Considering Paid Social Media Marketing

For businesses today with a digital marketing strategy, it is almost essential to have paid social media marketing included. Paid social is a way of sponsoring content and advertisements on any social network, whether it is a promoted trend on twitter or carousel ad on facebook or instagram, the main goal is to boost your brands presence.

Why a Business Should Invest in Paid Social

With the U.S. market spending over $30 billion on social ads its safe to assume that they work. As a business, investing in paid social is a great way to make the most of your marketing spend because it has a high potential to bring you a large range of benefits and advantages. The following are some of the top benefits that paid social can offer a business.

Custom Budget

Social media advertising is a somewhat cost-effective way for businesses of all size to promote. The amount that a business spends on their ads is totally up to them so they should have an idea of a budget before they get into it. Networks can charge in different ways such as a pay-per-click model (PPC) where you only pay when a user completes an objective but for reference, in 2016 AdEspresso analyzed over 100 million dollars of ad spend and it was discovered that the Facebook average cost per 1000 impressions (CPM) was $7.19.

In the end your paid social budget is up to you can can be whatever you want. You can take time to look at all the different advertising options on all the different platforms to find out which ones work the best for your strategy and budget.

Boost Brand Awareness

Having your brand show up on the feed of your target market is a really good way to increase your businesses brand awareness because they will be more likely to remember you. Especially if you advertise consistently interesting content that fits your brand and doesn't ruin their feed, it is a good way for users to make their way to your profile or website and initiate a positive long-term relationship with your brand.

Better Reach

Organic social media is a very important method for businesses however its ability to reach your audience is on the decline and paid search is your solution because it ensures that your advertisement will be seen by a chosen audience. The ability to reach your target market is one of the most convincing reasons a business should invest in paid social.

You can research and choose the right social network that corresponds with your target market, then use segmentation options to find out the right pages and channels to send your ads. Lets next take a look at the targeting options on the platform with the highest ROI: Facebook.

Facebook Audience Targeting

There are three options to build and target your audience on Facebook:

• The core audience is a way for you to decide what kind of person the ad will reach. This is mainly based off the criteria you choose such as demographics, locations, behaviors and interests.
• The custom audience is a way for you to find your existing customers or leads on Facebook. It allows you to use your different data sources to build an audience to reach.
• Look alike audiences are good for reaching new users who are similar to your customers. Using data sources or custom audience you can then build a look-alike audience that will be more likely to be interested in your brand.

Facebook Ads

To give you guys a good example I created a mock up Facebook page for a grocery delivery business that is promoting its support to help people stay safe during the pandemic.

An advertisement like this could be very helpful to a business like such because it would be very easy using Core Audiences targeting to only show the ad to your target market (lets say elderly people within our 15 mile delivery radius) who we believe are the most likely to be interested in our services. After the ad has reached our audience, the users who are interested can easily click on the ad or our profile to learn more and continue down the purchasing funnel. All the while, we can collect data to form an even better audience profile based off who shows interest in ads like this one.

I hope you learned something about the value of paid social media marketing! Ill put some helpful links that I used for those interested.

A Short but Comprehensive Guide for Advertising on Social Media

[GUIDE] PAID SOCIAL STRATEGY: ADS, ENGAGEMENT, ROI

Paid Social Media: Worth The Investment?