We all know how much are social media important these days. The most challenging part, when it comes to social media advertising, is probably reaching your target audience. Secondly, converting followers into customers. Many businesses need help creating social media marketing strategy that is also successful. 

You need a strategy that will increase brand awareness, boost your bottom line, and drive engagement.  Simply said, every business needs a marketing strategy that delivers results. 

Firstly, in this text, we will present you with key elements of social media advertising. Secondly, we will provide you with a guide that will help you achieve your social media marketing goals.

What is social media marketing?

There is one certain thing, social media rise at a great speed and its importance of them is still growing. Also, there are no signs that it will slow down. Therefore, social media advertising is a very important strategy to master for every business. 

To say it in the simplest way, social media advertising is a type of digital advertising that includes paid ads that you send to your target audience through social media platforms. Those platforms can be Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

We can also look at it as a part of digital marketing that uses paid ads on social media platforms intending to reach customers. Advertisers and marketers promote their products, services, and brand altogether because they want to inspire sales through the social media platforms that users visit frequently. 

Research shows that around twenty-six percent of the users that click on the Facebook ad will end up buying the product. Secondly, more than seven million businesses use this platform for advertising. As a result, brands will double their budget for social media advertising during this year because it brings results. 

This type of advertising shows that it is different than traditional advertising and it has sophisticated targeting capabilities. Traditional advertising delivers ads to as many people as possible and it does not care if the people are interested in the product or not. On the other hand, social media helps brands connect with ideal customers based on different factors. Therefore, they filter buyers based on their psychographic, demographic, geographic, and behavioral traits. 

A Guide through key elements of social media advertising 

These are things you need to and the elements that successful social media advertising must consist of: 

1. Target audience and potential customers

Try to be as specific as you can when you choose the right target audience. You need to dig into the analytics section of your social media pages or accounts so you can understand your audience. But, also to understand the type of content they are the most open to. 

Next, study your buyer persona templates so you can figure out the most relevant characteristics. Finally, create test campaigns on different platforms so you can figure out the type of audience you can reach. Of course, based on the filters you applied to define the target audience. 

After all this, most platforms will give you an approximate number of people you can reach through that specific ad campaign. Change characteristics if needed and accordingly to the results, so your targeting is not too broad or too specific. 

2. Social media platforms for advertising

People use many social media, if not all, for advertising. Those include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat. Different platforms offer different audiences. For instance, fast-moving consumer goods(FMCG) brands might not have a successful awareness campaign on LinkedIn. Likewise, Pinterest is not the best choice for business-to-business. 

Therefore, choosing the right social media platform for your business is crucial. That will determine your ad format, and budget, and make the campaign messaging suitable for individual platforms. 

You can choose a platform by considering your business goals. Also, audience demographics. Those two will help you determine which platform will be the best for your business goals.

3. Campaign overview – objectives and campaign outline 

This will help you establish what elements of your social ad campaigns work perfectly. Objectives will tell us what we are trying to achieve through our campaign. For instance, increase product sales, brand awareness, social media following, push store visits, or drive website traffic. 

The campaign outline will provide details of our ad campaign and help us plan. It has ideas/inspiration, details like goals and purpose, objectives, a new window name, hashtags, and similar information. Determine your objectives and goals and you will be able to measure the metrics and estimate your return on investment(ROI). 

4. Success metrics and campaign budget

This will help you break down the budget into two parts so you can effectively track ROI. Firstly, make sure that you are keeping fees and expenses separate. That means that the fees that you pay to social media advertising companies, need to be separated from the budget for your ads. This ad money includes the pay for the platform to run your ad campaign. Secondly, deciding the ad budget can be a little bit tricky, especially if you are at the beginning. But, it is not something that you won`t be able to figure out quickly. 

5. Campaign creatives

These include visuals(videos, gifs, images) and ad copies(messaging). When creating them, you need to take platform guidelines and target audience into consideration. For instance, visuals that have a lot of text will not perform well on Facebook. The audience might be the same for some platforms, but they visit them with a different mindset. That is why, you need to customize the creatives to suit the platform. That way your ad will be attractive to the potential customers because that is the type of content they expect to see on a certain platform. 

How do I manage my budget for social media advertising?

This is probably one of the most important questions that a business needs to think of. It is one of the most intimidating things about social media advertising. That is because you are spending money on your campaign and you need to make sure that it is not in vain. 

Additionally, there are a lot of different channels and formats that you can use, and make sure you do not get stuck in details. Before you launch your ad campaigns make sure that your advertising strategy is aligned with your marketing objectives. 

You should use retargeting to promote purchase offers or free trials If your goal is to convert leads further down the funnel so they become marketing-qualified leads for your customers or sales team. This is a higher commitment so it will be more expensive. 

However, if you want to drive leads and traffic, the funnel content should include free tools and blog posts. This type is cheaper and more light touch. In conclusion, to manage your budget, you first need to determine your goals and what you want to achieve with social media advertisement. 

The bottom line

If you want to achieve your marketing goals and reach your target audience, social media advertising is the right choice for you. This is one very important tool that can help your business grow in many ways. We are witnessing that social media is becoming more and more important every day. That is why you need to use it to your advantage.