Advertising on Social Media – The Right Way
So, you’re advertising on social media, but the results always fall below your expectations, and you’re wondering if you’re doing something wrong.
You see, social media is a gold mine. It is the ideal leveler for brands, as brands with no offline relevance or a huge customer base to keep them solvent have used social media advertising to build massive followings and increase their bottom line.
With over 4.5 billion social media active users, brands have moved their marketing to various social media platforms. The over $230 billion spent on social media advertising in 2022 clearly shows how much brands are willing to compete to be visible to this record-breaking social media usage.
If you want to leverage social media advertising to grow your brand and increase revenue this year, be my guest. We’ll examine social media advertising in detail, explaining its benefits to businesses and how to create an effective social media advertising strategy. You’ll also learn the common mistakes to avoid for effective social media advertising.
What is Social Media Advertising?
Social media advertising is the act of using social media platforms to promote a product, service, or brand to a targeted audience. It involves creating and managing ads on popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, etc.
Social media advertising can include display ads, sponsored posts, video ads, carousel ads, etc. Every brand involved in social media advertising aims to increase awareness, generate leads, drive website traffic, and ultimately boost sales. These businesses use advanced targeting tools to reach specific demographics, interests, behaviors, and location-based audiences.
Compared to traditional advertising, social media advertising is more cost-effective and tends to reach a wider audience more quickly. However, understanding the different types of social media advertising and their possible reach will help guide your advertising plans.
Types of Social Media Advertising
Here are some of the most common social media advertising formats businesses use to promote their products and services:
- Display Ads: These are image or video ads that appear on social media users’ news feeds.
- Carousel Ads: Carousel ads allow brands to display multiple products or services in a single ad using a series of images or videos social media users can scroll through.
- Stories Ads: This is the form of social media ads where brands advertise their products or services between peoples’ media stories. Story ads are new but becoming common among social media users with the wide adoption of the feature.
- Message Ads: Unlike most social media ads that appear on users’ feeds, message ads appear directly in a user’s inbox. This is common with Facebook Messenger and LinkedIn.
- Sponsored Posts: Here, brands sponsor influencers with huge followers to promote their products or services on their timelines.
Brands that understand each social media advertising type’s unique benefits know how best to use them for effective promotion campaigns.
Benefits of Social Media Advertising to Your Business
The benefits of social media advertising to brands are many. Here are some of them:
Increased Brand Awareness
With millions of users on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., you can promote your products or services to a wider audience. Unlike traditional advertising, where your ads are visible to only people in a particular location, social media advertising can earn your brand visibility from around the world.
Targeted Advertising
One of the key benefits of social media advertising is the ability to segment your audience and target a specific set of people based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors. Ad targeting helps you show your ads to the right audience, increasing your conversion chances.
Affordable Advertising
Social media has significantly reduced the cost of advertising. Now you can run ads with any budget, which is not obtainable when running TV, radio, or print ads. Even more interesting is that you’re not billed by impression but by the clicks your ads attract.
Improved Customer Engagement
Social media advertising allows you to engage with your customers directly by replying to comments and direct messages from the ad posts. This can help you build brand trust quickly and also improve customer satisfaction.
Measurable Results
One of the advantages of social media advertising over traditional advertising is the possibility of measuring your ad’s performance in real time. You can analyze key metrics such as ad impressions, clicks, and conversions and use them to optimize your ads for better results.
How to Create an Effective Social Media Advertising Strategy
Social media advertising allows brands to create awareness and ultimately increase their bottom line. However, if not done properly, social media advertising can waste time and resources.
Smart businesses develop an effective social media advertising strategy that enhances the actualization of their goals. Here is a clear strategy you can use to design a social media advertising strategy that brings results:
Set Clear Social Media Advertising Goals
Successful social media advertising starts with setting clear and measurable advertising goals. These goals define the level of success your brand has attained at the end of an advertising campaign.
Set a Social Media Advertising Budget
After setting your brand’s social media advertising goals, the next step is to set a budget to attain those goals. Social media advertising is cost-effective, as you can work with any budget. However, the depth of your budget determines the extent to which the set goals will be met.
Choose the Right Ad Format and Platform
The next step in setting up an effective social media advertising strategy is to choose an ad format and platform. Image and video ads work best on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, while LinkedIn is known to be the best for message ads.
Choosing the right ad format and platform to display your ads goes a long way toward determining the success of your social media advertising campaigns.
Plan the Ad Placement
Placing ads on social media requires more than knowing how to post. Most social media platforms have ad managers where you can set up and manage your ads.
Planning your ad placement is crucial to having a successful social media advertising campaign. This is where brands choose the demographics of their target audience, set budgets for each ad campaign, and determine how long it will run.
Many businesses make mistakes that cost them greatly in achieving their campaign goals. It’s understandable when these mistakes are peculiar to the brand’s needs and expectations. However, there are certain mistakes you should learn to avoid early on.
Common Mistakes to Avoid in Social Media Advertising
Failure to Understand Your Target Audience
Successful social media advertising is a product of proper audience segmentation and targeting. Studying and understanding your audience before launching an ad campaign is essential. Targeting the wrong audience leads to brands exhausting their ad budgets without meeting their expected goals.
Using Poorly Designed Ad Creatives
Most brands make the mistake of using poorly designed images, videos, or copy for their ad campaigns. Properly designed images, videos, and well-written ad copies play a huge role in convincing your target audience to visit your sales page.
When the image or video is catchy, and the ad copy hits the pain points and resonates greatly with your target audience, you’ll have a great click-through rate.
Choosing the Wrong Ad Platform
If you’re running an ad for old people, you should know TikTok isn’t the place to go. The same thing applies to running ads for professionals, no platform offers you more access to your target audience than LinkedIn.
People make the mistake of choosing ad platforms based on the number of users they have. The focus should be on the number of platform users meeting your target demographic and interests.
Ignoring Analytics
Accessing ad analytics and not using them is like neglecting a doctor’s diagnosis and prescription to do what you want. Most businesses run ads without trying to understand why they are not converting.
Ad analytics gives you insights into the interests and preferences of your target audience and lets you know what to work on to increase your conversion rate.
Ready to Advertise the Right Way on Social Media?
With a clear social media advertising strategy, your efforts and resources would be well-spent. Social media provides a huge opportunity for businesses to build a strong community of loyal customers on a budget, and only the smart ones leverage this opportunity.
Advertising the right way on social media goes beyond having a fantastic product and huge ad budgets to having the right strategy to dig the social media gold mine.
