3 Benefits of Social Media Advertising for Small Businesses
Is social media advertising the way to go?
Well, the short answer is yes! Social media advertising is one of the fastest-growing forms of digital marketing. With social networks reaching over 2.27 billion active social media profiles worldwide, it’s an audience your company cannot ignore. The online market is rapidly changing. It is essential that you stay ahead of your competition to get seen by your potential customers, or you could be left behind!
Benefits of social media advertising
Before we dive into making a good advert, we should discuss the benefits of advertising on social platforms and why your small business should consider ads. Also, making sure you understand the Terms of Service for each platform is very important. Check out Facebook’s here.
Growing audiences
With more and more people spending longer using social media, they connect with more businesses to get news, updates, and new information. Being online and present allows your company to connect with a growing community to promote your product or service.
Scroll, scroll and scroll some more!
The average American now spends 2.5 hours per day scrolling, liking and commenting on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the newly emerging platform TikTok. Why not give them something to look at!
Cost
Then we have the most apparent benefit! Cost! Social media advertising is much cheaper than other, more traditional methods of digital marketing. Sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter offer cheap advertising services to push your posts and ads to more users. More users mean more potential consumers for your company.
What is social media advertising?
So what do we mean by social media advertising?
Social media advertising is a form of digital marketing that allows a business to target customers, get your posts seen and drive more traffic to your site. Social media ads are usually created for specific audiences, which can be groups such as age or location amongst other personalised information that users give Facebook, Instagram and Twitter when signing up.
What is an advert?
An advert could include a combination of text, images, videos or links to other web pages. All of which are designed to build engagement with your business and brand. Through a call to action, adverts can direct a user to do exactly what you need them to do, for example, to like the social media post, follow the page, or give you a call.
Is Social media marketing the same thing?
Advertising on social channels is all a part of social media marketing. Any time business owners can promote their products or services on social media is an excellent example of marketing.
Social media marketing is all about how your small business generates awareness on social media platforms and puts the brand into the user’s eye line. Social media marketing often is planned around a content marketing strategy, and adverts are just a small part of that plan.
How do you make an advert?
Making an advert that performs well and generates good leads is much easier than you might think. Let’s look at how you can get good results.
Step 1: Know your audience
Planning and preparing your advert is the first step! Researching your audience is vital to know exactly who to advertise to and to create good adverts for social media. This can be done by looking at what your direct competition are doing well, and by looking at your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter followers and grouping together your audience.
Knowing who to advertise to and which customer groups to target will mean you can create more engaging adverts.
If you are not sure how to start or where to start researching your potential customers, talk to one of our team for some advice – Schedule a Chat
How do your customers use social media?
Finding out how your followers use social media can become invaluable! Knowing when your audience is online and active can become key data to create content for your social media platforms. By advertising your products and services when your audience is online, your business can reach your existing and potential customers faster.
Step 2: Where is the value?
Once you know the audience, you need to evaluate what value you can give them; customers don’t want to read junk. Relevant and exciting adverts will perform much better than generic and useless spam. The value may be teaching them something they did not know about your business and brand or an offer of a promotional saving.
So what?
Ask yourself, “So what?” when designing adverts, why should the people reading your advert care? You want people to read your advert, know exactly why they are seeing it, and understand what to do next.
Step 3: Set your goals
The third step in creating effective advertising is to set goals of what you want to achieve. Make a list of the best outcomes from the ad; then you will know how to obtain those goals. (Remember, though, make your goals realistic and obtainable).
What are some common goals?
Common goals your business may set may centre around engagement. The benefits of using social media sites such as Facebook are that they have great insight tools which measure likes, comments and shares! Various social media platforms also offer services to measure engagement similar to Facebook so that your company can replicate or change your ads.
Setting obtainable goals for your social media advertising can be tricky, and you may not have all the right tools to get to your aims and objectives. Why not talk to one of our friendly team members for some advice on goals, and if you can reach them.
Step 4: Go forth and create
Once you have decided on what your goals are, it’s time to create the ad! Getting the right balance of imagery/video to text is your own special sauce and will depend on your audience, advert and intent.
Be playful with it
Be experimental when you create ads, use short and long captions and play around with your imagery. This is to make sure you know what works well and what your audience likes to see on your page.
Creativity doesn’t come easy, especially when you are busy with all of the other elements of your day to day business. With over 5 years in the game, we can help you create a home-run advertising campaign that delivers results!
Step 5: Measure your success
You can never improve what you don’t measure. Once your advert is up and running, you can evaluate how well each advert is doing so that you can make changes to obtain better results the next time!
Gather data
Being able to generate data such as likes, comments and shares will be vital indicators of how successful your content is performing in your target audience. Make sure to analyse other important factors as well such as which platform they were posted on, what time and what day! These can all be key factors in the success of a social media advert
Not sure how to analyse data? SocialManas offer this service as part of our social media product suite! Talk to our strategy team to see how we can help.
Step 6: Make it consistent.
Before starting the cycle again, make sure that you have reviewed the data and have learnt what went well. Social networks like Facebook like to promote businesses that are consistent with their language, images and how regular they post content.
Lets look at the key takeaways
Social media advertising is a great way to reach your audience and grow your business. But. There is a big drawback of social media marketing. It takes TIME! And it takes you away from what you do best. At SocialManas we can take care of all the above for you. With the team with generating over $4million for clients in the last 5 years, we can certainly help to take your business to the next level with social media ads.