A complete social media plan should include both paid and organic social media strategies. Paid social media ads are a staple in marketing strategies across small and large businesses to build awareness and drive sales. Organic social media traffic is great to build engagement and loyalty but can take days to build due to site algorithms. Paid social advertising can give you an extra boost in traffic at a speed that organic posts can’t match.
What is Paid Social Advertising?
Have you ever seen a “sponsored,” “promoted,” or “ad” tag near posts on social media or a Google search? Those are examples of paid advertising. Let’s look at a few different social media platforms and how advertising on each could benefit your business! It is essential to understand that each platform offers different benefits to determine what social media platforms would best promote your business.
Facebook provides two main advertising options for your business page, to create an ad or boost a post. The main difference between these ad types is your ability to target an audience based on geography, interests, demographics, and more.
Boosted Posts
A boosted post is one that you would post to your company’s page and pay Facebook to expand the range of the post. Facebook allows you to choose who to reach, your maximum budget, and how long to run the ad when advertising in this manner.
Facebook Ads
Creating a Facebook Ad is a great marketing tool, especially when you have a specific goal in mind because you can fully customize your ad.
To run ads on Instagram, you will need a business profile. Lucky for you, Facebook owns Instagram, so you can manage all ads for both platforms on Facebook. Your budget will determine the Instagram ads timeline. Instagram ads focus heavily on visual content and look the same as regular posts, which are less intrusive. Instagram ads will measure the success of your ad campaign based on awareness (reach and recall) rather than follower counts, likes, or comments.
Google ads are a crucial marketing tool for any business looking to get meaningful ads in front of a targeted audience. Google’s algorithm will show your ads to the right people, in the right place, at the right time, allowing businesses to reach anyone who uses Google to search for information. Google ads offer different ways of targeting your audience compared to social media sites, allowing you to target your audience based on:
- keywords
- location
- time/frequency
- or what devices to appear on.
If there is an area of your business you would like to grow with paid social advertising, share the details with us and we can create a proposal for you!
Marisa Lyon
Marisa is the Finance and Marketing Manager at Innereactive and we are so grateful to have her. She enjoys helping businesses find the right solution for their marketing needs.
