By now most businesses have a presence on social media but not all of them understand the value of using paid social advertising to grow their business. Advertising on social media provides the opportunity for companies to get more brand visibility and customers and is an essential part of a successful digital marketing strategy.

Social advertising objectives

There are 3 basic objectives of paid social advertising. First, often called top of funnel, simply aims to make new users aware of a company or brand. Second, or middle of funnel, encourages users to engage with the company or brand. And third, bottom of funnel, is where a direct conversion or sale is the goal.

Successful paid social advertising requires a strategy and a plan starting with defining your audience and selecting the appropriate social media channels.

Determining your audience

According to Sprout Social, Facebook has 2.7 billion monthly active users with females making up 56% of users. The largest age group on Facebook is between the ages of 25-34 and represents 26.3% of users. With such a large user base and engagement rate Facebook remains a smart advertising choice for most businesses.

Instagram, which shares its advertising platform with Facebook, has approximately 1 billion active monthly users with females making up 57% of users. The largest age group on Instagram is between the ages of 25 to 34 and represents 33.1% of users. With the rise of influencers on Instagram this social platform is a great choice for shopping geared advertising

LinkedIn has 738 million active monthly users with males making up 51% of the users. The largest age group on LinkedIn is between 46 to 55 but don’t overlook this platform for a millennial audience who represents a quarter of the total platform users. LinkedIn attracts a higher educated audience with a more B2B focus. Of note; 70% of LinkedIn’s audience lives outside the US making this a great opportunity for companies looking to expand internationally.

In addition to basic demographics, each social media platform provides ways to target specific audience behaviors, interests, locations, occupations, and more. For example, Facebook and Instagram offer targeting based on interests such as business, entertainment, relationship, food, fitness, hobbies, shopping, technology, and more. LinkedIn provides targeting options like company size, industry, job function, education, to name a few.

Custom and lookalike audiences are a more advanced way to refine the targeting of your paid social advertising. Through the deployment of website pixels and tags custom audiences can be built within social media platforms and used to retarget ads to visitors based on certain activities and criteria. Email contact lists, when uploaded to a social platform, can also be used for advanced targeting either by directly finding the contacts on the platform or creating a lookalike audience to find new users based on existing ones.

Creating visually appealing content

Successful social paid advertising content should be highly visual and consistent with the company brand, tone, and voice. Use of relevant, eye-catching photos, graphics, animations, and videos are more likely to attract the user’s attention, create engagement, and build trust.

CTA’s and landing pages

Leading users to take the desired next step from a social ad is done through creating appropriate call-to-actions (CTA’s). Whatever that objective, the success of the ad campaign converting will depend on the landing page. Relevant content that is clear, concise and user-friendly will ultimately impact the conversion rate.

Measuring and monitoring

Best practices when launching social paid advertising campaigns is testing. This involves taking a small budget and testing one or two ad versions based on different copy, visuals, and CTA’s to see which drives more results. Based on these findings ads can be tweaked and larger budgets applied.

As with any digital marketing activity, monitoring the performance of paid social media advertising campaigns is critical. Social media platforms provide insights and analytics measuring metrics such as impressions, clicks and conversions. To fully understand the ROI of an ad campaign it is important to be able to track the user beyond the social platform. Properly monitoring landing pages with Google Analytics provides the data needed to determine the true ad conversion rate.

Paid social media advertising offers today’s businesses a cost effective way to grow, build trust with their target audience, and increase sales. Contact us today for more information about how to grow your business with paid social media advertising and let us take the next step with you!