Paid Social: Facebook's Not Dead

So, you've tried to make your business "blow up" organically, but your posts keep getting buried and you can't seem to get any real reach. What now? Let me introduce you to paid social.

What is Paid Social?

Paid Social refers to any form of social media that is influenced by advertising dollars. Businesses pay for ads on different social channels in order to connect with audiences outside of their own reach.

Typically when digital marketers talk about paid social, they are referring to Cost Per Click (CPC) or Pay Per Click (PPC). CPC/PPC is a business model where ads are paid for based on the number of people who click on the ad. The alternative is Cost Per Thousand (CPM), which is billed based on the number of views rather than the number of clicks.

Why Should Businesses Invest In Paid Social?

1. Paid Social helps increase brand awareness. By investing in paid social ads, your business is exposed to people who would have otherwise not known about it. This helps increase brand awareness. After all, you can have the best product/service in the world, but you won't sell anything if nobody knows about it.
2. Paid Social can teach you more about your target audience. The analytics that come with paid social ads can show you a lot about which audiences are making it to the bottom of the marketing funnel (aka actually buying your product). The metrics will show demographics of buyers, but they will also show the types of promotions with the most engagement and how paid ads are performing in comparison to organic ads.
3. Paid Social allows you to target specific customers. It is easier than ever to set up targeted ads so that your business is targeting exactly the people you are aiming for. Ads can be set up to target a certain demographic like location or income level, previous buyers, or people who have visited your site and then left. One of the most popular social sites for targeting ads is Facebook, which has multiple options for targeting ads.

Three Audiences on Facebook

There are many different platforms for targeted advertising, but Facebook remains one of the largest. Facebook has three main tools for building custom audiences.

1. Core Audiences- Core audiences allow targeting based on demographics, interests, behaviors, location, and connections.
2. Custom Audiences- A custom audience targets existing customers. This is done by using customer lists, website traffic, and engagement on Facebook.
3. Lookalike Audience- A lookalike audience targets people who are similar to your existing audience. This is done by using a custom audience as the "source" audience, and then finding people with similar interests, demographics, and behaviors to advertise to.

How to Use Facebook Ads

Let's look at an example. Say you are a fashion company, and you want to promote your business to a wider audience. You could use a graphic such as the one below, with the ad leading to your main website. A lookalike audience would good to target, since the goal is to broaden your reach.

Let's say you're the same brand, but you want to promote a particular sale or product. You could use the graphics below on a custom audience to target repeat purchasers.

When users click on these ads, they could be sent to the landing page for the sale being promoted, or they could be sent directly to the product they clicked on. The goal here is a purchase conversion, whereas the goal for the first ad was increased overall brand awareness.

In Conclusion

Paid social is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. Paid social puts your brand in front new eyes, and is overall a marketing strategy that every brand can benefit from.