Paid social media campaigns are an integral part of most businesses’ marketing activities. However, if you’re not sure where to start and why paid social media is important, read on to find out more.
What is paid social media marketing?
In simple terms, social media marketing is about paying to put your social media content in front of new audiences to drive brand awareness, engagement and leads.
Looking at your social media output as a whole, organic social media works best for non-commercial messaging and paid social media is where sales-driven and lead generation content have their natural home.
What are paid social campaigns?
It’s a common misconception that paid social media campaigns and boosted posts are the same thing.
Boosted posts allow you to quickly reach people by putting money behind an existing organic post, whereas paid social media campaigns are longer-term and funnel-driven to gain more views, impressions or engagement.
Aims and objectives
A paid social media campaign will start with discussions about aims and objectives, budgets, target audiences, messaging and the creatives you are using to catch the eye of users.
Developing content
You will then develop your written and visual content, agree a budget and a timescale and agree your KPIs – which can be metrics such as website visits, direct purchases or form completions.
Measuring and adapting
Once live, the campaign can be indefinitely tweaked to ensure it is reaching the right people and delivering the best possible ROI.
All major social media platforms allow you to run paid social campaigns, and the platform you choose to use will depend on what your campaign objective is and where your target audience is.
What are paid social media ads?
Paid social media ads are designed to blend in with organic content on the feed so they will look very much like the regular posts you see in your feed, with some extra content features to ensure you get the most bang for your buck.
These can include links, targeting, tracking and different creative formats for the same content.
You can choose from static imagery, carousel images, short or long videos, right up to full-screen takeover ads on YouTube.
Text will often be shorter than a regular post, but the creative will allow additional functionality you wouldn’t see on an organic post – such as adding a clickable link on Instagram to take users to an online shop or sign-up page.
Your ads can be heavily customised based on your needs, each with their own call to action.
Why is paid social media important?
With organic social media, you’re largely talking to the same audience every time – the audience that already follows your page. If you strike it gold with a viral post, you can grow outside of this realm, but a more realistic and proven way to spread your wings is paid social marketing.
The key reason why paid social media is important is it offers audience targeting – so you can choose the types of prospective customers you want to reach based on variables such as age, gender, interests, job titles and location.
Read our Organic Social vs. Paid Social blog post to learn the key difference between these two social media marketing channels.
How can paid social media help a company increase conversions?
Paid social media can best help a company increase conversions when it’s part of an integrated marketing campaign, which also includes tactics such as creating optimised SEO web content and email marketing.
This all helps take a prospective customer on the journey with your brand. Users rarely look for information in one place, so if your website, social channels and email channels all link to each other with a consistent message, this will help increase conversions.
In the same way as you would with an offline marketing campaign, you can run a paid campaign along the traditional marketing funnel of awareness, consideration and conversion. The data gathered from your awareness phase can be used to retarget engaged users and continue to take them on the journey towards consideration and conversion.
Support with your paid social media campaign
Here at R&Co, our team of experts have years of experience running paid social media campaigns for clients and achieving impressive results. To find out more, take a look at our paid social media marketing services and see some examples of our work.
Talk to our team to learn how we can put your business in front of new audiences.
