Why should you use paid social media?

Paid social media is intricately connected to the broader landscape of digital marketing. It offers unique advantages in terms of audience targeting, brand visibility, traffic generation, and analytics, making it an integral part of a comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Advantages of using paid social media

Paid social media is advertising. Where an organization pay money to a media such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, etc. To have content or message reach a target audience where they are likely to be interested and converted.

By using paid media, a company is able to increase its visibility and reach a larger audience outside your organic reach. It is a great approach to expand your brand presence.

Target advertising is an advantage of paid media. Paid social media platforms provide advanced targeting options, allowing advertisers to reach specific demographics, interests, and behaviors. This precision helps in reaching the right audience with relevant content.

The creativity side is amazing with paid social media. Paid platforms offer a variety of ad formats, including images, videos, carousels, and more. This flexibility allows for creative and engaging content that can capture the attention of the audience.

Another advantage of Paid social is analytics and fast results. Paid social media campaigns provide detailed analytics and insights, offering valuable data on the performance of your ads. This information can be used to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions for future strategies. Paid advertising allows for quicker results by immediately putting your content in front of a larger audience.

How can an organization such as NFL use paid social media to increase awareness?

To create a successful paid social media campaign the NFL needs to understand the process of social advertising. The process from learning about a product to conversion is best described by the marketing funnel where attention, interest, desire, and action are the stages. Paid social media process is about going through the funnel. The first step is understanding the landscape of social advertising. If your target audience is on Facebook, that should be your starting media platform. Don't focus on a platform because of current trends and popularity, focus on your target audience and later expand to other media to experiment and hopefully learn something new. You can A/B test to decide which media platforms reported better results and which form of content that resulted to a higher conversion rate.

The next step is establishing your audience demographics, interests, and behavior. By using web analytics, the NFL can view the report on which group is more likely to convert such as 18-25 years old rather than 50-65 years old, or male or female, they can optimize their campaign for the younger age and specific gender group. The demographic include age, gender, location, marital status, household size, and more.

Doing research on competitors to observe how they market their brand and product is an easy way to make sure you aren't missing any opportunity and also learn what not to do.

Segmenting your audience to understand the customer journey. There are three segment audience.

• Those who never heard of your brand.
• Those who have engaged with your brand in the past.
• Those who are ready to buy.

You can market your product or service based on the current lifecycle of your product. If you are on the introduction stage, you want to focus on "those who never heard of your brand." if you are on the maturity stage you want to focus on "those who are ready to buy."

The last step is setting up your Ad campaign. When setting up the campaigns, you may want to start with three campaigns (prospecting, remarketing, and retargeting) to ensure you engage with your audience at the right time along their journey.

Using influencers to reach a wider audience is a great marketing method with social media. A person like Taylor Swift who has a large fan base is able to increase the NFL viewership by 7%, especially females' viewer. Influencers have a lot of referent power to influence consumers, partnering and building good relationship with celebrities and influencer is beneficial for social media marketing.

Summary

Organizations use paid social media for various reasons, such as tailored to their objectives and target audience. Key benefits include expanded reach and visibility through targeted advertising, faster results compared to organic growth, detailed analytics for informed decision-making, customization through A/B testing, promotion of events and contests to a broader audience, effective lead generation and sales, gaining a competitive advantage in the online space, remarketing opportunities for better conversion rates, and contributing to social proof and brand awareness by engaging users through likes, comments, and shares.

To learn more about paid social media check out Hootsuite or Search engine journal.