No matter the size of your brand, utilising social media can have major benefits for everyone.
While social media is completely free to use, and running an organic social media strategy works, there are paid media options available to increase the efficacy of your social media strategy. Running paid ads can either be led by you or, if you are a smaller business with less resources, you can rely on a paid media agency to actualise it for you.
Paid options include, but are not limited to:
- Partnering with influencers
- Social media ads
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Banner ads
Here are five reasons you should consider paid advertising to maximise the benefits of your social media strategy.
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You can micro-target your audience
When using paid ads, you have a range of demographic options available for you to choose to target. These cover broad demographics such as age and location, and also specific ones such as travel preferences, or favourite TV shows.
Take a look at your key metrics and analytics across all platforms you’re present and active on. Analyse your audience to identify common factors such as keywords, geographic location, job titles, interests and common topics. You can then use this information to refine where you want to target your paid ads and pull in more qualified leads and customers.
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It’s an alternative to market research
Due to the sheer number of social media users, social networks have been able to gather extensive data on a vast range of users. If you need to conduct market research before running a campaign, you don’t need to hire a specialist market research team to find this information.
Instead, you can use paid social media ads to promote a survey or questionnaire to a specific audience, and use the answers as your market research. Because this is done in real-time, you can continuously make changes to make your research more specific, and tweak your campaign as it is running to maximise your results.
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Increases traffic and leads
With paid media you pay to target a super specific demographic. As a result of this, you will be reaching an audience who is more likely to be interested and engaged in your campaign. This means they will be more inclined to respond to any call-to-actions included, in turn, increasing your traffic and leads.
The key to this is doing your audience research beforehand, otherwise you won’t know where to target your ads.
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Decreases your need to compete with others
There are an alarming number of brands on social media nowadays, all of which are pushing out new content regularly. Because of this, social media users can quickly become overwhelmed by the new content they are shown daily. Using paid ads to promote your content eliminates the tough competition between brands, and helps you cut through the noise.
Paid ads will also ensure that your content is integrated seamlessly into the user’s feed. This way it will reach a lot more people. A lot of the time, the ad is displayed without the user even realising it’s an ad.
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Promotes top content
Your marketing team works tirelessly to create high quality campaigns that are intended to engage your audience and promote your brand. Without using paid ads, that hard work is not reaching its full potential.
Paid advertising ensures that these campaigns are reaching their intended audience, so ensure that you choose your best ones to maximise success and ROI.
