Social Media has become its own entity and a major advertising platform for businesses that use its power. It offers a double injection of online superpowers with its ability to optimize content but also use this content to create ads and take it even further.
Leveraging social media ads to link back to your website with your products and services can get your name out there quickly. Creating video content, reels and targeted, quality content can push your marketing efforts further using social media’s power.
Growth means that you expose your business to a larger audience, and there is no larger audience than social media. By advertising on a platform that fits your target audience, you will see greater interaction and engagement.
Social media campaigns through targeted ads are great for new campaigns, holidays, special sales and events, and time-sensitive deals. Advertising using shareable content doubles your efforts, and the return is fast and rewarding.
Which Platform?
Many companies choose established forms of Social Media for Ads, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Other platforms are also opening up to businesses like TikTok, Pinterest and WhatsApp.
Knowing who your audience is and what you want them to know is key to which target platform you want to use.
- LinkedIn is a great networking site and good for promoting B2B and finding people and businesses with similar interests who will collaborate with or promote your product.
- Facebook is also good for business, with many adopting this platform early in its existence, it has the highest number of users, and it appeals to a mid to older audience.
- Instagram is great for photo and video content that now includes a high degree of sponsored ads and shopping options.
- Twitter is good for short conversation starters and engagement.
Click to learn more about each platform’s demographics and target – here.
Meta Ads Manager
Meta, the new name and face of Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, is a good place to start with social Ads. You can set up an ad campaign through Meta, similar to how Google Ads works, that will cover those three platforms using the relevant content you provide.
You can set your audience, location, and demographic, filter specific interests and hobbies, and even target a small geographic location if you want only to stay local. There is a lot of scope in targeting for Meta Ads, so you don’t waste your advertising budget and hit the audience relevant to your business.
Retargeting
Retargeting is another form of personalization. It takes the analytics collected by customer interaction with your social platforms and uses this information to directly personalize ads to interested people who have had some interaction with your social platform.
Say, for example, they visited your page and clicked on an app or your website link. By interacting in some way with your Facebook page or another social platform, you can use retargeting to place an ad back in front of them again.
This helps to remind this person that they previously interacted with your site, and it may cause them to return or follow through on a purchase or another action on your platform. You may have noticed on your social feed if you click on a ‘sponsored’ post out of interest, you will inevitably see that same ad come back up the next time you scroll. This is a form of retargeting.
For Facebook retargeting in your ads, Facebook Pixel was the code you would previously add to your website. Now it has been updated and changed to Meta Pixel.
It’s a small piece of code that is added to your website that can give you excellent insight into who is clicking on your site and what pages they are visiting. Also, whether they added products to the cart, checked out, or didn’t go through to buying but left an abandoned cart.
This gives you plenty of opportunities to retarget on Facebook or Instagram. You could offer a discount for the products and pages they visited, remind them about products left in their cart, and even offer a reward if they buy something.
Social Media isn’t going anywhere in the future except continuing to evolve and grow. Harnessing its power with strategic, targeted social media ads will help you stay in the big picture with relevant information about your business.
Need Help?
Fireside can help to manage your social media ads and campaigns for you and take the stress out of finding your audience and maintaining your ads.
The next time you scroll through your social media, think about the impact your business could be having right now.
