Social media advertising can be effectively be used by business to consumer or business to business customers. However there are specific platforms that cater to professional audiences for example Linkedin, while other platforms such as Facebook appeal to the general audience.
Customer research encompasses the use of various media channels and social media networking platforms in researching for information. Therefore in this day and age its paramount for a business or brand to have some social media presence.
As briefly mentioned earlier on there are tons of social media platforms that a business can make use of. The most biggest and common platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn youtube ,Tik tok and Snapchat. These networking sites can be used by business and brands to connect to their customers while they are consuming content.
Getting Started With Social Media Advertising
Most of the social media platforms have the functionality of serving ads to users as they are consuming content. There are various advertising objectives that are open for businesses and brands to make use off. The most common objectives can revolve on engagement on the respective platform or driving traffic to an external digital ecosystem.We are going to be exploring the various options in great detail.
On Platform Engagement
There are various ways of driving engagement on the social media platform. On most of these platforms advertisers can boost posts in order to raise awareness amongst their target audience. Usually this involves paying for a post to be amplified or broadcasted as a way of raising awareness to an audience that does know about you mostly referred to as cold traffic. The rationale for boosting posts is to reach a large audience and the common interactions include post likes, page likes post shares and comments on posts. This can be very beneficial for creating custom audiences of users that would have interacted with your content that can be used at a later stage for driving traffic to external digital ecosystems.
Driving Traffic To External Digital Ecosystem
One of the great functionality of social media advertising is the ability to drive traffic (users) to external digital ecosystems such as website or mobile apps. There are various ways for driving traffic but the most common way involves users clicking on ads and being redirected to a webpage or app landing page. At most the traffic driven to the external website is either warm or hot traffic. Warm traffic comprises of users that are aware of the advertiser while hot traffic is a segment of the users who are ready to undertake an action that is important to the advertiser. As the user lands on the website they can either sign up for a newsletter, create a web registration or make a purchase.
In order to efficiently track all the traffic driven to a landing page there is need for a pixel to be installed that will track custom events. Having a relevant social network pixel properly installed on a website or app for example will open up a more performance based advertising option which revolves around conversions. A conversion is an event which is of importance to the advertiser which might include:purchase, registration or newsletter sign up.
Most advertisers are interested in running conversion based advertising on social media as the most common objectives are mainly centred on driving leads or purchases. Some of the social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn now offer the functionality of generating leads without users ever leaving the social networking platform. However there is the use of an api to sync data the leads data from a social network into an advertisers customer relationship management platform or alternatively their database.
Ad Formats
Common ad formats used in social media advertising are images and videos. In the upcoming articles we will get into the specifics of the various images and video formats, sizes and guidelines.
Ad Copy
Most of the social media platforms allow for advertisers to use ad descriptions and headlines along the ad formats so as to stand out and provide more information to the user.
Ad Destination
This is mainly dependent on the objective of the ad whether it’s to encourage in platform engagement such as page likes or driving users to external digital platforms. For external digital platforms there will be the need to make use of a link which will land users on the right landing page.
Advertising on social media platforms enables advertisers to cherry pick relevant custom audiences based on attributes such as age, location, interests and behavioral data. Most advertisers are maximizing their return on investment while advertising on social media platforms. You too are eligible to maximize your return on investment by having us run your social media advertising campaigns. Get in touch with us today so that we can discuss your requirements and how we can add value to your business.