Platforms To Advertise Your Business - Social media is one of the pillar channels in digital marketing, but what makes it different from other pillars, like search engines and email, is that it has multiple platforms in it. And not in a Bing vs. Google kind of way. Each platform has a large audience that is ripe for advertising.
In other words, social media advertising is its own animal. But once controlled and used, it can be used to help your business achieve its goals. Read on to learn everything you need to know to get started and succeed with social media advertising.
Platforms To Advertise Your Business
Social media advertising is a form of social media marketing where you use paid media to promote your business through one of its many channels. This media comes in many formats and placements and supports a range of creatives from images and video to immersive experiences.
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It is also called paid social. With paid search where you target keywords and terms, and social, you target audience, interests and behavior. Social media ads are also typically more visual and branded, and very native to the platform – so much so that they can sometimes be hard to recognize as ads.
As with any PPC strategy, social media advertising has many benefits for businesses. Here are some reasons to advertise on social media:
To give you an idea of how big the social media advertising market is, let's look at some statistics:
As mentioned above, while search ads work primarily on keyword targeting, social ads are based on audience targeting. Each platform has its own features, settings and formats, but they share some common characteristics:
Google Marketing Platform
Now if this isn't a loaded question, I don't know what is. Ultimately, your social media advertising costs depend on many factors, including your campaign goals, bidding strategy, budget, campaign optimization, industry, and more. But here are some PPC metrics you can see in social media ad spending:
The graph below shows the overall average cost per click and average cost per thousand impressions for each platform according to Statista.
But remember, these are mainly used to give you a point of reference. What you can expect to pay varies widely by industry, and also by campaign type. For example, you can see in our benchmarks here that the average cost per click for home services on social is between $1-$2, while for real estate it is less than a dollar.
The hardest part of any marketing strategy is actually getting started. But check out these basic steps and you should have enough confidence to take the plunge!
Social Media Advertising 101 (+examples, Costs, Tips & Types)
As with any marketing strategy, you need to make sure you have a firm grasp on your target audience. Use your existing customer data, do some market research, and look at the analysis of existing platforms that might work well. This will help you identify who to target, with what to target and when. So, once you start running your ads and collecting data, you can get more specific insights about who is seeing and engaging with your ads.
A cross-channel marketing strategy is important, but you need to nail the platforms before you start interweaving them. The best channel depends on your audience, but more often than not, Facebook is a good first step.
What do you want to achieve with your social ads? No need to set OL' SMART goals here - specific metrics will be hard to identify until you actually start. But you can usually get an idea of what campaign objective to start with based on your primary goal (awareness, lead generation, conversion, for example).
How much you pay for your social ads depends on your industry, audience, optimization strategy and more, but it's always good to get a general reference point before you start so you can set a certain level of expectation for your budget. can do
Reasons Why Social Media Is Important To Your Company
There are many free resources that can help you with social media advertising. We have some roundups and even a tutorial for you:
If you're looking for a small business to get your feet wet, your best bet is to start there and learn. Social media advertising platforms also take some time to learn, so the earlier you start advertising, the sooner you can start collecting the data the platform needs to really optimize your ads.
What works best for each platform varies, but these general tips will help you see success across platforms.
Chances are (hopefully, slash), if you're looking to advertise on social media, you already have an organic social strategy. If this is the case, lean on your organic performance to inform your payment strategy. Over time, you'll have more insight from your ad data, but until then, look at Audience Insights, Top-Performing Posts, Under-Performing Posts, and Engagement Metrics to get a feel for the best segments to target your audience. . Plus the best deals to promote.
Top 14 Benefits Of Social Media For Your Business
You can use native analytics within any platform or any social media reporting tool to drive these insights.
In addition to using your most engaging posts, you'll also want to look at top-performing user-generated content as your ad creative. This makes for great testimonial ads that combine relatability with reviews to create reliable, ROI-worthy (and totally rad) ads.
It probably goes without saying, but it's still worth emphasizing: keep mobile in mind. Most social media platforms are primarily accessible on mobile (some are mobile only). Of course, formatting your ads for mobile will take care of itself as long as you follow the image specification. However, keep a mobile mindset when considering the offers you promote and when delivering your ads.
For example, if your audience is young city-dwelling professionals, a PDF guide can be advertised on LinkedIn during the morning commute when they access the platform on their phones. It may make more sense to run the ad at a time when they see it on their desktop.
Types Of Advertising Methods & How They're Used
You should always try different versions of your ads to see what performs best. With A/B testing, you only change one variable – like the copy or the image, or in the case below, the image style.
As I mentioned earlier, each paid social platform offers different goals to choose from for your campaign - not only because different businesses have different goals (app installs vs. store visits, for example), but you'll also have different goals in your funnel . . . You may want to generate leads with a top-of-funnel offer for one campaign, but retarget website visitors with a more bottom-of-funnel in another. So create multiple campaigns and use the different goals available to you to create a full funnel strategy. This will ensure that you get the most out of each platform.
I touched a little on cross-channel marketing above. Once you've got your social media advertising strategy, start looking at how you can use your search and social ads together. For example, you can take top-performing keywords from your Google Ads data and use them in your Facebook ad copy, or target specific Facebook audiences based on how engaged they are with a search ad offer.
Not only are social media feeds highly viewable, but they are constantly refreshing. It's more important than on any other platform that your ad stays creatively fresh.
Online Advertising Costs In 2021
To help you decide which channels are best for your strategy, read on for a breakdown on each.
Facebook ad audience size is 2.11 billion, which is 26.7% of the total population. Its largest demographic is 25-34 but it has the largest representation for the 65+ age group. The average cost per click for Facebook is $0.97 (second lowest after Twitter) and the average cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is $7.19.
While creating an ad on Facebook is pretty easy, setting up an ad account is a super confusing process. Fortunately, our Facebook Ads tutorial will walk you through it all.
Also, the more effective a paid media channel is, the more competitive it is, and Facebook is no exception. However, Facebook is the most popular social networking platform in the world and has the most even age distribution of all its peers. And while iOS updates and privacy changes have created certain limitations, Facebook ad targeting is still unmatched. Also, it is working on ways to preserve reporting and target integrity through the Conversion API. To get started, use the Facebook Ads tutorial linked above.
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The size of the Instagram ad audience is 1.48 billion, which is 18.70% of the population. Its largest demographic is aged 18-34. The average cost per click for Instagram ads is $3.56, and the average CPM is $7.91.
While Instagram ads are generally more expensive than Facebook ads, engagement on Instagram is also higher. Plus, it's the top social media platform consumers use to follow brands, so the motive is high. It is also a great advertising channel for ecommerce businesses.
Get started with our guide to advertising on Instagram
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