What are the benefits of advertising on social media?

In this guest blog post Sarah German of VOOMAds shares with us her top tips and advice on the benefits of advertising on social media.

4.62 billion people around the world are using social media (in 2022). That’s more than half the world! Facebook is still the number one platform by daily active users, followed by YouTube with Tiktok currently in 6^th and growing fast. And with usage averaging 2h 27m a day, it’s no wonder that businesses feel they can’t afford not to be on social media. I mean, it’s highly likely their customers will be there somewhere!

Indeed, every platform offers a huge opportunity to reach large numbers of potential customers, as well as the ability to target them more precisely and effectively with paid advertising. However, there are many additional benefits that are often overlooked, or not realised.

So why else advertise on social media?

Increased Traffic

Paid ads are fantastic at driving traffic to your website and socials. What’s more, if you’ve got your messaging right, it should be good quality traffic. For Clicks and Bricks businesses, this traffic can also equate to increased footfall.

Cost Reduction

Yes, paid ads are an investment, but, with the right strategy and killer creatives, they can be relatively inexpensive. 1p per video view, 5p per link click, 3p per post engagement, 35p per lead are some examples from my recent campaigns. It’s worth spending a little more up front to test out audiences, ad creatives and copy. Once you’ve learned what works best, you can optimise your campaigns and be more efficient with your budget by retargeting to warm audiences.

Higher Conversion Rates

Which brings me nicely onto conversions…Laser-targeting, funnels and the ability to analyse and optimise your ads all lend themselves to achieving higher conversion rates. Platforms offer full funnel capabilities, and it is the ability to learn at the top and retarget at the bottom that facilitate the increase in conversions.

Brand Awareness and Recall

We all know that it can be a slog just to reach existing followers with organic social media, let alone reaching people who don’t know about your brand. Paid advertising breaks out of the follower list and supercharges your reach to thousands of new eyeballs and if you happen to create a killer, memorable ad, your new audience is highly likely to remember you in the future.

Analytics

The thing I love about running paid advertising campaigns is the ability to test and to learn by checking the analytics, enabling you to optimise, drive down costs and ultimately, understand your return on investment. Campaign analytics provide valuable audience insights that can not only be leveraged in future campaigns, but across your whole marketing strategy.

Realising the benefits

To realise the full benefits of social media paid advertising beyond the targeting of your ideal clients, it’s necessary to have a full understanding of funnels as well as expertise in the structure and nuances of the platforms where the campaigns are being run. There is plenty of help and free training available in Facebook groups, on YouTube and on the platforms themselves, but you will need to invest a lot of time to learn, which is ultimately a significant cost to the business.

Employing an ads manager or strategist is of course an additional investment to consider on top of your ad budget, but if their expertise means they can develop an effective strategy, optimise your funnels and keep your costs as low as possible, it can be well worth it.

Where to advertise

The first consideration in choosing where to advertise, is your overall objective. What do you want your ads to achieve? After that, consider where your audience is most likely to be. My expertise lies in Facebook/Instagram and Pinterest Ads, so I can only really compare the two platforms in this instance. Both have very similar targeting options and funnel capabilities, the main difference being the user experience. Facebook/Instagram ads interrupt the news feed, whether the user likes it or not, so the objective is to stand out from the feed, stop the scroll and pique the reader’s interest. Pinterest ads on the other hand are served up based on keywords, so the user is in a sense already warmed up. This means that conversions tend to happen faster and cost less. Facebook and Instagram remain more popular in terms of usage and probably because of the size of the audience, however 92% of advertisers say they prefer Pinterest.

Finally

Paying to advertise on social media doesn’t have to be a huge cost or even the waste of money that many businesses have experienced. Almost any business (that complies with the platform rules) can reap huge rewards from their investment, but it’s important to be smart with the budget, have a clear objective and strategy and to leverage the analytics to keep optimising and take your campaigns from strength to strength. If it means you need to outsource to do this, it’s got to be well worth it, as opposed to spending hours of your valuable time trying to learn and probably overspending your budget.

If you’d like to find out more about how to run your own paid ads campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest, or if you’re thinking of outsourcing to an ads manager, please contact hello@voom-ads.co.uk, we’d love to have a chat.

Sarah German is a Paid Ads Manager who supports business coaches, course creators and online service providers with Paid Ads campaigns on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Her goal is to deliver new (ideal client) leads through optimising social accounts and amplifying their online presence with a tailored social media advertising strategy. Sarah is a self-confessed Pinterest addict and is currently flying the flag for marketing on Pinterest, a truly inspirational and positive platform, that is growing in popularity and broadening its appeal way beyond the party-planning it’s become known for in the UK. For more information please visit VOOM Ads

Statistics sources: smartinsights.com