other content formats on social media pages. This strategy exposes your content to a wider audience than your regular site visitors and the traffic coming from search engines. If you wish to take your content marketing game a step further, you should consider promoting your content via paid social media advertisements.
The strategy becomes especially useful if you can come up with a specialized content type like a case study and you promote it on a platform like LinkedIn. The people that come across the posts are likely to see you as an authority in your field and would be more inclined to patronize your services.
Offers great value for your money
Paid social media advertising is cheaper than any other form of advertising available today. Depending on the platform, you can expose your business to over 1,000 people for $5 or less. This wide reach, coupled with the comparatively cheaper rates makes paid social advertising an excellent option for many small businesses. What’s more? The pricing for social media ads often runs on a cost-per-click model. And you can always set your minimum and maximum ad spends to ensure you don’t exceed your budget.
Important points to consider when designing a paid social media advertising strategy
Now that you understand some of the benefits of paid social media advertisements, here are some important points to consider when designing your strategy
Start small and stay agile
When designing your paid social media strategies, it’s vital to start small in terms of your budget and the platforms. You should understand that you can’t be everywhere at the same time, and your strategy would be more effective if you focus on a few platforms at first. Additionally, you should constantly review your strategy to get what works and what doesn’t while keeping in mind that social media is a rapidly evolving space.
Budget
Business owners often wonder what percentage of their revenue should be dedicated to social media advertising. Although it sounds a tad restrictive to quote a figure for all businesses, the Business Development Bank of Canada advises B2B companies to dedicate about 2-5% of their revenue to social media advertising. Still, savvy digital marketing agencies would encourage you to drive your budget through the cash flow it generates as this is the easiest way to maximize your ad spend.
Track your results
One of the superior benefits of digital marketing is that it simplifies the process of tracking advertising results for many businesses. When designing your strategy, you should have well-defined KPIs like Click-through rate, Conversion rate, and Return on Advertising Spend. Measuring these metrics lets you know how effective your campaign is and if there are aspects you need to tweak.
One of the foremost benefits of social media is making advertising accessible to all businesses, not minding their size or target audience. All you have to do is understand how to develop your advertising strategy, identify your audience, and position your ads for maximum conversion, and you’ll be awed at the transformative potential of paid social media advertising.
Of course, the learning process takes time and it may require burning scarce advertising dollars. That’s why you’ll be better off outsourcing to a marketing agency that understands the intricacies of social media advertising and can get you the results you desire in record time. Send a message to Tap Marketing today and we’ll be glad to discuss how we can help.