Our Guide to Social Media Advertising
Introduction
It is essential to point out that when we talk about Social Media Advertising we are referring to Paid Advertising on Social Media platforms and not the running of an Organic Campaign which is generally referred to as Social Media Marketing.
There is no doubt that Social Media Platforms have become incredibly powerful business tools for businesses of all shapes and sizes, from your one-man show all the way to the largest international concerns.
Each platform offers something different and appeals to a different market segment or demographic, so choosing the right platform for your business is vital.
All marketing should be customer-centric, so you need to know who your customer is and which platform/s he or she is most likely to be actively active on.
What is Social Media Advertising?
Social Media Advertising is the placing of targeted adverts on various social media platforms to attract and engage with potential customers.
How Social Media Advertising Works.
- Research. As with any advertising campaign, it is imperative to know who your ideal customer is. The more you know about your customer the better you can target and communicate with them. Marketing is about getting the right message to the right person at the right time.
- Choose your platforms. Based on your research you can decide which platform/s you can reach your customers on. There’s no point in advertising on a platform on which your ideal customer is not active.
- Set your Budget. Depending on the platform you can choose an overall Campaign Budget, or a Daily Budget, you can split the budget over different Ads accordingly.
- Decide on the Ad Types. Different Ad Types are better suited to certain products or services varying in price and effectiveness. The choice of Ad Type may also vary depending on your campaign goals.
- Set your Targeting. Choose your target demographics according to your customer research.
- Decide on your Campaign Goals. If you are targeting Brand Awareness you may opt for a CPM approach (Cost per Thousand Views.) Cost per Click may be better for attracting traffic to a specific offer and Conversion targeting is best for Lead Generation.
- Develop and implement the Ads, including landing pages etc.
- Monitor and optimise campaigns. Advertising is a dynamic function with many moving parts. Monitoring and improving each aspect of the Campaign can lead to a greatly improved overall performance.
Who is Social Media Advertising For?
Social Media Advertising is for all companies, startups, micro, small, medium and larger even well-established companies that can and should make use of Social Media Advertising.
Social Media Advertising can be used at any stage during your businesses life or Buyers Journey, its flexibility allows for it to be extremely useful at certain stages, check out our article on using Social Media Advertising to the Max:
- Startups can use Social Media Advertising as an instant route to market while they build up their organic presence and can be used to attract immediate attention to new products or services.
- If you are in a highly competitive industry you may not have a choice but to make use of Paid Advertising or risk losing business.
- Social Media Ads are an extremely powerful tool for any company during the start-up and growth phases.
- Social Media Ads form an integral part of any Lead Generation campaign.
Features of Social Media Advertising.
Social Media Platforms offer a host of features that enable effective campaigns to be set up to suit the requirements of every advertiser. Below are just a few of the more important features:
- You can choose Ad Types, Images, Video, Text, Carousel, Product, Story, etc., depending on the specific platform.
- You control your monthly spending with Budget Settings, campaigns can also be set to run at specific dates for a set duration.
- You choose your Target Market with a range of settings, Geographical, Age, Gender, Interest, Job Title etc.
- You decide on the nature of your campaign, are you targeting Awareness, Clicks or Conversions?
- You can implement Remarketing to improve campaign results.
- Campaigns can be paused and re-activated at the push of a button.
- You can have separate Accounts, Campaigns, Ad Groups and Ads.
- You can set up multiple Ads for testing which is most effective.
- The platforms provide in-depth analytics to enable you to track and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.
- You decide where the visitor is re-directed upon clicking the ad, webpage, landing page etc.
Benefits of Social Media Advertising.
Social Media Advertising offers many advantages to companies of all sizes at all stages.
- Social Media Ads are an instant bring instant results, once your campaign has been set up, launched and approved you will start seeing results within minutes.
- Social Media Ads traffic is what we refer to as Controlled Traffic, in other words, we can decide where we link the ads, it could be a specific product page, a specially designed Squeeze Page where we want visitors to perform a certain action or just a page on our website. This level of control results in a much higher conversion rate for specific goals.
- You have complete control of your budget. You can adjust your budget, shift budget between Campaigns -Ad Sets – Ads and even pause campaigns at the push of a button.
- Social Media Ads are extremely flexible platforms that provide in-depth analytics that enables ongoing optimisation and improvement of your campaign. Google Analytics can also be used to track performance. Every campaign should be improved upon on an ongoing basis.
- Social Media Platforms provide a range of targeting and bidding options to manage your expenditure and reach, you can choose to target a wider audience for greater exposure or a very specific audience for lead generation depending on your goals.
- You can set up your Ads to target potential customers at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Social Media advertising is a great way of creating and building your Brand Awareness.
