What is a Social Media Ad?
What is a Social Media Ad?
A social media advertisement is a message that you pay to display on a social media platform.
A social media platform is any digital channel that signs up members to form a group that likes to socialize and hang out together. There are over 75 social media platforms, and that number keeps on growing. Not every social media platform has a vast audience, and that works both for and against it as a space for social media advertisers.
The top seven social media sites are currently:
Each of these platforms appeals to different interests – one person can be on all, one, none, or a few sites. Each platform has its own style and approach, and that may work for or against your brand. All of these platforms have over 300 million active users per month. Some count their users in the billions.
A social media ad occupies space on these social media web pages and shows to a targeted audience. You format the ad to suit the social media channel using images, infographics, text, and video as appropriate. The social media ad is content for the social media platform and part of their offer to their users.
The explosion of content on social media makes it difficult for your posts, tweets, and articles to reach people without a boost from a paid promotion. That is what a social media ad does for your business – it increases your visibility to a targeted audience to attract more customers and sell more.
How is Social Media Used in Advertising?
How is Social Media Used in Advertising?
When it comes to promoting your business and attracting and retaining customers, advertising in social media provides two options:
• Organic advertising
• Paid advertising
Organic Advertising
Organic advertising means waiting for people to find your content and your business through its relevance to their lives. Your webpages, blogs, and other content explain your business and how you can meet potential customers’ needs by providing them with solutions to their problems and pain points. Organic advertising is a long-term strategy that builds a consistent flow of potential customers to your business. Organic advertising works to retain and create followers. The organic approach to providing quality content costs less and lasts longer. The downside is that it takes time for new web pages to rise through the search rankings and establish themselves as authoritative and relevant to searchers. In social media terms, it is hard to build a following from zero without help.
Paid Advertising
Paid social media advertising is a big business because it works to achieve your business goals in a short time frame. The benefits for a social media advertiser are:
• You connect with people who are interested in your business because your ads are shown to them through detailed targeting and not to
the uninterested people.
• Social media platforms collect a wealth of information about their users, and you get access to a clearly defined target audience for maximum
benefit from your advertising budget.
• A new business needs to build awareness, and social media ads reach your potential customers at a time when they are relaxed and
browsing online.
• You get to choose a social media platform and an ad format that suits your brand personality so that you can build an authentic connection
with potential customers.
• You make the best return on investment because advertising with social media costs less than other forms of media advertising.
A successful business with strategic goals uses a combination of organic and paid advertising to build a sustainable flow of new customers and a loyal audience.
A social media marketing agency provides a professional service of digital marketing and the services cover:
Expert knowledge of social media platforms – you need the right platform or mix of platforms for your brand and goals.
Strategic planning – covering who you are going to target and what content and ad formats meet your objectives.
Setting up profiles and accounts on the right channels and either managing these for you or training your staff.
Content creation and publication. Social media works best with a constant flow and interaction with the target audience.
Research ad analysis – this covers you, your potential customers, your competitors, and the effectiveness of your social media activity.
Campaigns and engagement – most strategies need a mix of organic and paid promotions to build a sustainable presence.
A social media marketing agency can offer you a portfolio of services with creating, establishing, and maintaining a social media presence across a wide number of platforms.
How Effective Is Social Media Advertising?
How Effective Is Social Media Advertising?
Over three quarters of most social media users claim to dislike the ads that appear on their social media feeds. But these ads are effective in reaching the target audience because of the wealth of data people voluntarily share with their chosen social media platform.
40% of social media users choose to follow brands – effectively opting in to receiving ads relating to those businesses. Plus, most social media users log in via their smartphones and cannot block the ads, in the same way as someone on a laptop. A social media ad reaches your target audience in a way and with a call to action that is unmatched by non-digital advertising.
Once someone clicks on your ad, they are 26% more likely to buy the product, which is an exceptional conversion rate for an ad. Plus, the place with the biggest footfall for customers is social media platforms. People discover products, brands, and companies on social media rather than in the shopping mall or driving past.
For most businesses, a social media presence is no longer optional, your customers are on social media, and if you don’t have your ads and brand representation, then they will see and discover your competitors. Businesses need to go where the customer is – that used to mean a prime location with plenty of people passing by the shop window. Changing times mean that social media is the location where your business needs to be visible, and it competes for visibility. Social media ads are effective at getting you noticed – the first step to attracting a customer. A mobile site can load slightly faster on a mobile phone than a responsive website because the mobile site is good to load straight away. The responsive site must pick the best format. If you have complex information on your site, then the responsive approach attempts to scale this for the mobile phone user – with limited success. A mobile website has preselected the information that is available to the mobile user, and the assumption is that the phone user is not interested in performing any complicated tasks. Third-party services generally don’t work as well with responsive sites as it is challenging to integrate them fully. You can use third-party services like hotel bookings with a dedicated mobile site relatively easily. Both responsive sites and mobile sites provide a mobile phone user with access to your business, the web design process that is right for your business depends on the features and applications you need as well as time and money constraints.
Social Media Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising
Social Media Marketing vs. Social Media Advertising
Businesses pay both for advertising (specific social media campaigns to achieve a business goal) and marketing on social media.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing depends on organic or natural search results to promote your business, services, and products. You create engaging, useful, and entertaining content blogs, articles, videos, infographics), and your reward comes with consistently high rankings in searches and a steady stream of visitors.
Social Media Advertising
Social media advertising needs creative, useful, and engaging content, but you pay for the opportunity for your material to reach a precisely defined target audience. All social media channels offer paid or promotional spaces on their pages. You pay for the potential to occupy some of that space, and your reward is a flow of interested potential customers. You know they have some interest in your business because you target your best prospects for conversion. Advertising on social media produces a time-limited flow of traffic, where social media marketing aims at creating a continuous flow of prospective customers and followers.
What is the Difference?
What is the difference between advertising social media and marketing? Are they different when they are both targeting the same audience? Is it all about the money invested? Social media marketing builds an image of your business on a social media channel. Before you create a profile on any social media platform for your business, you need to understand your brand and keep it consistent across all the platforms you use.
Social media marketing involves four key areas:
• Your concept – how do you look online, colors, logos, and products.
• Conversation – what exactly are you going to talk about and how often.
• Audience – who are you trying to reach, and why do they care about you?
• Channel – what channels match your brand and target audience?
Social marketing creates and reinforces your brand identity in the mind of your potential and current customers.
Social media advertising, with its focus on selling, is different from social media marketing with its emphasis on promotion and image. But social advertising needs to reinforce and not contradict or harm your brand image. Ultimately marketing and advertising must work together.
Social media advertising is a small subset of social media marketing – it is not a standalone process. It relies on social media marketing for its effectiveness, relevance, and purpose. Social media marketing can exist and be successful without social media advertising. In other words, social media advertising is one of the many tools available to social media marketers.
Social Media Advertising Benefits:
Why Social Media Advertising? What Can It Do For Your Business?
Social Media Advertising Benefits:
Why Social Media Advertising? What Can It Do For Your Business?
Brand Recognition
Before anyone is going to buy your products and services, they need to know who you are. Most people do their initial research about products, services, and businesses online. That includes asking people on community local pages for the equivalent of a word of mouth recommendation for local trades and small jobs. People only buy from businesses they recognize, and if you want to get your brand in people’s minds, you need to be where people go – that’s social media land.
Brand Loyalty
First, you attract their attention, and then you persuade them to stick with you, so they don’t even think about taking their business elsewhere. Your business thrives from retaining customers and building a loyal following. It grows through attracting new customers and keeping them. Social media ads are excellent at attracting new customers, and your interactions with them turn them into loyal repeat customers.
Sell More
Marketing gurus talk about excellent conversion rates with social media ads, but the bottom line is you sell more. Social media ads put your business in front of interested people, and if they like what they see, then they buy the product or service. The benefit of social media ads is that the social media platform knows who is more likely to respond favorably to your business – they stack the odds in your favor.
Spend Less Get More
Social media ads have put marketing opportunities in the reach of the smallest business. You get a target audience and pay far less than a TV or billboard campaign used to cost. Social media ads are a game-changer for companies – they reach people for a smaller marketing budget, and they are very effective.
Social Media Advertising Cost: How much is a Social Media Ad?
Social Media Advertising Cost: How much is a Social Media Ad?
Most social media platforms require a minimum daily spend on paid actions like:
Social media marketing involves four key areas:
• Impressions – your ad was visible to your target audience
• Clicks, likes, and views – a bit more interaction than the presence
• App installs or conversions – more valuable actions
• Watching a video – more time engaging.
While your campaign is running, the cost varies between the platform and the action. Digital advertising has different ways of bidding for advertising space:
• CPM – payment per impression, you pay every time your social media ad appears on a page.
• CPC – cost per click, you pay when someone clicks on your social media advert.
• CPV – cost per view; you pay every time someone watches your video.
• CPL – cost per like, when someone likes you, you pay a fee as these class as a conversion.
• CPA – cost per action, a specified action triggers a bill when a social media user does it.
Some payment methods depend on the social media platform:
• CPF – cost per follow, offered by Twitter.
• CPO – cost per open offered by LinkedIn.
A social media ad costs you a variable amount, but you set the maximum amount you pay for each action – your bid. Most businesses opt for CPC because it is straightforward to understand and see the results.
You set a monthly budget for the maximum amount you want to spend on social media ads on your chosen platform. You then opt for:
• Automatic bidding – the platform tries to give you the lowest cost available for your ad placement.
• Manual bidding – you decide how much you wish to spend on gaining a target audience placement.
Average Costs Per Social Media Platform
The exact cost varies depending on what you want to achieve, the platform you choose, and the way you choose to pay. As a guide to average prices:
|
Platform |
Minimum |
Average Monthly |
Average CPC |
Average CPM per 1000 |
|
CPM $1 |
Between $200 and $1,500 |
$0.97 |
$7.19 |
|
|
CPM $1 |
Between $200 and $1,500 |
$3.56 |
$7.91 |
|
|
$10 Daily |
Between $200 and $1,500 |
$3.21 |
$9.68 |
|
|
CPC $2 |
Between $200 and $1,500 |
$5.26 |
$6.59 |
|
|
None |
Between $200 and $1,500 |
$0.38 |
$6.46 |
|
|
CPM $2 |
Between $200 and $1,500 |
$1.50 |
$30.00 |
|
|
Monthly minimum |
Start at $3,000 |
$1-3 CPS
|
$2.95 |
|
|
$5 |
N/K |
$0.75 |
$200.00 |
* Reddit tends to do best for organic search marketing unless you are willing to spend megabucks. Reddit is relatively new to social ads, but sponsored posts are available. The above table shows average spending on social media platforms for advertisers; it does not include the additional amount businesses pay social media marketing companies to run their advertising campaigns.
What is Social Media Remarketing? How does it work?
What is Social Media Remarketing? How does it work?
When you walk into a room full of people, there are two types of people – those you have never met and those you’ve at least said hello to in passing. In other words, you have interacted in some way with some of the people in the room. It is easier to start a conversation with a small connection.
On social media, you can approach strangers or those who have visited your website, clicked on your call to actions, bought your products, followed your tweets, and liked your page. Remarketing is showing your social media ads to an audience that has a history of interaction with your social media presence.
All the social media platforms collect information on how people interact with you, and you can use this information to select an audience that already knows a bit about you. These people are more open to receiving your message and engaging with you. Remarketing typically gives a better return on investment because they are more likely to click, follow, or buy from you.
A mobile site can load slightly faster on a mobile phone than a responsive website because the mobile site is good to load straight away. The responsive site must pick the best format. If you have complex information on your site, then the responsive approach attempts to scale this for the mobile phone user – with limited success. A mobile website has preselected the information that is available to the mobile user, and the assumption is that the phone user is not interested in performing any complicated tasks. Third-party services generally don’t work as well with responsive sites as it is challenging to integrate them fully. You can use third-party services like hotel bookings with a dedicated mobile site relatively easily. Both responsive sites and mobile sites provide a mobile phone user with access to your business, the web design process that is right for your business depends on the features and applications you need as well as time and money constraints.
What Are Examples of Social Media Ads?
What Are Examples of Social Media Ads?
The social media platforms generally give their user free membership. As a result, social media ads are the revenue stream that the platform needs to pay staff and running costs. The purpose of a social media ad is to connect and influence a target audience.
Image Ads
Image ads are posters of the social media advertising world.
You use colors, shapes, images, and text to:
• Attract attention.
• Provide information,
• Encourage action.
An image ad provides you with the opportunity to:
• Build awareness
• Create conversions
Image ads appear on all social media platforms.
Video Ads
Video ads provide a more engaging experience because they combine pictures, movement, and sound. They achieve everything an image ad does with the added benefits of:
• Entertaining
• Storytelling.
• Shareability.
• Easy to remember.
Video ads are ideal in building a brand image through the medium of entertainment and stories.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads are ideal for providing a mini shop window into a collection of products that users can buy now. They can also be used to provide information, but they are very effective as sales brochures. All social media ads are useful for the same range of business goals.
What are Social Media Ads Used for?
What are Social Media Ads Used for?
Awareness and Recognition
Until people know who you are and what you sell, they won’t beat a path to your door. The first step in social media advertising is to establish your identity to your audience. You develop your social media face and personality through your content and products. Still, if you are a new business, social media ads campaigns get your image into people’s awareness by showing them pictures.
Relationship Building
The next step in your social media marketing is to take the initial recognition and build it into a relationship. You begin to pull people in to visit your website, follow your Tweets, and start to engage with your business. Your ad campaigns are now seeking to be engaging, entertaining, and informative.
Conversion
Taking someone into the next step of buying your product and services is the goal of all marketing because that is how your business generates revenue. In social media advertising, some specific adverts encourage eCommerce, but most aim to move the person further along their buying journey. A successful conversion from the audience to a customer does not cover sales but other activities like installing an app or contributing to a cause. You define a successful conversion point as part of your social ad campaign.
Retention
Some social media ads ai to maintain the relationship with your customer base to keep them engaged and continuing to buy your products instead of engaging with a competing business. Retargeting is a useful tool in approaching people who have bought products in the past by encouraging repeat business with offers, discounts, and reminders.
Second Chance
Social media ads can target people who almost bought from you and then changed their minds. Sometimes a small nudge to remind them that they thought about this product is enough to close the deal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Social Media Advertising Work?
Social media advertising works because you are targeting people who are already interested in or could benefit from your products and services. People engage with social media voluntarily, and they consume and enjoy the content.
Most social media ads present as enjoyable content, and not all of it is a direct sales pitch. Social media ads are part of most people's online experiences. Although people in surveys complain about ads, the evidence is that they buy products and services from social media ads. This news is unsurprising when you consider that most people prefer to shop online and are actively searching for products and are in the right frame of mind for a purchasing decision.
What Is Meant By Social Advertising Media?
Social advertising is the practice of putting paid content on social media platforms. The form of the advert depends on the social media platform, but they all revolve around image and video.
Social advertising media targets the type of individual, so everyone gets personalized ads that meet their potential needs. Except in some rare instances, the targeting is accurate and based on information provided by the individual.
The social advertising media conforms to the platform – Tweets for Twitter, Posts for Facebook, and videos for YouTube. The user can differentiate between paid and organic content on any page, so there is no deception or trickery involved in the placement of the sponsored material.
Social media advertising can be direct selling with shopping or product ads or general promotion and awareness building through attracting and retaining an audience with the paid content.
Additional Resources
Discover How We Can Help Your Business Grow
Services
©2020 VARGA, INC. ALL RIGHT RESERVED. Privacy Policy Terms and Conditions