What are the benefits of paid social media advertising?
Paid social media advertising is an effective way to promote your idea, service or product to a targeted audience, but it isn’t something to jump into without a plan. From campaign and ad creation to budget management and testing, paid social media advertising is comprised of many different moving parts.
There are many benefits to paid social media advertising. Here are some of the ways paid social media advertising can help grow your business:
- Increased Reach: Given the massive audience size on social media, there is plenty of opportunity to reach more people than you would with organic content.
- Improved Targeting: As one of the major benefits of paid social advertising, targeting helps you narrow in on your specific audience by behaviors, activities, preferences, locations, job titles, and interests. Your ads will display for users who are most aligned to your ideal buyers, instead of a broad audience that may or may not be interested in your content. Additionally, this information can be used for retargeting ads.
- Speed to Market: As with any paid advertising, you can quickly get content launched for immediate viewing. As soon as your campaign is live, ads will begin displaying to users on the social platforms you’ve chosen. Organic social media traffic can take months to build due to the algorithms at work behind the scenes of the most popular social media sites. If you’re running a short campaign, the ramp up time can cost you visibility and leads. With paid social media ads, your campaign can get up and running in a matters of days.
- In-Person Traffic: Increased foot traffic to your storefront is another benefit of paid social advertising. Geofencing ads can target people located within 1 mile of your storefront, and help get more people to your retail location.
- Microconversions: Paid social is a great driver of micro-conversions, whether for trials, free samples, or just funneling additional traffic to your website. Social media ads allow you to target audiences that may not have seen your post otherwise, thus increasing brand awareness and product awareness, and leading prospects further down your marketing funnel.
- Market Research: Paid social media advertising allows you to gain a better understanding of the needs your audiences have. From demographics information to behavioral data, social media platforms have the ability to collect high-value user data. Using separate campaigns that target segmented audiences can provide a clear insight into how different audiences engage with your content and advertising campaigns. By using that data, companies can gain more knowledgeable input about their ideal customer and how best to influence them.
- Increased Engagement: By running paid social media advertising campaigns, brands can indirectly boost their engagement levels. For example, if you’re running an ad on Facebook, it is very likely that the ad will result in LIKES on your fan page. Each LIKE on your Fan page is similar to an email subscriber, in that they they are granting you permission, to see your posts. This results in higher engagement levels. Whether you are attracting new subscribers to your products or engaging previous customers with your content, it is all beneficial. Your business gains higher social exposure, which gives it value to consumers as well as search engines. And when you put all this together, you are one step closer to building a self-sustainable and recognizable brand.
- International Brand Development: Paid social media advertising accelerates your brand growth internationally. Social media platforms give brands the opportunity to reach a global audience so long as they have the necessary resources, quality content, a good strategy, and most of all – transparency. With nearly 3.96 billion people across the globe using social media, businesses now have the opportunity to reach half the world’s population through paid social media advertising. Research shows that over 53% of consumers are willing to consider brands that are transparent about their products, services, core values, etc. on social media channels.
- Establish Credibility: In addition to raising brand awareness, social media enables you to establish credibility for what your business stands for. It’s important to assure audiences that you are in fact an authority in your respective industry. Additionally, you will need promoters, ambassadors, and most of all – influencers, to guarantee all that. Social media influencers have gained a lot of power in the digital world over the past several years. With the ever-growing number of users, having a large number of followers on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. instills trust. The people that follow influencers trust in their recommendations, which is why influencer marketing is such a popular notion nowadays. Social media influencers can be a tremendous benefit for your brand credibility.
- Customer Retention: With small businesses and large companies sprouting everywhere, building long-term relationships with consumers is not as simple as it used to be. Companies now have to look beyond simply making a single sale to maintain their brand. That’s why so many businesses focus on remarketing strategies for retaining customers. By utilizing paid social media advertising, you have the potential to keep your advertisement in front of your audience after they viewed the advertisement. With proper social media advertising tactics, you can have an approach that will not only sell to customers but have them asking for more.
At Search Engine Pros, we make sure that you’re informed about the status of your campaigns and individual ads on a regular basis, sending you full reports of all relevant data and KPIs. Additionally, we provide performance analysis from our paid social media advertising experts. Using the results from these reports, we optimize your campaign strategy to ensure that we’re hitting every opportunity available.
Paid Social Media Advertising FAQ
Challenges exist with any advertising initiative, and paid social media is no different. Nevertheless, typically the advantages of these ads typically outweigh the disadvantages. Here are a few of the obstacles that businesses may encounter along the way:
- Choosing Platforms – When it comes to social advertising, the platform makes all the difference. If you choose a platform where your audience doesn’t spend much time, then you’re wasting ad dollars and, quite frankly, your time. Be sure you know who your audience is, where they spend time on social media, and what their intent is on those platforms. That way, you can select a platform that should give you the best return.
- Creating Realistic Goals – Before you embark on a paid social campaign, you’ll want to establish goals that are realistic for your business. Otherwise, you could be setting your campaigns up to disappoint your team and decision makers.
- Determining KPIs – It can be challenging to determine the best KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for your paid social media advertising efforts, but it’s an essential step in making the most of your budget. This article lays out some of the basic paid social metrics, like impressions, clicks, and conversions.
- Increased Competition – The opportunities of advertising on social media are not lost on other companies. It’s a popular way to promote, which means you can expect more competition for ad space on social platforms.
- Managing Budget – It’s important to stay on top of how your budget is being allocated across platforms, how much you’re paying per click, and how frequently your ads are displayed. This can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of paid social, but a PPC specialist can do the job for you.
- User Data Tracking – Apple has created a new challenge for advertisers with the recent introduction of its opt-in prompts for apps. These pop-ups will display in each individual app, giving iOS users the opportunity to opt-in to tracking of their activity. This is expected to cause significant barriers to user data and advertising on social media platforms, as more users choose to deny access to their data.
- Know What to Sell – categorize your products and services based on their values. Try to sell the most valuable product or service you have in your business.
- Research Your Audience – Know what your audience is looking for. Most users look for three major things: 1. Physical: The product itself 2. Identity: How it makes the customer feel 3. Functional: What it does for the customer. It helps to read reviews and blogs to determine the subtle aspects of what your audience is looking for.
- Establish Credibility – It is not always about the product but also about the reputation and value of the company. So, you should keep in mind that your customer is not just buying your product. Use credibility enhancing aspects in your advertising, such as “Since 1979” or “Best of Los Angeles Winner”
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