7 Reasons To Consider Paid Social Media Advertising

Social media has erupted over the last decade or so, and brands have been quickly learning to take advantage of new channels for promotion and awareness.

As of 2019, 45% of the world’s population is active on social media platforms. That’s a huge audience, and it’s been attracting brands to social networks in droves.

As much as 90% of brands use social networks to boost brand awareness. With such a high proportion of businesses leveraging platforms, social feeds are littered with posts and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for brands to cut through the noise and earn organic engagement.

The answer lies in turning to other methods of social media promoting that guarantee a higher reach on your channels.

Read on for seven reasons you should be considering paid social media advertising as part of your marketing strategy.

#1 It is Cost-Effective

Traditional forms of advertising are highly expensive – effective radio, billboard, print, and television campaigns these days are reserved for organizations with a seemingly endless marketing budget.

So it’s no surprise that lots of traditional advertising channels have seen a dip in recent years. In contrast, social media advertising spend is on a steep upward rise.

The total social ad spend globally for 2019 is predicted to finish up around $93 billion. In 2018, it increased by a whopping 32%.

That’s because social media ads are far more cost-effective than many other forms of advertising for several reasons:

The PPC Model

Social media ads are generally paid for on a pay per click (PPC) or pay per thousand impressions (PPM).

This means that rather than throwing your marketing budget into the void and hoping for results, you don’t pay for your advertising without guaranteeing that they have been clicked or viewed.

#2 It Promotes Brand Awareness

Not every business has the historical brand awareness to instantly command a following of thousands on social media. For most businesses, the path to organically increasing their follower numbers is a long, hard slog, regardless of how creative you get with organic content.

With paid social strategies, you can choose the size of the audience that sees your posts. Depending on the budget that goes into your ads, you have opened up your potential reach to thousands, if not millions, of users.

And you’ll know that the brand awareness is working (and that your targeting strategies are good) when your follower numbers and click-through rates start to grow. Amongst Gen Z and millennials, 50% consider social media to be the channel where they’re targeted with the most relevant ads, proving that paid ads work when it comes to brand awareness.

Effective brand awareness can take expert-level social media optimization.

#3 Increased Traffic

One of the most prominent reasons to have a presence on social media is to attract higher visitor numbers to your website, where you can encourage conversions like purchases or content downloads.

And the results show that paid social ads increase website traffic. A typical Facebook user in the U.S. clicks through on eight ads on a monthly basis

Click-through ads are particularly successful on Instagram, which sees a higher engagement level with brands than any other social platform.

In fact, 200 million Instagram users visit 1+ business profile pages on a daily basis. So, on a platform where users are already organically highly engaged, it makes sense that paid ads deliver a high click-through rate to websites.

#4 Amplified Audience Reach

Social media platforms command some of the highest amounts of users, visitors, and search results in the world.

There are more than 1 billion active monthly users on Instagram. Youtube accounts for over 11% of all internet traffic.

By ignoring the opportunity to reach audiences on social media, brands are losing out on a huge audience reach potential.

#5 Targeted Advertising

Audiences are available on social media and fully prepared to click a well-designed ad. But you don’t have to worry about irrelevant people seeing your ad.

Social media advertising platforms are developing increasingly complex targeting tools so you can reach your target audience.

It’s no surprise when you consider the amount of information people post about themselves on their profiles. Facebook has made it possible to target your ideal audience by breaking demographics down into:

• Age
• Gender
• Languages
• Specific locations
• Interests
• Job title
• Education level
• Generation
• Life Events
• Politics
• Relationship status
• Behaviour (digital activities, consumer classification, and more)

As an example, a hotel could then create highly specific Facebook ad campaigns to target:

• Brides looking for a wedding venue
• Families doing vacation research
• People who return frequently to the area
• Employer branding ads for new graduates from hotel management courses

Targeting this specific is guaranteed to earn far better results than publishing generic promotional ads.

On most social media platforms, it’s also possible to set up tracking codes and pixels so you can easily retarget users to increase brand impressions and earn a higher click-through rate.

#6: It is Mobile Friendly

Social media are the kings of mobile apps, so all their paid advertising is responsive to fit either the desktop or mobile versions of their platform.

As most marketers will know by now, the importance of mobile traffic cannot be understated. It’s how users are increasingly browsing, and that goes for websites in general and social media.

In Q4 2018, 93% of Facebook’s ad revenue came from mobile ads. Ads you promote through social media apps are, therefore, fully mobile responsive.

#7: Growth Acceleration

Most social media ad platforms also come with a variety of tools that allow you to accelerate growth, both on the social media channel itself, on your own website, or increasing foot traffic to your business.

Various Ad Types

Taking Facebook as an example again, you can target your ads to produce specific results according to your overall business objectives.

• Local Awareness – great for walk-ins, such as restaurants, retail stores, and service-based businesses.

• Click-to-Website – create highly targeted ads to increase website traffic.

• Lead Generation – create ads that request form fills directly on the social platform for you to follow up with leads.

• Brand Awareness – improve awareness of your business and the products/services you offer.

Dashboards & Insights

Each social media platform offers it’s own version of profile and advertising insights so you can track and measure campaign success and quickly adjust your ad strategy accordingly.

Final Words

From audience reach, to highly specific targeting, to measurable results, social media paid ads have it all. Time to hop on the bandwagon and start investing in paid social ads!