What Is Social Media Advertising? Definition, Costs, Best Practices, Benefits, and Examples
What Is Social Media Advertising?
Social media advertising is an offshoot of digital marketing
where paid ad campaigns are run on social media platforms to reach target
audiences. Marketers and advertisers can promote their brands and inspire sales
through the social channels that users frequently use.
1. Campaign Overview
The campaign overview throws light on the elements of social
ad campaigns:
1. Campaign Outline: The campaign outline provides
elementary details of the ad campaign. It contains the campaignOpens a new
window name, ideas/inspiration, details
(such as purpose and goals, how it will help meet your company objectives,
etc.), hashtags, and any such information.
2. Objectives: What are you trying to achieve through the
campaign? Here are a few ideas:
a. Brand awareness
b. Increase social media following
c. Increase sales of Product X
d. Drive website traffic
e. Push store visits
Quantify your goals/objectives as it will allow you to
measure the right metrics and calculate the ROI for the campaign.
2. Target Audience
Be as specific as you can when it comes to choosing the
right target audience. Dig into the analytics section of your social media
accounts/pages to understand your audience and the type of content they are
most receptive to. Visit your buyer persona templates to identify the most
relevant characteristics and traits.
Finally, create test campaigns on different platforms to
know what type of audience you can reach out to based on the filters applied to
define the target audience. Most platforms give you an approximate number of
people you can reach through an ad campaign. Tweak the characteristics
accordingly, so your targeting doesn’t get too niche or too broad.
3. Campaign Creatives
Campaign creatives are ad copies (messaging) and visuals
(images, gifs, and videos). The campaign creatives should be prepared by taking
into account the target audience and platform guidelines. For example, visuals
with too much text don’t perform well on Facebook. The same audience visits
different platforms with a different mindset. Therefore, it is advised to
customize the creatives for each platform. You can run A/B tests by tweaking
the copy and visuals to optimize the performance.
4. Social Media Platforms
The most widely used platforms for social media advertising
include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok,
and YouTube. Different social networks serve different audience segments. For
example, Pinterest may not be the best choice for a B2B business or a
fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand may not drive a successful awareness
campaign on LinkedIn.
Choosing the right social media platforms will help you
determine the budget, ad format(s), and tailor the campaign messaging for
individual platforms.
5. Campaign Budget and Success Metrics
It helps to break down the campaign budget into two brackets
to track the ROI effectively:
1. Fees/Expenses:
If you are working with a social media advertising agency, you need to keep
their fees separate from the actual budget. You will, however, include the
payments made to third-party individuals such as a copywriter, graphic
designer, or video editor, and money that you spend to purchase stock images,
videos, or software.
2. Ad
Budget: This includes the money that you’ll actually pay the platform to run
the ad campaign.
Deciding the ad budget can be a bit tedious, especially if
you’re a beginner, so here’s how you can determine the budget to run ads. Let’s
say you need to generate 20 leads through a lead generation campaign. Through
research, you find out that the cost per lead (CPL) on Facebook is $10. So, the
initial budget for the campaign would be $200. Considering the volatility of
the bidding process, you can slightly increase the ad budget. As you execute
the campaign, keep tweaking the bid to optimize the ad spend.
Once your ad campaign is complete, you will be able to see
how it performed in all entirety. Map the goals achieved against the goals set,
in terms of reach, engagement, link clicks, likes/follows, shares, profile
clicks, etc. You can then measure how well the campaign performed and the ROI
from it.
Example of Facebook Ad
This is social media advertising in action.
In the online world, it is getting increasingly complicated
to get your message noticed, as user attention is increasingly becoming a
scarce resource. Social media advertising is significantly impactful as it
allows you to deliver your message to your ideal buyers throughout their
purchase journey. For instance, before the release of a new product, a B2C
brand can run a brand awareness campaign to garner pre-buzz. Similarly, a B2B
organization can re-engage their audience through remarketing campaigns to sell
a high-ticket product.
Social media advertising distinguishes itself from
traditional advertising with sophisticated targeting capabilities. Traditional
advertising adopts the carpet-bombing approach, wherein brands deliver ads to
the maximum people possible, regardless of whether they’re interested or not.
Social media, on the contrary, enables brands to connect with the ideal buyers
based on their geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral
characteristics/traits.
5 Key Components for Social Media Advertising
A successful social media ad effort consists of the
following five components:
1. Campaign Overview
The campaign overview throws light on the elements of social
ad campaigns:
1. Campaign Outline: The campaign outline provides
elementary details of the ad campaign. It contains the campaignOpens a new
window name, ideas/inspiration, details
(such as purpose and goals, how it will help meet your company objectives,
etc.), hashtags, and any such information.
2. Objectives: What are you trying to achieve through the
campaign? Here are a few ideas:
a. Brand awareness
b. Increase social media following
c. Increase sales of Product X
d. Drive website traffic
e. Push store visits
Quantify your goals/objectives as it will allow you to
measure the right metrics and calculate the ROI for the campaign.
2. Target Audience
Be as specific as you can when it comes to choosing the
right target audience. Dig into the analytics section of your social media
accounts/pages to understand your audience and the type of content they are
most receptive to. Visit your buyer persona templates to identify the most
relevant characteristics and traits.
Finally, create test campaigns on different platforms to
know what type of audience you can reach out to based on the filters applied to
define the target audience. Most platforms give you an approximate number of
people you can reach through an ad campaign. Tweak the characteristics
accordingly, so your targeting doesn’t get too niche or too broad.
3. Campaign Creatives
Campaign creatives are ad copies (messaging) and visuals
(images, gifs, and videos). The campaign creatives should be prepared by taking
into account the target audience and platform guidelines. For example, visuals
with too much text don’t perform well on Facebook. The same audience visits
different platforms with a different mindset. Therefore, it is advised to
customize the creatives for each platform. You can run A/B tests by tweaking
the copy and visuals to optimize the performance.
4. Social Media Platforms
The most widely used platforms for social media advertising
include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok,
and YouTube. Different social networks serve different audience segments. For
example, Pinterest may not be the best choice for a B2B business or a
fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand may not drive a successful awareness
campaign on LinkedIn.
Choosing the right social media platforms will help you
determine the budget, ad format(s), and tailor the campaign messaging for
individual platforms.
5. Campaign Budget and Success Metrics
It helps to break down the campaign budget into two brackets
to track the ROI effectively:
1. Fees/Expenses:
If you are working with a social media advertising agency, you need to keep
their fees separate from the actual budget. You will, however, include the
payments made to third-party individuals such as a copywriter, graphic
designer, or video editor, and money that you spend to purchase stock images,
videos, or software.
2. Ad
Budget: This includes the money that you’ll actually pay the platform to run
the ad campaign.
Deciding the ad budget can be a bit tedious, especially if
you’re a beginner, so here’s how you can determine the budget to run ads. Let’s
say you need to generate 20 leads through a lead generation campaign. Through
research, you find out that the cost per lead (CPL) on Facebook is $10. So, the
initial budget for the campaign would be $200. Considering the volatility of
the bidding process, you can slightly increase the ad budget. As you execute
the campaign, keep tweaking the bid to optimize the ad spend.
Once your ad campaign is complete, you will be able to see
how it performed in all entirety. Map the goals achieved against the goals set,
in terms of reach, engagement, link clicks, likes/follows, shares, profile
clicks, etc. You can then measure how well the campaign performed and the ROI
from it.
Top 5 Social Media Advertising Platforms
In this section, we will look at major social media
platforms that you can use to run ad campaigns, along with some examples to
inspire you.
1. Facebook
Facebook offers comprehensive advertising options for brands
that enable them to run ads across awareness, consideration, and conversion
stages of the buyer’s journey, with each stage offering multiple ad types to
reach the goal.
1. Awareness:
Brand awareness, reach
2. Consideration:
Traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, and messages
3. Conversions:
Conversions, sales, and store traffic
2. Instagram
Instagram offers ads that are similar to Facebook, and you
can manage ads for both platforms through the same interface – Facebook Ad
Manager.
You can target people on Instagram based on their location,
demographics, interests, and behavioral characteristics. Instagram also lets
you create custom and lookalike audiences to find new users that share similar
characteristics to your ideal buyer.
You can target users across their buyer journey through the
following ad types on Instagram:
1. Awareness:
Reach, frequency, brand awareness, and local awareness
2. Consideration:
Website clicks, video views, reach, and frequency
3. Conversion:
Website conversions, dynamic ads, mobile app installs, mobile app engagement
3. Twitter
Similar to the platform, Twitter’s advertising solution is
pretty straightforward. It currently offers the following types of ads:
1. Tweet
engagement
2. Promoted
video/GIF views
3. Brand
awareness
4. Website
clicks or conversions
5. In-stream
video views
6. Build
followers
7. App
installs
8. App
engagements
Besides this, brands can also promote a specific hashtag to
drive brand awareness. This feature is suitable for large B2C corporations and
entertainment brands as a pre-launch and awareness tactic.
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