Why You Should Be Doing Paid Social Advertising

This post was originally published on Fathom's Digital Marketing blog.

If you're not running paid social advertising campaigns, you should be. Analysts expect $24 billion to be spent globally on social media advertising in 2015. While it's not quite the spend we're currently seeing in PPC and Display, it's on the rise and experts are only expecting to see more growth in advertising dollars on social channels.

So, why is paid social growing? And why should your marketing efforts include paid social? I've included my top three reasons why you should be doing paid social below.

1. Advanced Targeting

The data points available for you to utilize in targeting your social ads are magical. Yes, I said magical. Facebook's (and now Instagram's) targeting is by far the most advanced. I feel like the possibilities are endless, well - almost endless. You're able to target people by life events - such as recently moved, having an anniversary, to behaviors - such as they are an above average spender online. It doesn't stop there, you can target by interests, demographics, job titles, and more. While Facebook is the most popular choice with advertisers, let's not forget about our other channels... Twitter and LinkedIn offer a lot of great options for targeting, as well. Twitter gives you plenty of options from targeting users following specific accounts to engaging with particular hashtags or users engaging with tweets surround key events. LinkedIn  has more job and company information from its users than all the rest combined. If you're B2B, LinkedIn is where you should be. See what I did there? LinkedIn is great for targeting specific users with certain job titles. For instance, if you were trying to attract people to download your whitepaper on "Top Digital Marketing Trends of 2015", you'd target users with the following job titles listed on LinkedIn: digital marketing specialist, digital marketing manager, digital marketing director, etc.

2. Custom and Tailored Audiences

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter offer options to remarket to individuals already engaged with your brand through placing snippets of code on your website or on specific landing pages. Facebook calls these snippets of code pixels and Twitter calls them website tags. These snippets of code allow you to create an audience in the platforms and give you the ability to target to them specifically with your ads. For instance, you can remarket to users who haven't converted by creating an audience from the pixel or tag of users who have recently visited your website but haven't converted. You'd do this through targeting the audience you created from the pixel or tag and creating a new audience by uploading emails of converted users and excluding them from your targeting. 

3. Promoting Your Content

You've probably heard that organic reach for brands is ever declining on social media. While, Facebook is the only channel to come out and say it, I'm expecting other channels to follow suite with their algorithms and make brands pay to play the game. Brands are lucky to see a 2% engagement rate from organic activities on Facebook. That means if you have 100 followers, you're lucky if two of them are seeing your organic posts. If you're seeing higher, take a moment… pat yourself on the back… you. are. doing. a. fantastic. job. Paid social advertising gives you the ability to reach more people that your brand cares about through all that advanced targeting I talked about a few paragraphs above. You're not gambling that your post is going to hit the exact people you want it to with the small fraction of people that your post is actually going to reach organically. Your post is actually reaching the users you want it to, thus making those users more likely to engage and take action from your post.