We all know by now that social media can be a great tool for businesses to leverage for advertising. You can get a lot out of advertising on social media platforms, and you can get additional benefits beyond organic growth and traffic.
Whether you are new to social media, just considering trying it or already using it, there are multiple ways you can power up your social media efforts.
Reaching New Customers on Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok allow you to reach to the masses and connect with new people that can benefit by using your products or services.
SEM platforms like Google Ads are keyword focused. Social Media ads target users based on things like interests, demographic data and behavior. This type of targeting provides an advantage that allows you to extend their reach to new and additional customers who use these platforms. People who see your posts or page may not know your brand or what products and services you provide. However, by having prospecting ads, these new people may realize that your company or product can benefit them. This in turn can provide an additional conversion for you.
Leverage Audience Insight to Enhance Social Media Success
Being able to optimize your audience by testing target audiences is a huge advantage on social media. A great example of this is Facebook. You can break down your reporting to learn about age, gender, business locations, country, region, dma region, and impressions by device or time of day. The list goes on and on.
By comparing all of these demographics you can further optimize your ads to what is most responsive to the audience that you are reaching the most. By continuously looking at your demographics, and modifying your ads based on this information, you can increase your chance of success.
You can dive even deeper into Facebook by looking at Audience Insights in Facebook Ads Manager. You can get a further breakdown of things like relationship status, gender, job titles, Education level, etc. You might find that your product or services convert better when people just get into a relationship, are recently married, or recently moved. You can alter your ads to target this audience. However, this type of reporting is limited due to privacy and transparency, Facebook is starting to make changes to this data giving you limited access to it. So start checking this out before it disappears altogether. It can be beneficial.
Audience Insights on all social media platforms can be incredibly beneficial and help you save money where you do not get the best reach or conversions. If you want to learn more about demographics check out our Instagram Demographics blog post.
Affordability of Advertising on Social Media
Advertising can get expensive online but compared to other routes, social media advertising is much more cost effective, especially if you are working off a small budget. On most digital platforms a small budget won’t get you very far, but on social media you can find some success. The more money you can spend, the faster you can get insights and learn what is working. You can then test and optimize to get better results. So having a small budget that can get you results will work faster than other digital marketing platforms.
If your company is the type that can be marketed successfully on Pinterest, then we would highly recommend starting there. Costs per click on this platform can be incredibly low. IN fact, it can cost as little as $0.10 low. With numbers like this you can create a low cost campaign and drive a high amount of traffic to your website, that you can later use for retargeting.
Knowing how much of a budget you have to play with, what platforms you can advertise on, and which ones you can scale the fastest, can help you understand where to start. For example, if you see increased sales after launching Pinterest you can do two things: Increase your Pinterest budget, or start ad campaigns on another platform to grow your reach further.
Ad Formats on Social Media
When it comes to ad formats on social media, there are several unique ways to deliver them across all platforms. The great part about social media is that you can let your creativity thrive here. You have options like standard image format to long form video content. One format that has been taking social media by storm is Stories. Stories are a way to increase organic growth. You can find the stories format on Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Twitter and LinkedIn also recently established them as well.
You can create videos displaying your products or services in use. Making short videos of how your products work make it easy to digest for consumers. It is a pretty simple concept, creating engaging video content of your products and service which bring in a bigger audience, and providing you a stronger chance of attracting traffic, followers, and conversions. If you don’t have any video ads to leverage, it's okay. You can use static images and make them into a video. Make sure your videos catch the attention of consumers and show off your brand so you get brand recognition. Make them direct, and finally ensure you include a call to action.
There are a wide variety of formats on social media for advertising, so make sure to experiment with all of them to find the most optimal success.
Being able to optimize your social media campaigns on such a precise level makes social media platforms incredible profitable, and great way to grow your brand audience and sales. Making sure that you take advantage of all the resources that social media platforms give you is how you will be able to make these strong optimization points.