Social media is one of the pillar channels in digital marketing, but what makes it different from the other pillars, like search engines and email, is that it has so many platforms within it. And not in the Bing vs Google kind of way. There are huge audiences available for advertising on each platform. In other words, advertising on social media platforms is its own beast. But once tamed and harnessed, it can be used to help your business soar past its goals. Continue reading to learn everything you need to know about social media advertising to get started and succeed. What is social media advertising?
Social media advertising is a form of social media marketing in which you use paid media to promote your company on any of the many social media platforms. This media comes in many formats and placements and supports a range of creative, from images and video to immersive experiences.
It’s also referred to as paid social. Whereas with paid search where you target keywords and terms, on social, you target audiences, interests, and behaviors. Ads on social media are also typically more visual and branded, and they are very much a part of the platform, to the point where it can sometimes be hard to tell them apart from ads. Advertising benefits of social media As with any PPC strategy, social media advertising has lots of benefits for businesses. Here are some reasons to advertise on social media:
Cost-effective: PPC in general yields an average 200% ROI. In addition, paid social is a lower-cost alternative to targeting your competitors’ audience on search.
Brand awareness: Not only are social media networks vast, but also, the visual ads allow you to customize them to your branding and style.
Engagement: In addition to ad clicks, users can interact with social media ads by liking, sharing, and commenting.
Formats: As mentioned above, social media ads support a wide range of formats and media types
Targeting: Because users share detailed information about themselves on the platforms, social media ads allow for granular targeting.
Not disruptive: For the most part, social media ads are often hard to distinguish from organic posts on the platforms, making them a less disruptive way to reach your audience.
Stats on advertising on social media To give you a sense of how big the social media ad market is, let’s take a look at a few stats:
Ads on social media are the second most popular online brand research channel and the fourth most common source of brand discovery.
