Social Advertising – What It Is and How to Do It

If you’ve spent any time on social media, there is a very good chance you have encountered a form of social media advertising. Social advertising refers to the process of creating clickable ads on social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) to reach a target audience. On average, people spend about three hours per day on their social media platforms. So, marketing your business on social media is a very smart marketing move for most businesses, considering people spend a great deal of time on these websites. This type of advertising helps to generate leads, build brand awareness and boost sales revenue.

How Effective is Social Media Marketing?

Social media marketing is a great strategy for most brands. What matters most is how you drive your audience on social media to take the next steps with your business. Because of this, it is highly recommended you have a strategy tailored to your business’ needs before you start setting up social media campaign. Think about your target audience, and what they need to see in order to get a step closer to becoming a lead or sale. Once you have a solid marketing strategy, your social advertising can be quite effective.

If you go about social media marketing properly, you will attract the right people for your brand. You can target your ads so they are shown to your audience based on their gender, age, interests, location and more. This makes social media marketing marketing one of the most strategic marketing tactics today. So, if you have a very niche brand, you may want to consider social media advertising.

How to Run an Effective Social Media Ad Campaign

Social advertising is often a great solution for businesses, whether with a small budget or a very large budget. Most social media platforms allow advertisers to spend as little as five dollars per day. At the price of one coffee per day, you can run an effective social media advertising campaign. With a budget that low, you just need to make sure you are set up for success. The secret is to develop a smart ad campaign by creating a community you can talk to again and again. This way, you can more consistently build trust, educate your audience and generate leads. But, how do you go about this?

Start With A Clear Goal

Before you run your social media ads, you should decide on your primary and secondary goals. Perhaps you want to increase brand awareness or generate leads. Or, maybe you want to get more email addresses for your list. Think about what you want the viewer to do with your brand after seeing your social ad. This will help you set up your campaign more effectively and will help you see if your campaign was effective or not.

Use The Right Platforms

While Facebook is a popular social media ad platform, it’s not always the right place to drive your marketing efforts. Where is your target audience? If you run a business-to-consumer company and you want to reach out to millennials, Instagram ads could be better than Facebook. If you are trying to reach college-aged Generation Z adults, Tik Tok and Twitter are possibly the best platforms to utilize. On the other hand, if you’re focusing your ads on B2B or business professionals, LinkedIn can be an excellent platform to reach people. Don’t assume every social media platform is automatically a good fit just because it’s popular. But, don’t rule them out either. Do a little online research to see which platforms are best for you and your industry.

You should also consider which social networks are most cost-effective. Typically, Facebook and Instagram are by far the most cost-effective platforms, especially when considering their targeting tools. These platforms allow you to very specifically hone in on who should see you social ads. So, whoever comes across your advertisement will likely be who you want to see it. However, if your audience isn’t on these platforms, they will probably not be cost-effective at all.

Drive Customers To Your Website

The best way to track metrics is to route prospects to a landing page designed for the campaign. A landing page is a webpage designed specifically for those who click on an advertisement. With your landing pages, be sure to make it as easy as possible to drive your website visitor to complete your call-to-action (CTA). Thanks to research, we know the more steps it takes to get someone to take an action, the less likely it becomes for them to actually take that action. Today, people are wired to get things done quickly and don’t wish to waste time or go down a complicated rabbit trail to get what they want. So, if someone clicks an ad and lands on your website, what should they do next? Should they make a purchase, get info, fill out a contact form or something else? Whatever the answer is, make it very easy for them to get to that next step.

Keep in mind the target audience will engage with your brand if they know what to do. Since social ads are all about interaction, you should make it simple. Make your advertisement and website easy to understand with clear language. Any confusion will turn people away and make them go back to browsing through their social media.

Consider The Budget

Spending more money on social media advertising doesn’t guarantee more success. If you don’t proceed with caution, you could end up wasting a lot of your budget on social ads. As mentioned above, Facebook and Instagram are typically the best platforms when on a tight budget. You can also use just one platform to save some money. For instance, when you’re on a tight budget you can choose Twitter instead of LinkedIn. But if you have some room, you can run the ads on both platforms. Don’t feel pressured to put $100 per day towards your social media marketing if you don’t want to. With the targeting tools available today, you can reach your audience effectively for under $50 per week.

Keep Your Brand Consistent Across All Platforms

As you create accounts for each platform, each account should have the same handle. If the handle is taken on one platform, try to make it as similar as possible. This will make it easier for people to find your account on other platforms once they develop a relationship with your brand. People love to follow their favorite brands across multiple social media websites. And if you want to maintain consistency, you should ensure the profile photos remain the same or very similar.

Your customers want to know what your business is all about, but very quickly, so you should keep the bio short. But this doesn’t mean that you copy and paste the same bio on each platform. The idea is to maintain consistency in branding, but not have identical pages. Think consistent, not identical when writing your bios and status updates.

Conduct A Follow-Up

Once your social media ad campaign concludes, it’s time to do a follow-up. If you want to build a long-lasting relationship with customers, you should respond to posts, Tweets and updates in real-time. The follow-up can last for days, weeks or months. Think about how you would feel if your favorite brand responded to your comment. It would be exciting and would make you love the brand even more. So, do this with your followers.

Different Social Advertising Platforms

Today, there are dozens of social media platforms. Navigating through them all can be overwhelming at first. So, let’s take a closer look at some of the social media websites where you can display your social ads and make a worthwhile investment.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is, by far, the largest social media platform with over 2.45 billion active users. It gives businesses an unparalleled opportunity to reach your target audience. Facebook knows so much about its users from birthdays, locations, favorite lunch spots, to favorite sports teams. When you’re updating your friends on Facebook about what your interests are, you are also giving Facebook data about you. From an advertising perspective, it is the perfect platform to use for targeting an audience.

Typically the first thing you should do with a Facebook campaign is to define the target group based on location, age, interests, and behaviors. Secondly, you need to tell Facebook the goal of the campaign. Then, you should decide on a budget you’re comfortable with. You can enter a daily or lifetime  budget. With a daily budget, Facebook will spend no more than that amount each day until you schedule the ad to stop. Whereas with a lifetime budget, they will constantly run ads until the budget runs out.

The next step is to pick a format. Generally, Facebook gives six ad formats to choose from. These formats give you options, so you can select what looks best with the content you want to share. Finally, you should place your order and manage the ad. Make sure you track performance and decide whether the ad is working efficiently. If you are getting very low clicks after 48 hours, it is recommended you stop the ad and make changes to it.

Instagram Ads

What many people don’t know is that Instagram is owned by Facebook. Instagram ads are actually considered an ad placement on Facebook. So, setting up an ad on Instagram is the exact same process as setting one up on Facebook. However, you need to choose if you want to use Instagram stories or the feed for your ad. You can also use both, but very rarely does the same content work for both placements.

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Twitter Ads

Over the years, Twitter has been adding advertising features to ensure its revenue can scale with its audience. If your brand has a strong Twitter following, the ads can give a high ROI. The main Twitter ads include promoted trends, sponsored Tweets and promoted accounts. Most Twitter ad campaigns are for generating website clicks, building leads and increasing customer engagement.

To create a Twitter ad, you should set a schedule for your campaign. This means you can choose whether you want these social ads to run continuously or customize the start/end dates. The advertiser can also set multiple locations, languages, platforms, gender and keywords to use – there’re a ton of options to choose from. You can also exclude your some audiences if you don’t want certain people to see the ad. Once everything is set, you should adjust your budget. But just like other advertising platforms, you can choose the maximum spend and total budget threshold.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn social media advertising is tailored for B2B or for attracting business professionals. To get started, you should name your campaign. Next, you should select the language and create your ad. Each should contain a web page, headline, and description. The last step is to launch your campaign and choose a payment model (cost-per-click or cost-per-impression). As with other social advertising platforms, LinkedIn has a minimum and maximum bid.

If you intend to aggressively use LinkedIn for your marketing, it would be a good idea to consider some additional options with this platform. In our blog post titled Which LinkedIn Membership Plan is Best for You, we provide information about membership options.

Final Thoughts

While many platforms offer social media ads, that doesn’t mean you should use all of them. Concentrate on the social media sites that strike a chord with your target audience. Regardless of the platform you use, make sure your ads are actually getting clicked on by your audience. And of course, do everything possible through your strategy, to make sure your ads are getting the desired results you want. If they aren’t, adjust your ads as needed.

If you need help setting up your social media advertising, please feel free to contact us. Our team would love to help you with your social media marketing efforts.