The 5 Biggest Reasons To Advertise On Social Media (+PRO TIPS)

by Adrienne Maginness

Advertising on social media platforms is a valuable tool for all kinds of businesses. It can be more fruitful than what we can get organically. It helps businesses to reach their goals and scale their business.

Below I will outline five reasons why brands invest in social media advertising:

1-Reach new customers

2-Low entry cost

3-Gain audience insights

4-Wide range of formats

5-Accomplish more of your goals

1. Reach New Customers

Social media advertising allows you to reach out to new people who may benefit from your business whether it’s a product or service, no matter what platform you use.

Social media ads target their audience based on their interests as opposed to key words which is how search engine ads target their audience. Social media ads also target people based on their behaviours, and other demographic data. This is a major advantage when trying to gain new customers. People who otherwise may have never heard of your brand can now discover it through this targeted form of advertising.

2. Low Entry Cost

When you compare the price of social media advertising to traditional advertising it is much lower. So, it is perfect for small businesses with a low budget. However, if you have a bit of extra money then you can learn more quickly what is working and what is not. This will enable you to optimise performance, test more variables and reach goals such as website traffic, and sales.

For the most part, social platforms seem to have similar advertisement costs, with Pinterest being on the lower end of the budget. For companies with a higher budget, LinkedIn seems to be more costly. LinkedIn is a great place for B2B businesses to generate leads.

3. Gain Audience Insights

Social platforms have built in tools that help us to understand the breakdown of our audience and how they relate the company’s performance on social media. For example, ‘Facebook breakdown reporting’ can share details about age ranges, genders, country, region, devices they use and others. Combining these breakdowns with the audience and the performances of certain posts can help you understand your audience better. The performance metrics of your posts will help you work out which segments of you audience that your ads are resonating with most. You can then use this to update your ad set targeting and use it to optimise your campaigns.

Additionally, you can look at ‘Audience Insights’ within ‘Facebook Ads Manager’, this will show you the age range of your audience, gender breakdown, relationship status, education level, location and more. It is limited in insight but helpful, nonetheless.

One other way to gain more knowledge about your audience’s preferences is to run ‘Instagram Stories Ads’ with polling stickers. Through doing this you can get a better insight into your audience’s product or service preferences. This will help you with product development and future advertising

campaigns. This will help to resolves issues your audience might have with the product or service, increase user engagement, and increase the ad engagement audience size in future campaigns.

To conclude, by pairing the insights and ad placement specific features you can gain valuable insight into your business and who is best to target. It also helps you make your brand voice and messages more relatable to that audience. It is also important to take these learnings and use them elsewhere so that you can save time and money in the future.

4. Wide Range of Formats

Each platform has its own specs, placements, and formats but whilst there are differences there are many similarities. With social media there is creative freedom to represent your brand in the exact way you envisioned using a range of formatting, pictures, or videos if you so wish. This freedom of choice enables you to optimize ad space, enabling you to stand out from the crowd, and make the focus your ad.

Stories are a successful format for paid ads across all platforms. Stories can now be found organically and/or as an ad placement on most platforms.

Video format seems to be more easily digestible by users. It can help manage user expectations about your services or products and can help to bring your brand to life.

It is important to captivate the user within the first few seconds of video, showcasing your brand and make sure your narrative is fast paced, to the point and actionable.

If you don’t have video content then you can use static images, apply one of Facebook’s free templates and special effects by using the ‘Video Creation Kit’ in the ad level of Ads manager.

Another option for other platforms is to use royalty-free stock image and video websites until you can create your own.

When creating social media ads, we have a lot of choice. Whether it is formats or platforms, we have many options to really bring our brand to life and help to create the identity we envisioned for that brand through the different mediums that we have at our fingertips.

5. Accomplish More of your Goals

Whatever your goal, it is achievable through social media advertising. Whatever point of business you are at, you can choose the appropriate campaign type that relates to your goal and target audience, at that time, and assist your users towards conversion.

With conversion objective campaigns, you can specify what the conversion is and then tell the platform which event you want a given ad set to optimise towards. Eg: You want to optimize for more searches? Select the event you want to optimise for. Make sure to align your ad creative and copy to this goal. Eg: add “Shop Now” to encourage more purchases.

Consider the benefits of social media advertising and diversify your efforts

While Facebook and Instagram have robust targeting and have low costs because of how large their user base is, it is important to not limit yourself to one platform.

If you are not restricted by your budget, then you should diversify across platforms so that you have a secure position if something was to happen to a particular platform.

Facebook is known to sometimes have issues with the advertising interface and so if it fails for certain periods of time then you want to make sure that you have other platforms to depend on.

If you are looking to expand onto new platforms or expand into social media for the first time, then you should reflect upon the benefits talks about above.

-You can reach customers based on interests and benefits.

-It is affordable.

-You can view audience insights to consider what is working well and what isn’t.

-You can use many different formats that fit with your vision for the brand.

-You can accomplish more goals with social media’s variety of objectives offered through its campaigns.