A Beginner's Guide to Paid Social Advertising - Why Advertise on Social Media?

With 3.8 billion people on social media, it benefits almost every business to include paid social media advertising in its digital marketing strategy. Paid social ads increase brand awareness, nurture relationships, grow your digital community, and drive sales. In this blog post, we’ll walk through the top three considerations for advertising on social media.

Increased reach

Organic social media is an excellent way to showcase your brand and interact with your community, unfortunately, however, only about 6% of your followers will ever even see your posts. While an organic social media presence is still a digital marketing necessity, social ads allow you to reach greater audiences and connect with folks who you otherwise wouldn’t get in front of. Social media advertising enables your business to search for customers rather than needing customers to search for you.

Targeting

With social media advertising not only are you able to reach a wider audience, but it also enables you to specifically target the right audience. When it comes to advertising to prospects and growing brand awareness, your business can target users of a certain demographic, location, have specific interests, have tailored online behaviors -- essentially, you can speak directly to your ideal audience with pinpoint accuracy. Social media advertising also allows your business to nurture relationships with users who are already familiar with your company. This happens through retargeting. With social media advertising, you can retarget users who have visited your website, downloaded your app, signed up for your email newsletter list, put something in their shopping cart -- the list goes on!

Insights

A successful social media advertising strategy won’t stop at just reaching your business’s objective. If done right, your company will generate priceless data on your customers’ behavior and what they want/need from your business. Social media advertising campaigns can communicate to your business how well your customer responds to a discount or certain creative, do they prefer video or static graphics, what audience is most engaged, etc. Your business will be able to use this data to optimize and plan successful future campaigns.

Please note that Avenue has no affiliation with any products, services, or websites referenced in this blog post. Avenue is a digital marketing agency in Portland using business as a force for good. Our proprietary suite of paid advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media services help brands and businesses of all sizes grow sustainably and successfully. For more information, we invite you to visit our services page.