What is social media advertising?

Introduction

Love it or hate it, we all see advertising on our social media feeds every single day.

But, when it comes to promoting your business, social media advertising can feel like a big step. Sometimes it’s not clear exactly how social advertising works, when it’s useful, and how it’s different from regular posts.

In this blog we look at what social media advertising is, what it is good for, and how it should fit in as part of a company’s social media management.

The basics of social media advertising

Social media advertising is when companies promote content on platforms such as LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and TikTok. It’s different from organic social media (i.e. regular posts) because you pay for your content to get views. 

Its main benefit is that you’re guaranteed to get in front of more people, and you can be very targeted in who sees your content. This has made it a hugely popular tactic, with 270 billion dollars spent on social media ads last year. However, it’s not a magic wand, and works best as part of an overarching social media strategy.

Why advertise on social media?

I am going to start with a controversial statement: social media advertising might not be right for you! 

I’m always honest with my clients that they shouldn’t do anything on social media just because they feel like they have to - and this includes advertising. You should only consider social advertising if you can tick these three boxes:

1. Your target audience are active on social media: With 1.2 billion people on LinkedIn, 2 billion people on TikTok, and 3.2 billion people on Meta platforms, chances are your target audience is on social media in some form! But there are some niche audiences that aren’t active so it is worth establishing that first.

2. You have a budget for social ads: We suggest an absolute minimum ad budget of €300/mo. Anything less than that simply isn’t going to get results and it might just be too early for you to do social media advertising.

3. It supports your existing social media plan: Social advertising won’t work if your accounts aren’t already active and it should only be used to support your existing social media objectives (see next section on organic vs paid social!). If it doesn’t hit one of the goals of your social media strategy, your money could potentially be better spent somewhere else. 

However, there are some areas where social advertising is amazing at hitting objectives:

• Getting instant reach: Social advertising is a great tool for reaching a large audience quickly. Unlike organic social media, social advertisement doesn’t rely on long-term consistency or the algorithm gods to reach your target audience (that’s what you’re paying for!), so it can create wider brand awareness.

• Lead generation: Social advertising is also a good strategy for lead generation, especially if you have a high value gated asset to offer your audience! This doesn’t always have to be a report or whitepaper, it could be discount codes, event sign ups, book orders, or a newsletter subscription.

• Re-targeting: Paid social media is very targeted and a great way to lead potential buyers down the sales funnel. I.e. you can identify people who have interacted with your brand before and encourage them to take the next step. For example, once someone has visited your website you could direct them towards downloading a report, and then push them towards booking a meeting.

These goals broadly fall into a framework we use a lot: attract > nurture > convert. We want to attract a target audience, nurture them with our content, and then convert them by convincing them we are the right product or service for them. This also applies to organic social media but the reach and targeting of paid advertising make it a great way to amplify the results. 

Paid social media vs organic social media

I strongly believe that paid social media should only be used alongside organic social media and never as a replacement. My advice to my clients is always to start with organic social media first and - if it will help to achieve the aims of the social media plan - layer social advertising on top. Here’s why:

• Paid advertising might not be necessary: Everyone likes to save cash right? As the name suggests, paid social media costs additional money, and it might not be necessary if your goals can be achieved with organic social media. Try organic first. At the very least, it will establish a performance benchmark  that can be used to work out the additional ROI of social media advertising. 

• You can make sure your content works: Organic social media is a great testing ground to see what your audience likes. If a post is getting a lot of likes, comments, and engagement without any money behind it, it’s likely going to perform well as advertising too! Organic social media is perfect for identifying trends and topics that work with your target audience.

• Social media advertising will fail if your accounts don’t look legitimate: Buyers are skeptical. You could show them the best ad in the world but - chances are - they’re going to take a second look at the company before they buy. If they go onto your social media page  and see badly written content , no branding, and zero organic social media posts, they’re not going to consider you  credible.

The best way to implement social media advertising is as an extension of the overarching social media plan. This will help to avoid some of the pitfalls of when paid social media is done separately, including mismatched messaging, confused customers, and wasted spend.

Seven steps to start social advertising

Once you’ve decided that social media advertising is something you want to do, how do you get started? These are seven steps to take to get going with paid social media.

1. Agree your strategy: As we’ve already discussed in this article, whatever your social media advertising goals are, they should be aligned to your overarching social media strategy and work in tandem with your organic posts.  Be as clear about your objectives as possible from the start, so there is no misunderstanding later about whether advertising is working or not.

2. Set your metrics: Your social advertising campaign should be tied to specific metrics for measuring success, such as followers, leads, or website visits. Benchmarking your current cost per lead, cost per deal, etc. will help you to calculate the ROI of your spend and help to put clear targets in place to establish success.

3. Select your target audience: We discussed how important it is to know your target persona in our previous article on creating the social media plan. This is even more true for social media advertising. Often, there is a tricky balance to get right: making sure your target audience is specific enough to be valuable to you if they convert, but broad enough to advertise to. On LinkedIn, for example, the best practice is to have a minimum target audience of 50k people.

4. Make a budget: This sounds like an obvious point but you would be surprised how often companies are flying blind on advertising spend! The mistake many make is to default to minimum spend because it seems less risky. Keep in mind that spend will directly correlate to results in an advertising campaign. It is better to save money by being selective in your platforms than to spend the minimum across multiple platforms and be disappointed when you don’t get the maximum results.

5. Choose your platforms: Use the platforms your target audience uses. Budget is also a factor because each platform has different costs. Meta platforms (Instagram, Facebook, and Threads) are cheaper than LinkedIn, for example. But if your target audience is Tech CEOs, you have to question if Facebook is the right place to find and influence them!

6. Create your content: The exact type of content will depend on your goals and the platforms you are using. However, as a general rule of thumb, a mix of content types is wise. While algorithms are less important in social advertising than in organic social, the platforms still care about the quality of content that you are serving to their users, and a variety of content is generally promoted as “good”.

7. Track, analyse, and iterate: Maximising social advertising spend is all about testing and optimising. Campaigns should be continuously monitored for performance and A/B tests carried out to see which content, platforms, and audience groupings are doing best. This is absolutely crucial to make sure money isn’t being wasted but does require a lot of time, which is why a social ads expert or social media manager might be needed to help carry the workload!

Want expert help with your social media advertising?

Are you looking for the right team to help you launch your first social media advertising campaigns? Contact us to outsource your social advertising today.

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