Social Media Advertising

What Is Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising refers to a form of digital advertising that serves paid ads to your target audience on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and even Pinterest. 

This part of your social media marketing strategy is specifically designed to enhance your brand awareness with your target audience by delivering your content to them instead of relying on social media algorithms. 

This content often appears organically in your target audience's feeds and stories, or at least they seem organic. However, they're actually paid adverts (often denoted with a "Sponsored" label) and they come in many formats and placements, depending on the platform they're deployed on. 

For example, Instagram ads and Facebook ads often rely on carousel ads and video ads, LinkedIn ads prioritize text ad formats and sponsored messaging, and TikTok ads usually prioritize video content. What makes social media marketing so effective is its visual and branded nature, which is often native to the platform it's deployed on, often making it harder to identify as ads. 

Additionally, this type of marketing provides you with total control over the content and audience targeting, the latter of which allows you to filter out your audiences to a greater degree by different demographic metrics, such as age and gender, field of interest, and area. However, it also allows for more layered targeting, allowing you to discern potential prospects from existing customers. 

Social media advertising ensures that you have very precise control over ads and their placements, timing, and audience segmentation. Advertising campaigns deliver almost immediate visibility and results. These digital marketing ad campaigns can be further optimized for different business goals, such as lead generation, increasing website traffic, or driving sales. 

How Social Media Advertising Works

While content marketing, such as blog posts and user-generated content, relies on keyword research and targeting, social media ads rely on audience targeting. It's important to note that social network marketing campaigns have a lot of moving pieces that affect how this type of advertising works. 

For example, META relies on its auction system to target audiences. This is very reminiscent of Google Ads' pay-per-click marketing; you define the key parameters of your ad campaign, including your campaign objective, target audience, ad spend (budget) and bid strategy, and high-quality content you want deployed to potential customers and relevant social media users. 

META's system ensures that ads are cost-effective for advertisers while providing users with relevant and non-intrusive ads. However, this is just one piece of a rather complex mechanism. You still need to have an advertising strategy built around a strong objective and adjust targeting options to target users relevant to your brand, product or service in Ads Manager. 

Lastly, there's content, which is intended to grab your audience's attention and persuade them to take a desired action. The choice of ad format depends on your brand messaging and social media advertising platform. 

Instagram advertising and Facebook advertising are mostly focused on images and reels; LinkedIn advertising mostly focuses on dynamic ads and text content, while Snapchat and TikTok focus on short and entertaining videos and user engagement. 

Benefits of Social Media Advertising

Regardless of whether you're trying to capture the attention of millennials on Instagram, Gen X on Facebook, Gen Z on TikTok, or some other demographics through social media channels, social media advertising is often included as a part of a more comprehensive digital marketing strategy, due to its numerous benefits: 

• Wider reach: Social media allows you to prioritize your target audience among the active user base, thus breaking into new markets and expanding its reach. 

• Refine your target audience: While social media marketing allows you to reach wider audiences, it also allows you to filter out specific audiences and target them with different types of ads. 

• Enhanced engagement: Social media is all about digital interactions, including interactions between businesses and their customers. Social media marketing creates opportunities for engagement with potential customers and paves the way for influencer marketing partnerships. 

• Enhances organic advertising: Paid social media advertising drives traffic and engagement, which in turn enhances the traffic to your organic posts, the latter of which should not be neglected at the expense of paid advertising. 

Social Media Advertising Best Practices

To ensure its cost-effectiveness, social media advertising should be backed by market research and a well-developed social media marketing strategy. Here are some of the best practices when it comes to social media advertising: 

• Establish your goals: It's important to develop your social media advertising campaign around your business objective, regardless of whether you're trying to increase sales or engagement. Knowing the direction you're heading in can help you choose the right social media channel to advertise on and optimize your strategy accordingly. 

• Know your target audience: Due to the nature of this type of marketing, being specific about your audiences will help prevent overspending and over-reach, keeping your social media advertising costs within reasonable limits. 

• Optimize: Check your KPIs across different ads; this will allow you to optimize those ads and channels that are underperforming, thus allowing you to either cut your costs or increase the efficiency of your campaign. 

• Organic ads: Don't underestimate the power of organic posts, as they are important drivers of growth. In fact, it's a good idea to base your paid ads on your top-performing organic content because it indicates that the content is valuable and will most certainly resonate with wider audiences. 

Summary

Social media advertising is one of the pillars of an effective digital marketing strategy, as it provides you with more precise targeting options and performance metric tracking that allows you to tweak your strategy for greater effectiveness. To learn more about social media advertising, don't hesitate to contact Orchard Marketing.