How can social media advertising help you target your ideal customer?

Social media advertising involves the use of platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Meta to allocate budget towards posts, stories, reels, and other content that pertains to services, products, or business-related information. This approach makes use of targeting tools to ensure the content reaches a precise audience whose interests and relevance align with what's being promoted.

Based on my experience, social media advertising stands out as the primary means for a brand, company, or organization to ensure their target audience views the content they create. Typically, when a brand relies solely on organic posts (those without paid promotion) on social media, the reach of these posts remains quite limited. This is because most of us follow numerous other accounts on our social media platforms, causing many organic posts to go unnoticed in our feeds. Additionally, social media advertising offers the advantage of precise targeting based on various factors, including user behaviors such as website visits or specific page visits, along with interests, demographics, and geographic location.

Social media advertising is important for selling an ecommerce brands because you want to get your message out to your targeted audience where they are spending their time online. This requires knowing your audience and knowing how they spend their time online, what sites they visit and what social channels they are active on. Once you know this information, you can then match your brand messaging with the appropriate social media channel using the platforms various targeting methods to refine your audience.

It all comes down to research. Identify your target audience and find out where they are spending time online. You can do this research by exploring online communities, looking at industry benchmarks and data, surveying the general public through a variety of tools, or asking your own customer base. Once you find out where your target audience is spending their time online, you’ll know which social media and ad platforms to choose.

The primary consideration should be to identify the platform where you're confident your target audience is already actively engaging.

This all comes down to collecting as much information on your audience as possible. Social platforms often have analytics and demographics data as does other analytic platforms like Google Analytics 4. We also highly recommend surveying current customers, using targeting popups to ask questions, using post-purchase surveys, and asking additional information in product review requests. This all helps build your target audience once you have enough data.

We like to start at the bottom of the sales funnel and work out way up. This means starting with remarketing ads and keeping a close eye on frequency. Many small brands can spend $5-10/day on a 30-day web visitor remarketing audience with really strong success. From here, work your way up to mid-funnel ads and see how you can capture attention of those actively searching for products like yours. This often comes in the form of Google Search ads or other in-market audiences. Maxing out your budget here can be challenging and is where a lot of brands stop with their ad spends. Top of funnel brand advertising is the last step. This is how you build demand for your product and feed the entire sales funnel.