Should your business advertise on social media? With investments in social media advertising forecasted to almost double from $16 billion in 2014 to nearly $31 billion in 2016, according to Statista, it is natural to consider this option.
While we cannot make that decision for you, we can offer a list of seven factors to ponder upon while weighing the advantages and disadvantages of social media advertising.
1. Allows to connect with the people who need your service or product
A 2016 survey carried out by the Pew Research Center found that 56 percent of online adults utilize multiple social media platforms, as classified by the survey’s measurements. Additionally, considering that 65 percent of U.S. adults acknowledge their usage of social media, it is advantageous for your brand to have a presence in those platforms.
Social media advertising offers the opportunity to connect with potential customers on various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Snapchat in order to reach out and engage with individuals who may find value in your product or services.
In contrast to intent-based search engine ads that primarily focus on keywords, social media ads direct their efforts towards users with specific interests, behaviors, and demographic information. This allows us to gain an advantage by strategically introducing our brands to new users, aligning our offers with their specific interests and behaviors.
By viewing your prospecting ad, individuals who may not be aware of your brand or the existence of your products or services might come to understand how it could improve their lives or develop a desire for what you are offering.
To put it simply, in order to make a sale, the initial step involves creating awareness. Therefore, it is desirable to advertise in locations where everyone’s attention is focused. The purpose of products is to address a person’s problem or enhance their overall life satisfaction. Advertising enables you to remind consumers about their unfilled requirements. However, the primary task is to determine their whereabouts, which happens to be on social media platforms.
2. Provides varied platforms and numerous advertising formats
Facebook can be used to target middle-aged adults and older individuals, making social media advertising appealing due to its inclusiveness.
If your goal is to target millennials, Snapchat is the platform to use. You can even narrow it down to the type of content you want to promote. If your advertisements heavily depend on visual appeal, consider utilizing Instagram or Pinterest. No matter what your objectives are, there is most likely a social media platform that can help you achieve them.
3. Allows to create specific target audiences
Advertisers and social media platforms rely on each other in a mutually beneficial way. Platforms are essential to advertisers for increasing awareness about their product, service, and company. Meanwhile, the majority of platforms require advertisers’ support for funding.
Social media platforms offer various services to assist advertisers in reaching users, enabling them to target consumers with a broad or specific focus to tailor the message accordingly. These highly personalized targeting choices make social media advertising advantageous.
4. Drive targeted traffic to your website or landing page
One of the most important metrics in measuring the success of your advertising campaign is click-through rate. According to statistics from 2013, Facebook’s click-through rate increased from 0.18 percent in Q1 to 0.36 percent in Q4, indicating a rise in click-through rates across all social media platforms.
During the same time period, advertiser sophistication and social media platform enhancements with targeting options and desktop and mobile experiences led to further improvements in ad engagement.
5. Social media marketing will get you more sales
The ultimate concern of any advertising campaign is its ability to translate engagement into business sales. It is gratifying to learn that numerous brands are experiencing success in utilizing social media as a sales channel.
Based on a report called Feedback Systems from 2015, it was revealed that 61 percent of socially engaged organizations experienced a positive effect on their revenue growth. Furthermore, a survey conducted by Aberdeen in 2014 demonstrated that 46 percent of social sellers achieved their quota, whereas only 38 percent of sales representatives who failed to meet their projected sales.
6. The ROI on social media ads is unbeatable
In general, advertising on social media platforms is usually more cost effective compared to other digital sites. Across all industries, the average cost per click on Google Adwords is $2.32, whereas for a targeted boost post on Facebook or Pinterest, you may only have to pay $0.12 per click. Social media provides a quick, easy, and affordable way to generate traffic.
7. Offers insights into your customers
One of the most impressive aspects of advertising on social media is the ability to obtain genuine understanding of the performance and reception of your ads among your intended audience.
There is no need for projections or surveys anymore as services such as Facebook Analytics offer abundant data to determine the performance of your ads among consumers. In addition to these analytic features, you can assess an ad’s social performance by examining the quantity of likes, shares, or comments it receives.
8. Low entry cost
If you have a limited budget, you can still participate in the auction and achieve success because the cost is significantly lower compared to traditional advertising. However, having a larger budget allows for a faster understanding of effective strategies, performance optimization, increased experimentation, and the attainment of various goals like website traffic, signups, and sales.
Based on our experience, we have observed that Pinterest offers lower costs of approximately $0.13 per click compared to most social platforms. This makes Pinterest an ideal platform for running cost-effective campaigns, especially when aiming to generate new affordable traffic for website retargeting purposes.
LinkedIn, despite being more expensive, can be a productive platform for B2B businesses in generating leads. This is possible if your business can meet the requirements of its business community through advertisements and if your budget and audience size are substantial. Therefore, investing in LinkedIn can yield significant success.
9. Gain audience insights
As advertisers, we now have access to a wider range of targeting options. This allows us to conduct more audience testing and then use the built-in tools on social platforms to analyze audience breakdowns and their impact on performance. For instance, Facebook breakdown reporting provides information on age ranges, genders, country, region, devices used, and other relevant details.
By combining these breakdowns with your different target audiences and the corresponding performance metrics, you can gain a deeper understanding of which audience segments respond best to your ads. Utilizing this knowledge, you can then make adjustments to your targeted ad set and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
Another method of obtaining more information about your audience is by referring to Audience Insights in Facebook Ads Manager. In this section, you can access details such as the age and gender distribution of a specific audience, their relationship status, educational background, job titles, location, device usage, and other relevant data.
Before making changes to audience targeting options for the sake of user privacy and transparency, Facebook used to have more robots in this tool a few years ago. Although limited in insight, it can still be somewhat useful.
One alternative method for improving your understanding of your audiences and their preferences is to utilize polling stickers in Instagram Stories Ads.
By utilizing these, you can enhance your comprehension of product or service preferences. Moreover, they can assist in collecting insights for upcoming product development and campaigns. Additionally, they aid in comprehending the challenges that your target audience faces, which you can address. Furthermore, utilizing these can initiate discussions about your brand and campaigns. Consequently, they will elevate audience engagement and expand the size of your ad engagement audience for retargeting.
You can obtain valuable insights about the most suitable target audience at different stages of the funnel by using reporting, audience insights, and ad placement-specific features. Then, you can tailor your messaging based on these insights. Furthermore, you can save time and money while expanding your efforts and gaining a better understanding of your customers by applying the audience-related learnings to other platforms.
10. Accomplish more of your goals
If you are seeking ways to boost engagement, enhance website traffic, increase app use, or drive ecommerce sales, social media advertising can help you achieve these objectives and more. Social media provides greater online exposure for your business compared to relying solely on organic posts.
You can choose the right campaign type based on your target audience’s position in the funnel and align it with your goal for that stage. This will help guide your users through the funnel and lead them to conversion. By using conversion objective campaigns, you can define the desired conversion and instruct the platform to optimize a specific ad set towards that event.
If you want to increase the number of people who add items to the cart, choose that as the event you want to focus on optimizing for. If you want to optimize for more purchases, use the same optimization strategy and ensure that your ad creative and copy are tailored to engage with these people at their current stage of the buying process. Clearly communicate the goal so that users can easily click on “Shop Now” in this specific example.
Side notes
As advertisers, we understand that Facebook and its related platforms, including Instagram and Messenger, have a significant and greater share of impressions. This is because brands typically allocate the majority of their advertising budget to these platforms.
Although Facebook and Instagram have a wide user base, which enables them to offer targeted advertising at low prices, it is important to avoid solely focusing on these platforms. If budget allows, it is advisable to diversify your advertising efforts across platforms to take advantage of the aforementioned benefits and mitigate any unexpected issues.
In order to determine which platforms are suitable for you, you have the option to acquire information about the most widely used social media marketing platforms here or make a comparison between TikTok and Facebook advertising.
Facebook’s advertising interface is widely known for being cumbersome, frequently generating invalid errors, inexplicably disabling ads, and experiencing glitches.
If the number of users decreases, as it sometimes does, we do not want to be in a disadvantageous position as brands and rely solely on one network to attract new users and then convince them to make a purchase. Remember this and consider these advantages seriously in order to broaden our presence on other platforms.
