Money doesn’t grow on trees, and neither does your marketing budget. With this being the case, it’s crucial to ensure that you’re getting the most out of the money that you’re investing into your company’s social media. Now, organic social media (which you can read more about in last week’s article here) is awesome because it doesn’t necessarily cost that much, if anything at all. However, you can only grow so fast before having to put some money into it.
But… Why?
Right now, companies are posting more on social media then they ever have before, but engagement is continuing to decline. In 2015 alone, Instagram’s interaction rate dropped by 40% and Pinterest’s fell by nearly 50%. Seeing a negative correlation between the quantity of posts and the number of responses can be a little discouraging, but this is where a good paid social media strategy can help. Paid social is a great way to make sure that your marketing messages are reaching you’re desired audience, keep track of your return on investment in your advertising, and simplify the customer’s journey to a successful conversion.
Well this sounds like a great thing! How does it work?
Your organic reach can only get you so far, and counting on customers to come to you is never a good strategy in the long run. By utilizing paid social, you’re helping to bring the content to the customer as well. Facebook, along with being the most popular social media platform in the United States, is a great paid social option (if it fits your target market). To make the process as easy as possible for you, the marketer, Facebook allows you to target your audience in three different ways:
- Core audience allows you to target people based on basic demographics and psychographics such as location, age, behavior, income, gender, etc.
- Custom audience uses data gathered from customers that have already interacted with your business in the past. This is a great option for focusing on customer retention and can be configured to track conversions from your Facebook ads.
- Lookalike audience uses data similar to that of your current customers to target people that could potentially be interested in your offering. This is a good method for expanding your reach to people who are more likely to be interested in what you’re selling.
Pictured here is a component of an example Facebook ad that I made. The goal of this ad was to run an A/B test to figure out if I should be focusing my advertising attention on people between the ages of 18 and 25 or 25 and 35. If I were to create an ad for an actual company, I would be much more specific with the demographics in the test, but for example’s sake, I thought I would keep it as simple as possible. Through the ad design process, Facebook also let me choose how I wanted the ad to appear to viewers, how much money I was willing to bid daily for ad space, and my overall goal for the campaign (for this one it was to grow brand awareness).
I said it in my last article and I’ll say it again: more people are using social media than ever, and this presents a great opportunity for marketers to deliver their messages to those most likely to appreciate what they have to say. Whether your goal is to grow brand awareness or increase conversions, you can’t go wrong with implementing paid social into your overall digital marketing plan.
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