Which of the following is an advantage offered by newspapers to advertisers?

Social media has taken the world by storm over recent years. To this end, it is essential that your business is both present and active on social media if you really want to connect with your target audience.

There are approximately 4.14 billion active social media users, according to the Digital 2020 report by Hootsuite. This is 53% of the world’s population, and a massive 88.9% of the 4.66 billion internet users.

With so many people using social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram every single day, social media advertising is a marketing strategy that you do not want to miss out on.

In the UK alone, a reported £2.76 billion ($3.38 billion) was spent on social media ads in 2019. With a 20% year-on-year increase in social media ad spend, it’s clear that many businesses across the UK value the potential power of social media advertising.

There are many ways you can use social media to meet your business objectives, and one of those ways is through social media advertising.

7 advantages of social media advertising

Whether you want to target teens on Tik Tok or make yourself known to millennials on Twitter, success lies in developing the best social media advertising strategy for your business. In order to do this, you need to understand the advantages of social media advertising, and how these can be applied to your business.

There are multiple advantages of social media advertising. If social media ads aren’t already part of your wider marketing strategy, you could be missing out on the opportunity to reach more people, generate higher conversions, and nurture greater customer satisfaction levels.

1. Increased brand awareness

By promoting your business, products or services across social media, you are increasing brand awareness from the get-go.

Even before clicks and conversions come into play, you are putting your brand out there to millions of people by using social media ads.

Appearing in people’s social media feeds with a ‘sponsored’ label or showing up in front of a YouTube video can do wonders for increasing your brand visibility, helping your business to stay fresh in people’s minds – even if it’s on a subconscious level.

Increasing your brand awareness, of course, has many benefits for your business. Whether you are a newcomer within your industry or you are a well-established brand, this increased exposure from social media advertising could result in fresh leads and higher conversions for your business.

If you do choose to publish an Awareness campaign as part of your paid social media strategy, make sure you choose the most appropriate ad format for your objective. A reported 76% of people habitually skip ads when watching YouTube videos, according to research by Magna.

Therefore, if YouTube ads form part of your social media campaign strategy, you may want to opt for non-skippable in-stream ads to really help increase your brand awareness.

2. Improved brand loyalty

Engaging with your customers on social media can help your business develop a loyal customer base. Social media advertising is about more than promoting your products or services. It offers the opportunity to connect with your target audience and develop meaningful connections.

Social media advertising can be a great demonstration of social proofing, which in turn, can improve brand loyalty and turn one-time visitors into lifelong customers.

You can use social media advertising to share customer testimonials or case studies to demonstrate customer satisfaction.

Using remarketing adverts on social media can further boost brand loyalty by making sure your products remain front-and-centre of your customers’ and website visitors’ minds.

3. Higher conversion rates

Social media advertising can help your business generate more conversions. In fact, 27% of people surveyed in the Digital 2020 report stated that they found new brands and products through social media adverts.

There are several ways to boost your conversion rate with social media advertising. Advertising platforms such as Facebook Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaigns Manager let you devise detailed audience targeting metrics for your ad campaigns. By doing this, you can make sure that your social media ads are reaching people who are likely to have an interest in what you have to say or offer.

But that’s not the only way that social media adverts can result in increased conversions. By setting up retargeting social media ad campaigns, you can also nurture warm leads and encourage them to re-engage with your business.

Remarketing social media campaigns are another powerful tool for increasing conversions. For example, eCommerce business owners could run retargeting ads on Facebook and Instagram that encourage website visitors with abandoned carts to revisit the website and complete their purchase.

A revealed that a series of Image ads outperformed other ad formats in driving traffic to the advertiser. So, if your goal is to drive traffic to your website to increase on-site sales, you may want to consider setting up an ad funnel consisting of a series of Image ads.

Over on Snapchat, Filters and Lenses are a great way to get users to promote you to their own followers while having fun. These advertising formats are a fantastic way to create shareable content that builds brand awareness and gets even more eyes on your business than ever before.

The most important thing to remember about social media is to be social – create content that is both engaging and relevant to your audience and people will naturally remember your brand, reshare your content and recommend you to their followers, friends, and family. By making sure your brand is creating shareable paid content, you will be able to drive more traffic to your website and improve conversions.

When it comes to increasing website traffic and boosting conversions, social media advertising can be an advantageous place to start.

4. Boost leads for your business

As you already know, social media advertising is a great way to get your business in front of more people and expand your customer base.

By running specific lead generation ad campaigns, you can really harness the benefits of social media advertising for your business.

Facebook’s messaging adverts and lead generation ads are an ideal solution for  customer-facing businesses looking to gather more leads. You can use lead generation ads on Facebook to encourage people to sign up to your online event, grow your email list ahead of a product launch, or to gather customer information for future marketing, to name just a few examples.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn advertising can be a powerful lead acquisition tool for B2B businesses.

Whether you’re an eCommerce brand looking to connect with distributors or you’re a SaaS company hoping to increase your customer base, you’ll want to make sure LinkedIn forms part of your social media advertising strategy.

Sponsored InMail adverts on LinkedIn help you connect with your target audience in their inbox – a powerful advertising tactic for collecting quality leads directly from your social media ads.

5. Low cost advertising

When it comes to social media advertising, your biggest concern may be “how much will this cost?”. The good news is social media advertising can be a cost-effective solution for your business.

Most social media advertising models operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) or pay-per-view (PPV) basis meaning you only pay when someone has clicked on your ad, or viewed your video ad. As a result, you can keep your advertising costs low and only pay when someone takes action.

According to Wordstream, the average cost-per-click for Facebook advertising is $1.68 across all industries, with the Food & Beverage industry being the cheapest at an average of $0.42 per click. With the average costs per click being so low, advertising on social media really can be an efficient way of boosting your marketing efforts without eating into your budget.

6. User-friendly interface

Advertising on social media doesn’t have to be scary. Most social media giants offer a user-friendly advertising platform.

By managing your ad campaigns through ad managers, like Facebook Ads Manager for your Facebook and Instagram ads or Campaign Manager for your LinkedIn adverts, you can make sure your ads are set up to achieve the results you are aiming for.

Most of these platforms will walk you through each step of setting up your advertising campaign from choosing an objective to inputting your audience requirements and specifying your budget.

Then when it’s time to publish your adverts, you can easily monitor the advert performance and use these insights to make informed decisions about how best to optimise your adverts for success.

Some advertising platforms will also let you create custom reports and rules to really improve the ease of managing your paid social media campaigns. If you are a marketer wearing multiple hats, this is one advantage of social media advertising that you will be grateful for.

7. In-depth analytics

Last but not least, another advantage of social media advertising is having access to a wealth of analytics and statistics which, we’re sure you will agree, is any marketer’s dream!

You are able to see, almost instantly, how well your campaigns are performing and how past campaigns performed. This allows you to tailor your future campaigns to ensure they are as successful as possible, as well as optimising live campaigns and developing A/B tests to refine your social media advertising strategy.

The benefits of social media advertising analytics doesn’t stop there. You can also use these advertising insights to improve other areas of your business. For instance, your social media adverts could give you a good indication of brand sentiment, allowing you to create organic content that you know your target customers love to see online.

Using your social media advertising analytics in collaboration with Google Analytics, you will be able to gain a deeper understanding of the marketing tactics that work best for your business.

Disadvantages of social media advertising

As with any marketing tool, there are some disadvantages of social media advertising. However, these are few and far between.

For starters, it is not as easy as it looks so it can be overwhelming for junior members of your marketing team. Developing successful social media advertising campaigns is a whole area of expertise, meaning you will want to make sure you put someone in charge who knows what they are doing. This is, of course, something you can easily outsource to a social media advertising agency – and the positives far outweigh the negatives!

You’ll also be competing for attention with other companies, as social media advertising is so accessible to all. Rather than seeing this as a disadvantage, you could see this as an opportunity to do something that makes you stand out from the crowd – be bold and have fun with your campaigns.

Final thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of social media advertising

Of course, there are various advantages and disadvantages of social media advertising. In many ways, however, the benefits definitely override the downsides.

Advertising on social media is a user-friendly, cost-effective and customisable way to promote your products and services to millions of people at once. This is why it is so important to spend time understanding how social media can impact your business, especially during times when many of us are relying so heavily on the digital world.

If you really want to reap the benefits of social media advertising, reach out to us today to find out how we can create results-driven social media ad campaigns for your business.

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