Social media – almost everyone uses it. On Facebook alone, there are over 1.4 billion daily users worldwide. In North America, the average person spends 2 hours and 6 minutes on social media each day. That’s a lot of scrolling. That’s also a lot of opportunities for businesses to get their brand and messaging in front of their audience. One way to capitalize on this opportunity is through paid advertising on social media. Leveraging paid social media advertising gives you a presence on these popular social media platforms and can provide your business with a competitive advantage. Conversely, businesses that don’t utilize social media advertising can find themselves falling behind. In this article, we’re going to outline the importance of paid social media advertising and why you should consider adding it to your marketing mix.
4 Benefits of Adding Paid Social Media Advertising to Your Marketing Mix
Amplify Your Reach
Social media can be thought of as a 24/7 center of conversation. People engage, connect, interact. They share their thoughts, tips, recommendations, and content. Having a presence on social media is important because it allows your brand to join in this conversation and gives you the opportunity to connect with your audience and potential customers. However, getting your business’s message to stand out in this 24/7 center of conversation can be challenging. This is where paid social media advertising comes in.
Utilizing paid social media advertising allows you to cut through the noise and guarantee placement in your audience’s feed. Despite the sheer volume of posts on any social media platform, paid advertising gives you a direct vehicle to deliver your message to your desired audience and ultimately help drive leads, website traffic and sales for your business.
Brand Awareness
Successfully amplifying your reach on social media gives you a leg up on the competition by helping to increase your brand’s awareness. Establishing brand awareness is important for any business. It’s the first step in any sales funnel and the foundation of eventually acquiring customers. With the popularity of social media, now more than ever, utilizing social media is an important tactic in building your brand’s visibility. Employing paid social media advertising gets your brand in front of your desired audience and creates familiarity with your business. A mix of memorable and informative social ads can effectively capture your audience’s attention and leave a lasting impact on your brand’s recognition.
Effective Audience Targeting
Speaking of reaching your audience, paid advertising on social media gives you detailed, precise control over who sees your ads. Each platform offers a variety of targeting capabilities that allows you to efficiently and effectively reach your desired audience. You can target based on geography like zip codes or location radiuses, and demographics like gender and age – but beyond that, you can also target based on psychographic factors such as interest, hobbies, personalities, and more. This cuts down on advertising spend waste by giving you complete control on who receives your ads and allows you to use your advertising dollars with precision.
Furthermore, you can upload a list of existing contacts that your business has and target ads to them on social media or create a lookalike audience of people that resemble your existing contact list. This is an effective tactic to not only re-engage with your existing audience, but also expand it with new customers who closely resemble your current ones.
Additionally, Facebook specifically allows you to leverage retargeting advertising – meaning you can serve ads to people who have previously visited your website. Retargeting is an effective advertising tactic because it allows you to serve ads to people who have already shown interest in your business. Retargeting helps reinforce your brand awareness but also can help conversions on your website.
Gathering Audience Insights
Not only does paid social media advertising allow you to successfully target your audience, it can also provide you with key insights about your audience through the platform’s metrics and data. Want to know what demographic in your audience is interacting with your ads the most? Which ad type was most effective? The metrics for paid advertising on social media provides you with a look at different KPIs that can give you deeper insights on who your audience is that you previously may have not known and allows you to better target your advertising and get the most out of your marketing dollars.
Taking Action
The social media landscape is vast and ever-changing. Navigating your business’s marketing through this complex and rapidly evolving environment can be daunting but doing so successfully can pay big dividends. No matter the size of your marketing budget, considering adding in paid advertising on social media to your marketing mix is a conversation every business needs to have.
