We love old blogs, but we think social advertising is too important to let you read old information, so we wrote a new blog on this topic. Find it right over here.
Social media is a great tool for any inbound marketing strategy. Whether you are a large corporate brand or you run a small business, there are major benefits to utilizing a social media marketing strategy. While social media can be a completely free tool, there are paid options available to increase the efficiency of your strategy. To maximize the benefits of your social media campaign, your brand should consider investing in paid social advertising. Below are five reasons why you should invest.
1. Targeting an Audience
In utilizing paid social advertising, you can select demographic information for who your campaign will target. This information can be as broad as age, location, and gender or as specific as travel preferences or favorite foods and TV shows. Social networks have become so in tune with their users that they can determine very specific information about those users and can segment them into audience profiles. This is great for inbound marketers because it allows a range of options for reaching very specific target personas. You can advertise much more effectively when you include this specific information in your campaign. Organic reach is great but does not ensure that you are reaching your intended audience. Paid social ensures that your campaign is reaching the right audience at the right time.
2. Alternative to Market Research
Because social networks have collected so much data on such a wide range of users, if you are seeking to conduct market research for a campaign, you may be able to utilize social media as opposed to hiring a market research firm. For example, you can use paid social ads to connect to an online survey or lead generation page to quickly test an idea. This can be done in real-time, allowing for any changes to be made continuously. This agile testing allows you to tweak and perfect your lead generation campaigns as they are running, to maximize your results.
3. Traffic & Leads
Utilizing paid social ads will help increase your traffic and leads faster than if you depend solely on organic reach. Because you are paying to target a specific demographic, you are reaching an audience that is more likely to be engaged in your campaign, which means they will be more likely to respond to your call-to-action. However, it’s not as simple as just paying for traffic and leads; you need to perform extensive research on who your target audience is. You need to be sure that you are targeting the right demographic and as long as your campaign is engaging to the audience, it will be more successful.
4. Competition for Attention
There is an exponential amount of content available to social media users. Brands are forced to compete for space on these networks and it takes quite a bit of planning and execution to create successful campaigns that will engage the intended audience with organic reach alone. Using paid advertising, social networks will integrate your advertisement into the overall experience and will show seamlessly in user’s feeds, while reaching more people than you otherwise could. Many times, the ad will display without the user even realizing it is an ad. On Instagram, for example, an advertisement will display within the feed just like any other image that is posted by an account they follow. The advertisement becomes less disruptive to the user, and the experience continues to be seamless.
5. Promote Top Content
Let’s face it: your marketing team works extremely hard to develop campaigns that are intended to engage your audience and promote your brand. Without paid advertising, that hard work is not reaching its full potential and the content your team worked so hard on, might as well have been for nothing. Using paid advertising ensures that these campaigns will reach the intended audience. When using paid advertising, choose your best campaigns to maximize the success and ROI of your investment.
