Paid social media- is it an investment worth spending?
The number of social media users globally grew from 4.2 billion in January 2021 to 4.62 billion in January 2022. This accounts for a 10.1% growth YOY of global social media usage. While these numbers are impressive, it’s also true that organic social media reach has declined over the past few years When it comes to social media, you not only need to maintain a great organic calendar but also invest in paid social media advertising. This is why more and more marketers are using paid social media to support their organic content. Paid social media can better enable you to get your content in front of the right audiences at the right times. Social media advertising spending topped $47.9 billion in 2021. That’s practically 20% of the total expected advertising spend by all North American businesses that year. However, it might seem daunting to move from an organic strategy to using paid adverts, so it’s important to understand how to effectively use paid social media, and how your organization might benefit from its use.
What is Paid social media advertising?
Paid social media advertising is very different from traditional advertising. Paid social media is a way to display adverts or other sponsored content via social media platforms. These apps usually have in-app tools to create, schedule and post your ads. Social media advertising can refer to paying to boost one of your organic posts so that it’s seen by more people, or creating a specific ad campaign that appears either as sidebar banners or within a feed and will be served to audiences meeting the targeting criteria you choose. These ads can be very useful for targeting specific audiences, based on core demographics like age, location, and even interests. Big data and machine learning allow you to find, target, and reach your audience with ease. Each platform is designed to facilitate the goals of your business, such as brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, and more. You can even access native analytics for insights into how to enhance the performance of your social media advertising campaign.
Benefits of using Paid social media advertising
Whether you’re looking for reach, engagement, or sales — advertising on social media marketing will take your business to new heights and thus is a must-have for your business. Here we have rounded up several benefits of using paid social media advertising for your business and leave it up to you to decide whether its an investment worth spending on:
1- Fit any budget
2- Amplify your reach
3- Enhance your targeting
4- Maximize your content marketing
5- Boost brand awareness
6- Gather market insights
7- Gain access to mobile users
8- User-friendly interface s that there are options for every budget. Facebook and Instagram allow business pages to boost organic posts for just dollars a day to serve existing content to additional audiences
1.Fit any budget
One of the fundamental benefits of paid social media is that there are options for every budget. Facebook and Instagram allow business pages to boost organic posts for just dollars a day to serve existing content to additional audiences outside of your page’s followers. Most social media advertising models operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-view (PPV) basis meaning you only pay when someone has clicked on your ad or viewed your video ad. As a result, you can keep your advertising costs low and only pay when someone takes action. As your marketing budget increases, you can plan to make additional investments in your top-performing outlets, or expand your budget into additional paid social channels where your audience can be found.
2.AMPLIFY YOUR REACH
Given the massive audience size on social media, there is plenty of opportunity to reach more people than you would with organic content. Most social media platforms enable users to use interest-based targeting to ensure ads are reaching the people who are truly interested in your content. You’ll also be able to reach customers that might not know your brand but are interested in your product. Advertising on social media gives your brand instant visibility. The sheer volume of posts on social media makes connecting with your audience a statistical improbability. However, paid ads are guaranteed a place in the user’s feed. Despite the noise of the larger social platform, this gives you a direct window to drive leads, website traffic, and sales. To achieve the greatest reach, find where your audience spends their time online. Demographics play an important role in Paid social media advertising.
3.ENHANCE YOUR TARGETING
Paid advertising on social media gives you complete control over who sees your ad. Social media advertising can help your business generate more conversions. 27% of people surveyed in the Digital 2020 report stated that they found new brands and products through social media adverts. 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 with your ideal buyers, instead of a broad audience that may or may not be interested in your content. There are several ways to boost your conversion rate with social media advertising. Advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaigns Manager let you devise detailed audience targeting metrics for your ad campaigns. By doing this, you can make sure that your social media ads are reaching people who are likely to have an interest in what you have to say or offer. But that’s not the only way that social media adverts can result in increased conversions. By setting up retargeting social media ad campaigns, you can also nurture warm leads and encourage them to re-engage with your business. Remarketing social media campaigns are another powerful tool for increasing conversions. For example, eCommerce business owners could run retargeting ads on Facebook and Instagram that encourage website visitors with abandoned carts to revisit the website and complete their purchases. Each social media platform offers excessive targeting parameters. Beyond basic user demographics, you can choose from psychographic factors such as interests, hobbies, personality types, and more. Based on these insights, Paid social ads can help you re-engage with existing customers or followers and promote your latest developments.
4.MAXIMISE YOUR CONTENT MARKETING
You don’t have to wait for people to come to you. With ads, you can put your content in front of them with the frequency and budget you control. Aside from coaxing leads down the funnel, ads for content will help you to drive web traffic, boost engagement on social media, and improve the ROI of your content marketing. By promoting your business, products, or services across social media, you are increasing brand awareness from the get-go. Even before clicks and conversions come into play, you are putting your brand out there to millions of people by using social media ads.
5.Boost brand awareness
As social media users see your ads, you can build a presence and awareness for your brand as people continue to see your content on platforms where they spend their time. Social media advertising is a cost-effective way to create exposure for your brand. If your business appears in the news feed regularly, people will start to recognize you. Recognition will enhance your credibility, plus drive engagement and purchasing behavior. Consider that 80% of its users follow at least one brand on Instagram. Of this majority group, at least 30% of users have purchased a product they discovered on Instagram. When generating awareness, serve ads that are both informative and memorable. Appearing in people’s social media feeds with a ‘sponsored’ label or showing up in front of a YouTube video can do wonders for increasing your brand visibility, helping your business to stay fresh in people’s minds – even if it’s on a subconscious level.
6.Gather market insights
Across all the paid advertising platforms, you can set up multiple versions of an advertisement and optimize based on audience interaction. This data collected will help you refine your messaging and help you build a holistic understanding of your audience and their interests. The iteration process for paid ads is far quicker than the process of organic social and organic search optimization. In addition, the data the paid ad platforms give you is as deep as you want to go. You’ll have current and historical data on hand. Don’t miss the opportunity to improve your reach and conversion rate by interrogating the data. How did your audience interact with your ads? Which ad type was most popular? Did video convert better — and with whom? Use native analytics within the social media platforms to assess and refine the performance of your advertising campaign. You can look into KPIs such as clicks, comments, and profile visits to determine if your ads are creating an impact.
7.Gain access to mobile users
The dispersion of social media advertising is unmatched. According to Pew Research, 80% of time spent on social media is spent on a mobile device. When users want to find, know, or purchase — a social media advertising campaign will help you to reach your audience at that moment. The most effective ads compete with the organic content of their native platform.
8.USER-FRIENDLY INTERFACE
Most social media giants offer a user-friendly advertising platform. By managing your ad campaigns through ad managers, like Facebook Ads Manager for your Facebook and Instagram ads or Campaign Manager for your LinkedIn adverts, you can make sure your ads are put up to achieve your desired results. Most of these platforms will walk you through each step of setting up your advertising campaign from choosing an objective to entering your audience requirements and specifying your budget. Then when it’s time to publish your adverts, you can easily monitor the advert performance and use these insights to make informed decisions about how best to optimize your adverts for success. Some advertising platforms will also let you create custom reports and rules to improve the ease of managing your paid social media campaigns.
CONCLUSION
It can easily be deduced from the above arguments that advertising on social media is a user-friendly, cost-effective, and customizable way to promote your products and services to millions of people at once. This is why it is so important to spend time understanding how social media can impact your business, especially during times when many of us are relying so heavily on the digital world.
As organic reach on social networks continues to fall, paid social media advertising should be at the top of your mind. As a result, businesses of all sizes are changing their social media strategies to include paid media. Paying for social media allows you to amplify reach, enhance targeting, and drive greater results. If you want to reap the benefits of social media advertising, reach out to us today at Right Media to find out how we can create results-driven social media ad campaigns for your business.
As organic reach on social networks continues to fall, paid social media advertising should be at the top of your mind. As a result, businesses of all sizes are changing their social media strategies to include paid media. Paying for social media allows you to amplify reach, enhance targeting, and drive greater results. If you want to reap the benefits of social media advertising, reach out to us today at Right Media to find out how we can create results-driven social media ad campaigns for your business.
