Paid social, it's something you should be doing.

Paid social is a great tool for generating awareness about your brand and building engagement from your users online through social media sites. It's being used widely by north American and international businesses with an estimated 47.9 million spent in social media advertising from 2021, that’s about 20% of total advertising spent by all north American businesses in 2021.?

Examples of paid social advertising:

• Pay-per-click advertising
• Influencer generated content
• Display ads with call to actions

Each social media channel is different and should be carefully selected by your organization depending on where your target market is and depends on the kind of content you want to show your targeted audience.?

• Twitter is great for short form content
• Instagram is optimal for visually engaging content
• LinkedIn is excellent for B2B marketing and professional communications with other business professionals.?

It’s important to establish a budget for your campaigns so that you have an idea how much to tell each social media site what you’re willing to pay per click and for each engagement that user conducts.

This is a much different concept than the traditional Tv ad where you are paying for a length of time for the showing and can have a sizeable amount of difficulty measuring the effectiveness of the commercial.

With paid social you’re able to describe your ideal audience and reach more valueable users that would be more likely to engage with your ads and more liekly to make a conversion by reaching your site to sign up for a newsletter or make a purchase.?

The beauty of paid social marketing is that you are able to select a target market audience based on their characteristics, behaviors and previous actions online.

The big 3 audiences you should be targeting,

Core audiences

• Here you set the rules and parameters for who you want to see your ads.

It can be as broad or as narrow as you would like, it's based on how much scalability you want.

• Location
• Demographics
• Online behaviors such as device usage and more
• Interests
• Connections

Custom audiences

It is sort of like remarketing, because you are able to give a site like Facebook certain conditions that if a user has done “this action” in the past ad them to this smaller group of users that were going to target with the ad.

• A list of existing customers
• Build on a specific data range like 2-3 months back of online traffic from users depending on where your company is going in the future.
• If you have some contact information about users such as phone numbers and email addresses, you can upload a file and have 1 to 1 matching on those individuals to where you are targeting people who are already interested in your brand.?
• People who have previously interacted with your website
• Base on organic website traffic
• Users who have made a purchase on your website.
• Audience members who are signed up for your email newsletters.
• Users who attended a recent event like a webinar

Lookalike audiences

Lookalike audiences are users who are similar to your customers and custom audience. These are great to scale your audience and generate new audience members who haven’t yet heard about your brand but would be interested in your business based on their past behaviors and characteristics.

• Users who haven’t found out about your brand or website yet who share the characteristics of your core audience and custom audience. Facebook allows you to do this in the audience feature.
• You need at least 100 people in your custom audience for lookalike audience to work and bring back relevant and potentially valued users.

Paid social on Facebook

Formats of advertisements on Facebook

• Video Ads
• Canvas ads
• Collection ads
• Carousel ads
• Slideshow ads
• Photo ads

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Formats for paid social ads on Twitter

• Promoted tweets,
• These are like regular tweets but are labeled “Promoted”
• This appear in users’ timelines of those who you’ve targeted, this is great to increase your awareness, increase web traffic, and hopefully generate more conversions.
• Promoted accounts can be used in the “Who to follow” section, and in search results. This helps increase visibility and awareness.
• Promoted Trends, here you can put your story in the trending topics section of twitter. This will differentiate you from organic trends

Pricing for twitter is based on an auction-based system similar to Facebook, this helps you be able to establish a budget for your ad campaign.

Example:

????Follower’s campaign: $2.00 - $3.25

????Website visit campaign $1.58 - $3.00

Awareness Campaign: $4.00 - $5.00?

Instagram advertising:

It should be a high priority for businesses to thrive on Instagram, with visually appealing ads. 59% of Instagram users are 18-29, and over a third of these users are females.

Ad Formats:

• Photo ads
• Video Ads
• Carousel ads
• Story ads

Instagram pricing uses the auction-based system just like twitter and Facebook.?

LinkedIn Advertising

The app you are reading this on right now is the largest network for business professionals with about half a billion users in over 200 countries. It’s known as the most effective platform for B2B advertising and the top social networking site for lead generation.

Ad Formatting

• Sponsored Content: Delivers content across all device types in your target audience’s timelines so you can raise awareness, build lasting relationships, and hopefully drive conversions.
• Sponsored InMail: Here you can deliver personalized messages that are sent directly to your target audiences’ inbox.
• Text Ads: Text based ads that are shown on the right-hand side of the desktop display, these are great for generating traffic to your site.
• Dynamic Ads: Appearing on the right-hand side of the page and include personalized info including a name, photo in hopes of driving better results.
• Programmatic display ads

Targeting options on LinkedIn

• Company
• Experience
• Education
• Interests and identity: Including skills, affiliated groups, age, gender, and location.

Things to always keep in mind

1. Estanlish your campaigns objectives

• It's very important to decide how you want to grab people's attention, and where you are going to grab their attention whether it's on Facebook, Instagram twitter, LinkedIn or another social media network.
• Furthermore, you need to establish what kind of conversions you want to derive out of your campaign, it could be to increase your websites traffic, or increase product/service purchases.

2. ?Select the best social networks for the campaign

3. Create a smart budget depending on your CPC and budget accordingly

4. Test your ads in your campaign with smaller groups of people to test their effectiveness on a smaller scale.

5. Use the target features on social media sites to attract valueable users that are likely to help you achieve your goals.?

Wrap Up

Paid social is a very useful tool to generate awareness through social media sites by defining a relevant audience for your products by establishing a core audience, custom audience and lookalike audiences. Follow these steps listed above and you should be multiple steps closer at reaching your goals!