Social media is the most relevant advertising channel for Generation Z, Gen X, and millennials. These younger audiences are open, responsive, and primed to receive advertising messages as they browse their feed. If you want to target this younger demographic, paid social media advertising will help.
Social media is the most effective channel to inspire potential buyers to purchase from brands. Especially if you’re ready to invest in video ads. Marketers disclosed that they are increasing their digital video budgets by 25% year-over-year since video is widely preferred by consumers. Depending on your budget, you can get super specific with ad targeting to reach qualified customers and patients.
The problem with a lot of typical advertising that isn’t on social media is that they have no specific audience to target to and initial campaigns waste a good chunk of money fishing in an empty pond. While eventually, a target audience may be organically discovered this way, it’s highly unlikely that it will happen overnight.
With social media, you’re not necessarily fishing in an empty pond. It’s more like your fishing in a pond with a massive amount of very small fish that will very quickly turn into full-grown fish that you will eventually find yourself reeling in. With over 2.7 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2020, Facebook is the biggest social network worldwide.
Instead of marketing to the masses and getting nowhere, your audience is already on social media and primed to buy. Strategic social media advertisements pop up in front of people at the right time, educating them about your product or service and motivating them to make a purchasing decision.
Social media has changed how advertisers find their true target audience. With specific ways to target demographics, location and even a potential consumer’s interests, targeting your audience is now common knowledge when it comes to digital marketing on social networks.
The largest demographic on Facebook is men ages 18-34, making up 35% of active users. Simple things like targeting a specific gender can change your ad campaign completely. Additionally, when setting up a new campaign almost all social media advertising platforms will ask you for an objective; be it video views, website clicks, post engagements or sales. Once this has been defined, the platform will use previous user behaviour data to put your ads in front of the people that are most likely to perform your desired action.
Many businesses end up boosting posts on Facebook as prompted by the platform. Boosting is an easy and cost effective way to get more exposure of a post and can be very successful for competitions, photos, blog posts and other posts that are not sales orientated.
However, when boosting, note that you are only able to use basic targeting functionalities and Facebook will target users more likely to engage (likes, comments, shares) rather than link clicks by default. Therefore, if you are running a campaign that’s designed to generate conversions, consider exploring the Facebook ads manager platform instead.
With social media advertising, there is less intent, you are simply targeting someone because they meet the profile of your target audience, they may have no interest in actually using your services or buying your product. The exception to this is when you use the Facebook pixel as when retargeting previous visitors of your website, you can assume higher intent.
The effectiveness of a social media platform will depend largely on your target audience, product or service and budget. However, Facebook could be considered to have the most advanced advertising features of all social media platforms and also has the largest user base. A person’s social media account tells you a lot about them, and social media advertising platforms allow you to utilize this data to put your ads in front of the right people. The more interested in a topic a person is, the more likely to click an ad with that interest in mind.
