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What Is Social Media Advertising? Overview & Best Practices

January 19, 2023
social media advertising

Like most people, you have seen at least one ad on social networks. But do you know how it works?

In fact, ads are best way for companies to get the word out about their product or service and increase their sales while communicating about their brand.

Advertising on social networks is essential for your business. If you don’t do it, rest assured that your competitors will.

Today we’re going to talk about social media advertising:

Let’s get started! 

What is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising is an advertising option providing many possibilities when creating marketing campaigns on various social networks.

To make it short, social media advertising is any form of digital advertising that delivers paid advertising to targeted audiences through social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

These kinds of ads are quick and effective in easily connecting with your buyers and boosting your marketing campaigns. By using different sources of information, marketers can focus on their audience. Plus, social media ads are convenient and give you the potential for a high ROI.

What Are the Benefits of Social Media Advertising?

Now that you know what social media advertising is, let’s take a closer look at how it can help you grow your business and increase your sales.

Raise Brand Awareness

Ads are a great way to increase your brand awareness online. Ads allow you to promote your content and drive traffic to your website.

Plus, you can target your ads to reach new audiences who may be interested in what your business has to offer.

Cost-Effective & High ROI

Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, allow you to place your landing page directly in your ad. Landing pages help generate and track leads because they include calls to action (CTAs) such as “Buy Now” or “Learn More.”

The more paid ads you run on social media, the more leads you generate and the more sales you naturally generate.

Target The Right Audience

As an enterprise, you know who your buyer is. This is great because paid advertising allows you to refine your search and target specific population groups.

Features such as custom audiences and remarketing will allow you to serve ads that will only be seen by people who know your brand and need to drive purchases.

Most Popular Social Media Advertising Networks

It’s interesting to see which social media platforms work best for your marketing campaign now that you know the advantages of using them.

Facebook

Advertising on Facebook, the world’s largest social network, has become increasingly popular. Brands can easily find their target market on Facebook because the demographics of age, gender, and location are diverse. So your business can target consumers based on their location, interests, past activities, occupation, etc.

Facebook advertising options include :

  • Photo ads
  • Video ads
  • Story ads
  • Carousel ads
  • Messenger ads

All of this can be used to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or landing page, reach your customers on a more personal level, and increase conversion rates.

YouTube

YouTube’s advertising audience is 2.56 billion, the largest social media platform. This is 32.4% of the population, and the largest age group is 25-34. 

There are six main ad formats on YouTube.

  • Skippable in-stream ads
  • Non-skippable in-stream ads
  • Bumper ads
  • Out-stream advertising
  • Masthead advertising
  • Overlay ads

Instagram

Instagram ads are an ideal tool for brands with more visually appealing products. While organic content is a great way to build brand awareness, Instagram ads can link directly to your website or landing page, making it quick and easy to reach and interact with your site. Popular with both large and small businesses, Instagram ads are most commonly used by eCommerce brands.

  • Most users between 18 and 34 use Instagram, so targeting a younger demographic may yield the best results. 
  • You can target the right audience with options similar to Facebook, finding audiences based on demographics, activity, interests, and more.
  • Advertising options include a photo, video, carousel, and collection ads. 
  • You have the option to post ads on the company’s main Instagram feed, stories, or IGTV.

Facebook owns Instagram, so you can use Facebook Ads Manager to manage your ads on Instagram and Facebook. It allows you to view metrics such as click-through rates and other ad interactions on both platforms and optimize your spending based on the highest performance.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a large professional user base and may target users based on their work history and qualifications. Because of this, LinkedIn ads are primarily aimed at his B2B audience. With LinkedIn, you can reach out to people personally and directly and encourage them to read your content, apply for jobs, and follow you.

Twitter

Twitter has been a popular social media platform since 2006, which has increased the use of Twitter advertising. Most commonly used for reading news and interacting with influencers. Twitter Ads offers two advertising options.

Promote: This option finds the Tweet you want to promote from your timeline and tells Twitter who your target market is. Twitter will automatically promote your Tweets to the audience you specify.

Twitter Ads: These goal-based ads allow you to create unique marketing campaigns based on your business goals.

Social Media Advertising Types and Costs

Demographics, competition, bidding, and other factors heavily influence social media advertising costs. However, you can get an idea of cost per impression (CPM) and cost per click (CPC).

  • Facebook: CPC is $0.97, while CPM is $7.19.
  • Instagram: CPC is $3.65, while CPM is $7.91.
  • Linkedin: CPC is $5.26 while CPM is $6.59.
  • Youtube: CPC is $3.21, while CPM is $9.68.
  • Twitter: CPC is $0.38, while CPM is $6.46.

Social Media Advertising Best Practices

If you want a marketing campaign that works the best, you need to know how to get the most out of your lead generation and sales.

Define Your Audience & Identify Their Favorite Platforms

Make sure you know your ideal target audience. This will help you target the right audience and ensure your message resonates. Keyword searches and customer research can help you better understand who represents your ideal audience, what they are looking for, and what types of advertising work best for them.

Targeting your favorite customers is essential, but pay attention to your current customers. Remarketing to customers can remind them of your brand and encourage future purchases.

Experiment With Organic Posts First

If you post daily content on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, use those posts to determine future advertising success. Some posts tend to grab more consumer attention than others.

Track which posts get the most shares, comments, likes, and clicks so you can use the highest-performing posts for future advertising campaigns. You can also combine organic posts with ads to build brand awareness and show consumers the content you own.

Create & Experiment With Different Ad Types

Campaign success is highly dependent on the advertising medium. To maximize your chances of success, create multiple ads to hedge your chances. It’s not about doing A/B testing. You can create two (or more) completely different themes for the same campaign. You can use different ad copy and visuals together. 

Make Sure Your Copy is On Point

Social media users are often passive scrollers. They keep scrolling through their news feed until something catches their eye. To do this, you need to design something eye-catching enough to force you to scroll back to see the ad.

Play around with colors, symbols, or fonts to grab attention. Similarly, you can write compelling and relevant headlines to persuade them to click on your ad.

Utilize the Power of Ad Retargeting

People are unlikely to remember you after a single interaction. A visitor may land on your blog post to solve a problem, but they can’t see your brand at all. In such cases, you can use remarketing to introduce yourself. Remarketing campaigns go beyond reminders to build trust and enhance brand recall. To save time you can also automate your social media campaign and focus on other work.

Make Your Ads Mobile-Friendly

Most users view their social media accounts on mobile devices. This means that your social media ads will appear the same. Optimize your ads for small screens and make images easier to read on small screens. Use tools to target mobile users in your area.

Track Analytics: What You Can’t Measure Cannot Be Improved

Just as it’s essential to know your goals before running an advertising campaign, it’s also important to measure your results. This will let you know if you have achieved your goal. It shows you what worked and didn’t so you can improve in the future.

Measuring results and concrete data about the value your advertising brings to your business (sales, leads, etc.) is essential to demonstrating ROI.

Key Takeaways 

Advertising on social networks has an excellent return on investment.

  • The main social networks for advertising are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube.
  • Successful advertising requires a thorough understanding of your audience to target groups that are likely to be interested in your brand.
  • Each ad will have a different impact. Then, it is important to track the performance of your ads.

Now that you know everything about social media advertising, which one should you choose for your marketing campaign? Tell us in the comments!

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