Having an organic (non-paid) social media marketing strategy is an essential part of your marketing plan. It can help with brand awareness, website traffic, SEO, and lead generation.
However, it can also be leveraged as an effective advertising platform. In this blog, we’ll dive deep into how you can leverage social media and advertise to your target audience.
What are social media ads?
Social media advertising is a form of digital advertising that serves paid ads to your target audience using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Pinterest. This practice can help you reach your target audience, promote your brand, and inspire sales through social channels that customers frequently use.
What’s the benefit of social media advertising?
Highly targeted
Social media advertising introduces your brand to potential customers in a targeted way. You want to ensure that you’re focusing on customers interested in your brand and/or could benefit most from your services. And, in these cases, you don’t want to waste your time or money advertising to those people who don’t want or need what you’re offering. Social media cuts through that and allows you to target who you want to talk to directly.
Improved brand recognition
Social media has been shown to increase brand recognition and credibility. When potential customers become familiar with your brand, they are more likely to use you themselves and recommend you to their friends or family. Leveraging paid-social media is an essential step in increasing your brand reach.
Greater brand loyalty
Developing a loyal clientele base can help your company thrive. Advertising on social media is one way to create loyal customers because it allows customers to find you where they’re most comfortable and to express their views and feelings about the products/services offered. Companies have started offering customer service through social media and have seen a rise in customer satisfaction levels. Use this to your advantage!
Better conversion rates
Nearly 80% of consumers are on social media, which means you’re reaching people you may never get if you utilized other marketing channels. Social media brings brand visibility and website leads (and the chance of sales conversions!). If you have a solid social media advertising plan, you’ll have improved sales and profits. As simple as that.
Reduced marketing costs
Because social media business pages are free, leveraging them often lowers marketing costs. All you need is an internet connection and a computer, which means it’s an incredibly accessible way to market a small business. If you want to utilize paid ad options, then it can get marginally more expensive. However, there helpful paid and unpaid options that your business can use. Don’t let cost be a factor that scares you away from social media marketing. Overall, it’s affordable and should reduce your marketing costs compared to traditional media vehicles like radio or billboards.
Better SEO
Having a social media profile that links to your website can provide better SEO to your website in a couple of different ways. For example, ensuring your company name and contact information on your social media page matches other listings, and your website will help improve your NAP (name, address, phone number) score.
The key components of social media advertising
A successful social media advertising campaign will have all of the following elements.
Campaign overview
Your campaign overview provides details of your ad campaign. This campaign overview will include:
Campaign name
Ideas
Inspiration behind it
Purpose
Goals
How it will meet your company’s objectives
Hashtags
It will also look at the objectives of the campaign. Think about how it will increase brand awareness of your company. Will it grow your social media following? Will it increase the sales of your product or service? What about driving traffic on your website? Considering this will help you understand whether or not you’ll get the ROI for your campaign.
Target audience
Choosing your target audience is one of the most critical elements when utilizing social media advertising. You’ll want to be as specific as possible – especially when you’re going the paid ads route because you want it to be effective.
To make sure you get this right, study the analytics section of your social media accounts. Understand what your audience is and what type of content they’re most receptive to. What is your buyer persona? Identify the most relevant characteristics and traits so that you can create a campaign that caters to this personality.
Campaign creatives
Campaign creatives are ad copies (messaging) and visuals (videos, images, gifs) that companies use on different platforms. These are prepared differently depending on the platform and the target audience. For example, individual campaign creatives might not perform well on one platform but work just fine on another. Understanding these nuances can be essential to reaching audiences across different social sites.
Social media platforms
The most widely used social media sites in social media advertising are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. You’ll find that different social sites are better for certain types of advertising and reach different audiences. As you experiment with social media, you’ll find the right platforms and ad formats for your business. One way you’ll be able to see your success if by finding looking at the success metrics discussed below.
Track your campaign
If you are not going to track your campaign effectively, don’t spend the money. I’m serious.
To evaluate the effectiveness of a paid social campaign, you are going to want to take a look at both the direct and indirect metrics associated with your campaign.
Direct: make sure you use tracking links so you can tell in your Google Analytics the difference between organic social traffic and paid social traffic. You also use this to track whether or not this traffic has converted into leads on your website. If you cannot track the leads that came from your social campaign and are only looking at how many people saw your ad and/or how many people clicked on your ad, you are not tracking correctly.
In-Direct: spammers in other lowbrow advertisers have unfortunately trained consumers not to trust ads. We have often observed that when consumers see ads instead of clicking on them directly, they will Google them and make their way to their website in a seemingly more organic way. If you’re not following other organic metrics like your Google My Business profile and organic website traffic, you could be misdiagnosing and otherwise effective ad campaign.
Final thoughts
Social media has advanced targeting options, and it can help you build your presence online. If you’re ready to get started, LMM can guide you every step of the way. Social media marketing has never been easier. Visit here for more information.