Social Media Advertising FAQ
Social Media advertising is exactly what it sounds like, serving adverts to users on social media platforms. Put simply, it’s a quick and effective way to attract new customers as well as re-engage with existing customers.
Using social media advertising, you can select specific criteria to show relevant ads to target audiences within each platform. This allows you to continually build brand awareness, increase sales, and drive website traffic. Since your customers are likely to already be using some form of social media, it’s a great way to maximize your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).
Social media advertising, or social media targeting, uses the information that has been collected about users to serve them highly-targeted ads or in other words highly relevant ads. These are then served to the audience based on their interaction with other content on the platform that you’re launching your ad on. When the target market and user demographics are aligned, social media ads can help skyrocket your conversions and sales with a low acquisition cost.
With social media ads, it’s not a spray and pray approach, and you don’t have to wait for someone to search for your target keywords phrases and happen to come across your website organically, like how Search Engine Optimization works. Instead, these ad platforms will seek out the right audience for you at a time they are likely to convert — whatever your ad objective is.
Nearly half of the world’s population spends time on social media for at least 3 hours per day and over 54% of these users use their social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, to research products they want to buy.
Social media is the ideal platform to tell your brand story and connect with customers on a more human level, which is probably why 52% of all brand discovery still happens on public feeds. Paid advertising on these social platforms allows you to put your brand front and centre on these user’s feeds and educate them about your products and services. Ad impressions on these feeds are only growing — seeing a 20% year-over-year uplift in the past 12 months.
And, we aren’t just talking about social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube is essential to the buying journey too. 90% of ads on YouTube drive an uplift in brand recall, and 80% of people state that they watched a YouTube video early in the research stage of their buying journey.
Your customers are already spending time on these platforms, and over one-third of them are checking social media over five times a day. People often use social media as part of their downtime, so they’re typically more receptive to your ads over these networks — but only if they’re presented at the right time and in a way that resonates with them. Social media advertising can also help to improve your search engine optimization rankings. How, you ask? By building a strong social presence. With these signals to search engines, your brand becomes valuable, credible and trustworthy.
Advertising on various social networks not only puts you in front of relevant target audiences, but it also allows you to build brand awareness, trust and convert ad impressions into sales. Through social media advertising you can form a strong connection with your customers, grow your customer base, drive traffic to your website and increase sales for your business.