Social Advertising Adds Value to Your Organic Reach!
Our ad guru shows you when and how to use paid advertising on social media to supercharge your social presence.
Almost every business owner at some point will close their Instagram app as angrily as one can close an app and call the whole d*mned thing useless.
It’s impossible to get followers.
Even when you get followers most of them don’t see your posts.
And, even when they see your posts, they don’t convert.
However, just because you’ve hit these walls in the past doesn’t mean social media can’t work for you indefinitely.
Start with a strategy
Without a cohesive marketing plan, posting on social media is a bit like yelling into the void.
But with a proper plan, you can utilize both organic posts and paid advertisements on social media to work for you.
Last month we looked at the importance of organic social media, so this week we’re covering how paid advertising plays a unique role that’s equally critical for your business.
“It’s one of the easiest ways to generate a direct return on your investment through an advertising platform,” John, our ad guru, said.
The unreal reach of social media
Social media has an almost unfathomable reach in our current culture.
If you combine the US and Canada, there are less than 150 million television viewers – and that audience is chopped up among hundreds of channels and costs thousands to access.
Those numbers don’t come close to the behemoth of Facebook, which has 2.7 billion active users that can be accessed at almost any budget.
“On social media, the potential for your audience is nearly limitless,” John said, “but, your budget isn’t.”
While you can start to access that immense reach with even simple organic posts, the days of finding a huge following using strictly organic posts are gone.
Today, there’s too much noise.
You’ve got to pay to play
Social networks aren’t designed to let you cut through all that distracting noise made by those billions of users organically. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, whatever social network pops up next, they all cater to the pay to play crowd.
It used to be, if you posted at just the right time, when people were typically on their phones and scrolling their chosen social media – you would pop up.
But, posts aren’t dictated by timing anymore. That serendipity has been replaced by an algorithm that no one can predict – an algorithm that’s not there to serve your posts to your people, but to make the social media giant money.
So, they only deliver your message to those who want to see it.
“Facebook is only serving organic stuff to your highly engaged, participating user or follower,” John said. “But, with paid you’re going to hit people based on your specific targeting.”
So, if you want to find new audiences to fill the top of your funnel and introduce your brand to people who have never heard of or interacted with you (or haven’t interacted much) to drive traffic to take action, you’re going to need to pay.
A great spot to dip your toes
While organic social isn’t the place to go to grow your audience from zero, paid social advertising is.
“It’s one of the best places to start advertising,” John said.
With all the information social platforms have on their users, it’s incredibly easy to find the audience you want on almost any social platform. So, if you know your audience, which is critical for any successful campaign, you can make sure you’re talking to them whether they follow you or not.
And, best of all, you can do this no matter your budget. You can start with a meager $500/month and carefully track your success. When you nail down your advertising and start seeing a positive return on advertising spend (ROAS), then you can start to ramp up your investment.
Paid plays well with others
Though paid social advertising is a great place to start, it’s very rarely where you want to keep all your proverbial eggs.
The truth is, your audience is constantly switching between search, websites and social, and advertising is more effective when it follows users across all three. And, the good news is, paid social works really well in tandem with other advertising.
“Social is nimble – it can be a primary part of your ad campaign, or just a reinforcement of your total campaign,” John said.
Now, this is when advertising tends to get a little more tricky, as simply adding more dollars to your ad spend won’t create a cohesive campaign. But, with the right key performance indicators (KPIs), an understanding of which platform is the best primary for your product, and a tight focus on the right audience, you can really start to fuel your campaigns.
The future is murky
We touched on the death of the pixel in an earlier article. If you haven’t read it already, we highly recommend it, because it will be one of the biggest changes in online advertising since the pixel first appeared.
And, it’s going to have a major effect on paid social.
“The targeting and the impressions and the reach is still going to be there,” John said, “but we’re losing a lot of the functionality in terms of some of the tracking and the results of the analytics – for now”
Facebook has a plan to deal with this loss of granular data, but they’re not revealing what it is, or how it will work.
So, for those doing their own advertising campaigns currently, that means the ROAs of social advertising is going to get a little more hazy.
The IFM Advantage
The key to making your social media campaigns truly perform is to use an advertising partner who understands how to create clarity in ad planning and execution – especially as the tremors from the death of the pixel shake up the social world. Then, together you can maximize your ROAS on a social platform.
At In Front Marketing, we work with you to give you transparent results that allow you to make the best decision for your business.
We help you find the right audience, the right platform, then work with you to spread your advertising dollars through search, organic and paid social media advertising to create the most effective advertising campaign – and the greatest return for your advertising budget.
If you want to pick someone’s brain for anything from social media to display advertising, pick John's. Today, John’s putting businesses in front of millions of users and he can do the same for your business.
