Businesses of all types can benefit from advertising on social media platforms. Nowadays, social media advertising provides more real value than organic reach.
In this post, we explore five reasons why brands invest in social media advertising, from expanding their reach and visibility to driving their bottom line.
They include:
- Reach new customers
- Low entry cost
- Gain audience insights
- Wide range of formats
- Accomplish more of your goals
The benefits of social media advertising can be applied to a number of marketing and advertising strategies, but in this post we’ll examine how they can help set your business up for long-term success.
5 benefits of advertising on social media
There are several benefits to incorporating social media into your marketing mix, regardless of whether you are new to social media ads or already run ads elsewhere, such as on Google.
1. Reach new customers
Social media advertising allows you to reach out to and connect with new people who may benefit from your product or service, whether you’re considering advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Snapchat.
Social media ads target users based on their interests, behaviours, and other demographic information, instead of intent-based, keyword-centred search engine ads. By targeting users and matching our offers up to their interests and behaviours, we are able to introduce our brands to new users. It is possible that people do not know about your brand or even that your products or services exist, but upon viewing your prospecting ad, they may realise that it can benefit their lives in some way or that it is something they have been looking for.
2. Low entry cost
A small budget can still enter the auction and find success compared to traditional advertising. You will learn more about what’s working and what’s not the quicker you spend on ads, optimise performance, and test more variables, as well as reach more of your goals.
In most cases, the costs of social media platforms are comparable. Pinterest has a lower cost per click, making it a great platform to run low-cost campaigns, especially if you want to retarget new, inexpensive traffic to your website. In contrast, LinkedIn is frequently more expensive, but if your business is able to meet the needs of its business community through advertising and if your audience size and budget are on the larger end, you can see great success there.
3. Gain audience insights
We can use social platform built-in tools to understand audience breakdowns and how they relate to performance with more targeting options available to us as advertisers. In Facebook breakdown reporting, you can see information about their age ranges, genders, countries, regions, and devices. With this information combined with your various audiences and their respective performance metrics, you can better understand which segments of audiences respond to your ads and adjust your ad set targeting accordingly.
Check out Audience Insights within Facebook Ads Manager for additional audience-based information. The audience breakdown includes age and gender, relationship status, education level, job titles, location, and device activity. Facebook had to make some changes to audience targeting options a few years ago in order to protect the privacy and transparency of its users. This tool used to be more robots a few years ago before additional insights were removed. It can provide some insight, but it’s limited.
Instagram Stories Ads with polling stickers are another way to better understand your audiences. This helps you understand a target audience’s pain points so that you can resolve them, it can help you gather insights for future product development and campaigns, it can help you understand the preferences and needs of your target audience, it will help you start conversations about your brand and campaigns, it will increase audience engagement, and you will be able to retarget more effectively.
4. Wide range of formats
Although each social platform has its own ad specs, placements, and formats, there are some common denominators. In social media advertising, you have creative freedom and endless options for showcasing your brand. The ad placement space on a screen can be utilised for static images, ephemeral content and long-form videos, horizontal and vertical rectangular formats to square formats, so that the user concentrates on you, and there are fewer distractions from other ads and content outside. A format that has taken off organically and with paid ads across platforms is the Stories format, which can now be found both organically and as an ad placement, too, on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn as of late.
Do use video creatives and formats to showcase your products, services in use, and brand story, as video content tends to be more digestible by users than other content. Video content typically receives more impressions, helps manage user expectations about your offerings, and helps bring your brand to life. Make sure your narrative is fast-paced, to the point, and actionable when using video to capture your user in the first few seconds. Using the Video Creation Kit in the ad level of Ads Manager, you can apply one of Facebook’s free templates and special effects if you don’t have video content. Until you can create your own creatives, check out royalty-free stock image and video sites.
Through the various platforms we have available to experiment with, social media ads provide a wide range of advertising formats that can help our clients and brands succeed through various placements and mediums.
5. Accomplish more of your goals
Last but not least, social media advertising can drive engagement, increase website traffic, app use, and e-commerce sales. The visibility of your business on social media is far greater than that of organic ads.
You can select the appropriate campaign type based on where in the funnel your target audience is and assist your users through the funnel to conversion by selecting an appropriate campaign type. You can specify what the conversion objective is and tell the platform which event you want your ad set to optimise for with conversion objective campaigns.
Diversify your efforts and consider social media advertising
Typically, brands place most of their ad budget on Facebook and its other platforms in its ecosystem, such as Instagram and Messenger, as they own a significant and larger share of impressions. Facebook and Instagram have robust targeting and keep prices low because of their vast user base, but your efforts shouldn’t be siloed. In case something happens, diversify across platforms so that you can reap the aforementioned benefits.
Consider the above benefits of social media advertising when considering how and if it works for your goals and brand, regardless of whether you are expanding into social for the first time or into new channels.
- Identify and reach customers based on their interests and behaviours.
- Getting enough data to optimise a campaign is affordable.
- Learn what’s working and what’s not by gathering audience insights.
- Various formats to suit your brand, platform, and ad creative.
- Social media offers a variety of objectives through its campaigns that can help you achieve more goals.
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