Social media advertising shows no sign of slowing, with 63% of small businesses increasing their social media spend in 2019.1 So if you haven’t included it in your social strategy, you might be at risk of being left behind by your competitors.
But, of course, “everyone else is doing it” is a terrible reason to make any marketing decision. You need to satisfy yourself that anything you do will make a difference for your brand and deliver ROI.
So here are 5 benefits social media advertising can offer your business:
- INCREASE YOUR REACH
If you want to reach your audience, you need to go where they are. And the average person spends 135 minutes every day on social media.2
You may already have a social media presence but unfortunately that doesn’t mean anyone is actually seeing your content. Because of the sheer volume of content streaming through a user’s newsfeed, as well as Facebook’s algorithms that control what posts are shown to users, there is a significant likelihood your organic posts are not reaching many of your potential customers.
That’s where social media advertising comes to the rescue. Advertising on social media guarantees visibility on your chosen platforms. And most importantly, your content is not just reaching random users. It’s reaching people most likely to respond – and that’s because our second benefit…
- GRANULAR TARGETING
The beauty of social advertising is that it allows you to target your advertising far more than any other media. Now you can drill down beyond the basic demographics, and start speaking to very specific customer types. Target your audience based on users’ interests, their location within as little as a 5 mile radius, or connect with friends of people who already like your brand to leverage the power of peer recommendation. And that’s just the start…
If you have a niche product offering or you just can’t afford to let any of your advertising budget be wasted (who can?), social media advertising is your best friend.
- MEASURABILITY
It’s easy for marketers to promise the world in an ad pitch, but to be sure of ROI you need measurability. Social media advertising gives you a direct link between advertising and sales. You can check results, for example, to see exactly how many users clicking a specific ad in the past 48 hours have then purchased your product. This lets you assess whether that ad is achieving its goal, and measure the return on your spend. Importantly, it also lets you make changes to your campaign improve performance – and that brings us to the fourth benefit…
- YOU’RE IN CONTROL
Social advertising doesn’t just let you see live performance of your campaigns – it also gives you the ability to make instant changes to your targeting parameters mid-campaign. That means you can respond to your ad’s performance, building on successful demographics or tweaking areas of weakness to get the best final result.
- LEARN ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE
And of course, the feedback and data that social media provides isn’t just useful during the campaign. It’s a great learning resource to help make your future campaigns more powerful, thanks to your new, deeper understanding of your market and which audiences are the most responsive to target.
So if you want to increase the reach of your brand, get to the customers most likely to respond, and keep gaining up-to-date insights into your market, it’s time to consider making social media advertising part of your marketing mix.
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/433871/daily-social-media-usage-worldwide/
