Although organic social media is known to be cost-effective for a marketing strategy, it’s also difficult to increase your reach and target a larger audience. By using paid social media marketing, you can boost your social media posts so that they reach a larger proportion of your followers and non-followers.
Paid marketing does involve spending money, but it’s more beneficial than organic marketing for long-term results. By using the best practices, you will learn how to increase engagement on paid media as well as how to increase the ROI of your advertisements.
What is Paid Social Media?
Paid social media is essentially the opposite of organic social media, which involves spending money on advertisements to help reach your targeted audience. Organic social media can only reach so many online users, therefore by using paid social media, you’re able to reach new prospects that you wouldn’t be able to connect with using organic methods. There are several ways to promote your business using paid media, although it often means finding out what works best for your audience.
Using Paid Media to Boost Social Engagement
Examples of paid social media are Snapchat’s brand filters, Instagram’s sponsored stories, and Facebook’s carousel advertisements. Paid media allows businesses and brands to customize their advertisements, so they can boost them depending on their budgets and goals. By incorporating such channels within your marketing strategy, you can gain more reach for an expansion of your audience.
To be able to use paid media significantly, it’s important to understand what engagement is on social media as it works in hand with paid media. Likes, comments, and shares on a post on social media are all components of engagement and are vital for analysing how your current content is performing, as well as planning any future paid media campaigns.
There are many reasons why engagement is vital for a business, as it provides social proof, increases brand loyalty, and expands brand awareness. These reasons show and tell us why paid social media should be involved with your marketing plan. Although paid media costs more, you can boost posts so that they reach a larger proportion of your followers and also reach wider audiences.
The Best Practices
There are several things you can do to get the most engagement from your social ads, including:
1. Use all online tools available
All social networking platforms have their own tools that you can use to analyse data for a post. As an example, Instagram’s analytics has features that tell you every interaction a piece of content has received. This helps you to understand what content your audience like the most, so you can then use the best content strategies for your next paid media campaign.
2. Boost posts that have good engagement
After analysing social media posts, you can then determine which ones have performed the best. You can boost a post that has a good engagement to further increase that percentage with the content you are producing, as well as boost posts that aren’t performing very well to increase reach. When you boost a post on social media, you essentially pay the social media platform to increase the reach of an existing post.
3. Understanding algorithms
Being able to understand a social media algorithm is vital since they are the key to establishing what practices you need to adopt, such as hashtag research or the best time to post. It’s important to know that algorithms are always being updated, so it’s worth noting that you will need to stay up to date with knowledge.
4. Automated/scheduled ads
Ad scheduling involves limiting your campaigns so that they only run within a particular time frame. By doing this, you will be able to ensure you’re receiving the highest return on ad spend since you will know the best days and times within the week to schedule your posts. Ultimately, ad scheduling can save you money since your ads will be shown on the best days and times for performance.
5. Targeting Your Audience
Being able to identify your audience can allow your business to focus its efforts on the right groups who are most likely to buy from you. This will help your business to generate leads more efficiently. Once you’re able to understand the type of customer who purchases the majority of your services/products, you can then start to target related groups.
Engagement is the most important factor for any social media advertising campaign. It’s imperative that paid social media strategies are well-planned as well as analysed on a regular basis to ensure you receive the best engagement and profit. If you are able to convert fans into customers and generate leads, you will know that you have created a successful paid media strategy.
To find out more about paid media marketing, why not speak to our experts today?