How To Succeed in Paid Social Media Advertising

While on a personal level, some people may have a love-hate relationship with the use of social media, the power of it is undeniable — especially from a marketing standpoint. It’s an extremely interconnected, influential platform that is, somehow, still growing at an unprecedented pace.

The stats just keep rising. By the year 2021, the number of worldwide social media users is estimated to reach 3.02 billion people, per month. North America alone has the highest penetration rate of social networks, where 70% of the population has at least one account.

If that doesn’t make your head spin with new ideas and heart race with excitement, we don’t know what will! Whether you’re a business owner, a fellow marketer, or simply a user of these platforms, it’s impossible to deny the potential of paid social media advertising. Our next, most important step from here is finding the answer to “how do we succeed?”

Social PPC Basics

To put it simply, Social PPC is advertising on social media networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But as social media networks grow, so do our opportunities as marketers. The possibilities are truly endless, you can now advertise on Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and more — the networks go beyond just these!

At the most basic level when advertising on these platforms, impressions, and clicks are counted individually and cost us on a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Just like “search PPC” in Google and Bing Ads, social PPC has the ability to spend based on social engagement.

Each platform is intuitive in its own way, and has recommendations for the best ways to organize and track your performance. Take some time to dive into each platform, understand their metric reportings, and find patterns in your performance. Costs per result have the potential to vary significantly across different platforms but the end goal is the same: reach more people and expose them to your brand, entice them with your offerings, and turn them into a lifelong customer.

Related: Is Your Digital Marketing Strategy Complete? Find Out Here [Digital Marketing Checklist]

Know Your Audience

Before you can start to measure any type of success in the Paid Social world, you need to know your audience. And we mean, truly KNOW them.

An easy way to target your audience is to segment based on how you plan to post: the time of day, the frequency you’d like your ads to be shown, and the type of device you want them to show on!

If you want to go deeper, one of the great ways to know your audience is to use Customer Lists. Do you have the name and email of people who have been interested in your business? On platforms like Facebook, you can use customer lists to create new or lookalike audiences based on those who have converted for you in the past — and you can choose the percentage lookalike you’re interested in marketing too!  

Creative, Engaging, and Quality Content

Some ads never get clicked on. Ads can become stale, generic, and fatigued when they show too often without engagement. Choosing content and developing creative that is effective and compelling is absolutely key to success in Social PPC. Your ads are the face of your products or services, so always use a critical eye. What makes you unique? What value will you provide to your potential new consumer? Everything you produce must be top quality, don’t let your money waste away on ads that get drowned out in the endless scrolling through these networks.

Successful engagement levels come easy when leveraging the power of keyword targeting and posting at relevant times for your users. Get to know the trends in each platform. Are hashtags still a thing? What about video ads versus image ads? Single versus carousel? Do your research!

Demographics

Don’t waste your precious time and precious ad spend budget on just anyone who will likely just scroll past your ads. Sit yourself down, and buckle up, for a deep dive into the endless possibilities of demographic targeting. Just within Facebook’s advertising interface, the demographic targeting abilities can be exhaustive.

So you know the basics: their location, age, language, and gender. Sure, you can guess their relationship status, or their education level, or income. Knowing their political affiliation, work, and home life may be a stretch, but definitely doable. But do you know their interests? Whether they’re pursuing the healthcare industry or diving into their own small business? Do you know their favorite TV shows, games, live events? If they have pets, do yoga, or are local foodies? Facebook even lets you reach people based on purchase behaviors or intent, like whether they just bought a new motorcycle or if they’re likely to move.

Take advantage of this targeting, really hone in on who you’re looking for, and who is seeing your ads. We’ve all experienced those advertisements that appear in our feeds that really don’t apply to us. We get annoyed and the ads are being wasted on people who aren’t interested and won’t take action.

Every engagement you receive influences who your ads get shown to next, or who sees them again. Make sure your ads are being seen by the RIGHT people! Demographic targeting is the heart and soul of Paid Social.

We promise, while social media advertising is as much of an art as it is a science, it really isn’t as complicated as you think. When you utilize the networks correctly and take time to understand and develop the different techniques behind each platform, some amazing things can happen.