What Is It?
How do Social Media companies make money? “Senator… we run ads…” and they make billions doing it. Facebook is second only to the Google Ads network in advertising revenues and its because of the sheer scale of daily active users on their platform. In fact, nearly 1.47 billion people or 66% of their monthly active users engage with Facebook on a daily basis.
The argument for advertising on these platforms is easy to make. With so many people engaging daily with social media it’s a compelling opportunity for your business to reach your target audience. But, it’s not just the reach that these platforms provide that make them great for advertisers, it’s their targeting abilities.
Targeting on social media is based on audience psychographics and demographics. Ads can be targeted to segmented groups of people based on their activities, interests, age, gender, income levels and even job titles, just to mention a few. This enables advertisers to deliver very compelling ads to the people that are most likely to engage with them. Done right, social media ads can be very effective for your business.
Why is it important?
You get it, a lot of people use social media every day. So, why should you consider advertising on a channel like Facebook vs TV or print? It’s all about data collection! Social Media networks gather thousands of data points about their users allowing for highly advanced targeting and ad placement.
Advertising is less intrusive and interruptive when the audience you’re targeting is actually interested in what you do. Ad relevance naturally increases click-through rates and conversion rates, while keeping cost-per-click prices down. Only a few advertising channels, such as social media networks, give you direct access to troves of audience data before launching your campaign, allowing you to be more relevant to the people that you serve your ads to. Because of this access, social media advertising has become a cost-effective and high-performing marketing channel for those who know how to leverage it’s targeting capabilities.
How does it work?
Social Media advertising campaigns can get very complex depending on the scale of the audience or number of products to be advertised. To help keep it simple, our process consists of four repeatable steps.
In a social media advertising campaign, the first step is to define and segment your audiences. We do this in several ways:
The next step for the Buhv team is to dive into researching and planning for your new social campaign. We’ll look at potential audience reach, develop dynamic testing strategies for copy and creative, and determine the best use of your budget for the campaign. We’ll also dig into competitor research to see how they’re advertising through paid social so that we can make sure that your ads cut through the clutter and present a clear differentiator that speaks to your audience and puts your brand at the top of their mind.
Now the fun of creating ads and landing pages begins! Using tools like dynamic creative and A/B testing, we’ll launch a number of different creative variants to see what kind of messaging and visuals your audience responds best to. A huge plus here is that you’ll learn more about the creative side of your brand than you ever have before and be able to apply it across all of your other marketing channels.
In social media advertising, we have to react quickly so optimization begins as soon as the data begins to roll in. We’ll adjust budgets, turn off under-performing ad sets, and tweak ad creative and landing pages to help increase engagement and keep budgets in check. Longer term optimization includes refinement of your audiences, new research into different content formats and thus the cycle repeats!
Have you been convinced that social media advertising is right for your business? We’d love to see how we can help you increase engagement through social channels so, setup a time to come in and chat with us!
