At this point in time, it is recommended for nearly all businesses to develop a social media presence. This helps them legitimize their business, grow organic SEO backlinks, and also prevents other businesses from coming in and taking their name online. Outside of building brand awareness though, you may find yourself wondering, ‘Should My Small Business Advertise on Social Media?’
In order to answer this question, we first should explore the different goals you can achieve by running a social media ad. For instance, you may choose to run a social media ad because:
- You are trying to sell a specific product
- Want to let a broad audience know about a special you are running
- Want to grow your brand awareness
- Want to have new people sign up for newsletters
- Want to increase traffic to your website
Maybe you have a combination of these goals or an entirely different one. The first question you should ask before running an ad across your social media channels is, “What is my goal?” If you find that our goal does align with running an ad, you then must ask yourself which social media platform is best for the type of content I am trying to push.
Our team works with individuals to build a social media strategy that helps them get the most from platforms like facebook and instagram. If you have a goal for you social media accounts, we will help you, in real time, build a strategy that works.
5 Benefits of Advertising on Social Media
Whether you are new to social media ads and are considering the investment, or are already running ads elsewhere, such as on Google, the following benefits may encourage you to diversify your efforts and incorporate more social media into your mix.
1. Reach new customers
Whether you’re considering running ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, TikTok, or Snapchat, social media advertising allows you to reach out to and connect with new people who may benefit from your product or services.
Unlike intent-based, mostly keyword-centered search engine ads, social media ads target users based on their interests, behaviors, and other demographic data. This gives us the advantage of introducing our brands to new users based on targeting and how our offers match up to those interests and behaviors. People may not know about your brand or that your products or services even exist and by seeing your prospecting ad, they may realize that it could benefit their life in some manner or that they simply want what you are selling.
2. Low entry cost
Compared to traditional advertising, the cost is significantly lower and if you only have a small budget, you can still enter the auction and find success. Of course, the more you have to spend for ads, the quicker you can learn what is working and what is not, optimize performance, test more variables, and reach more of your goals, such as website traffic, signups, and sales.
Most of the social platforms are in line with costs, however, from our experience, we’ve seen lower costs of about $0.13 per click on Pinterest, which makes it an excellent platform to run low-cost campaigns, especially to drive new inexpensive traffic to your website for retargeting. On the opposite end of cost, LinkedIn tends to be more costly, however, if your business can fulfill the needs of its business community through ads and if your audience size and budget are on the larger end, you can see great success there for the investment. As you can see LinkedIn can be a great way for B2B businesses to generate leads.
3. Gain audience insights
With more targeting options available to us as advertisers, the more audience testing we can do, and then utilize social platform built-in tools to understand audience breakdowns and how they relate to performance. For example, Facebook breakdown reporting can share details about age ranges, genders, country, region, devices they use, and more. Pairing these breakdowns with your various audiences and the respective performance metrics can help you better understand which segments of audiences resonate with your ads and you can apply these learnings to update your ad set targeting and use that to optimize your campaigns.
One other way to gain additional audience-based information is to check out Audience Insights within Facebook Ads Manager. Here, you can view a particular audience’s age and gender breakdown, relationship status, education level, job titles, location, device activity, and more. This tool used to be more robots a few years ago before additional insights were removed when Facebook had to make some changes to audience targeting options for the sake of user privacy and transparency. While it’s limited in insight, it can be helpful to an extent.
Another way to gain a better understanding of your audiences and their preferences are to run Instagram Stories Ads with polling stickers. With these, you can get a better understanding of product or service preferences, they can help you gather insights for future product development and campaigns, they can help you understand a target audiences pain points that you can resolve, they can help start conversations around your brand and campaigns, they will increase audience engagement, and they will increase your ad engagement audience size for retargeting.
By utilizing reporting, audience insights, and ad placement-specific features, you can gain valuable insights about who is best to target at various stages of the funnel and then cater your messaging accordingly. Additionally, take your audience-related learnings and apply them to other platforms to save you time and money as you expand your efforts while you better understand your customers.
4. Wide range of formats
While each social platform has its own ad specs, placements, and formats, there are some common denominators across platforms. The beauty of social media advertising is that there is creative freedom and endless tactics and options to showcase your brand in the light you want. From static images to ephemeral and long-form video content, from horizontal and vertical rectangular formats to square, utilize every bit of the ad placement space to increase your ad real estate space on a screen so the user focuses on you and it limits outside distractions from other ads and content. One format we have seen quickly take off organically and then with paid ads across platforms is the Stories format, which can now be found organically and in most instances as an ad placement, too, is on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok, and as of recently, Twitter and LinkedIn.
If you are able to use video creatives and formats to showcase your products, services in use, and your brand story, do so, as video content tends to be more easily digestible by users, typically more impressions are dedicated to video content, it can help better manage user expectations about your offerings, and it can bring your brand to life. When utilizing video, also be sure to captivate your user in the first few seconds by putting your best foot forward, showing your brand, and make sure your narrative is fast-paced, to the point, and actionable. If you don’t have video content, use static images and apply one of Facebook’s free templates and special effects by using the Video Creation Kit in the ad level of Ads Manager. If you need creatives for other platforms, check into royalty-free stock image and video sites until you are able to create your own.
Social media ads provide a wide range of advertising formats and through the various platforms we have available to experiment with, it can bring our brands and clients success through the various placements and mediums we have at our disposal.
5. Accomplish more of your goals
Lastly, whether you are looking for ways to drive engagement, increase website traffic, app use, or ecommerce sales, you can accomplish these and more through social media advertising. Social media affords your business far more visibility online than organic posts alone.
Online Marketing For Businesses in Houston, TX
Your website is more than an extension of your business, it is often your first chance to make a lasting impression on potential customers. Our team helps you to optimize your website so that you do not fall behind your competitors. As the gap increases between the amount of effort your competition puts into their online marketing and how little work you put into your website, the more difficult it will become to engage with customers online.
The Houston Small Business Marketing team works hard to help your business stay relevant in this online-focused world by tracking the latest strategies in online marketing for businesses. If you are tired of giving away potential customers to your competition, we can help you.
Houston Small Business Marketing
713-492-0025
1415 North Loop West #950
Houston, TX 77008
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