A guide to social media advertising
Whether you have a £50 or £500 social media advertising budget, you’ll be pleased to know that promoting your business via social media can be a very cost effective way to get your business in front of the people that matter!
In this article, we explain some of the benefits of advertising, how much time and money you should be spending on social media and the types of adverts you can give a go.
What are the benefits of social media advertising?
How long do you have? The benefits of social media advertising are endless, but here are a few:
- Reaching a new audience – Alongside your organic social media posts which will generally only reach the people who already follow you, social media advertising allows you to reach a new audience, getting you in front of your target audience, even when they’ve never interacted with your brand before.
- Exposure of your brand – All those new audiences will then be exposed to your brand, allowing you to convert them into customers.
- Cost effective – Social media advertising is actually a very affordable method, especially when compared to traditional methods such as paper-based ads.
- Results focussed – With social media ads you can see exactly how each ad performed, insights such as cost per results, reach and conversions will be provided.
Types of social media ads you can create
Before setting up your first social media advertising campaign, you need to understand that there are many different ad types available to choose from. Each ad type will have a different purpose and end goal for your business.
Below, we have covered some of the common Facebook ad types that we use for our clients:
- Page likes campaigns – This one is pretty self explanatory, it’s an ad that encourages people to like your brand’s page. If you are starting from scratch, this is a good one to start with to build up your following.
- Lead generation campaigns – This style of ad puts a short, quick form in front of your audience to fill out their details in order to get something in return. This could be anything from a callback, to brochure download or a voucher for your shop.
- Boosted post – This is a basic ad that you do straight from your main Facebook page. It’s less sophisticated in terms of the targeting but will allow a specific post to get more engagement.
- Messenger campaigns – This ad type allows people to message your business directly from the advert allowing a conversation to start. For this you will want to be very active on social media so you can respond to messages quickly.
- Website traffic campaigns – If you’re looking to promote a specific page or product on your website, this ad style is perfect for you.
On Instagram, there are also other goals you can choose for your ads, these cover things like page views, website traffic and follows. These are set up in a similar way to Facebook where you choose your demographic including age, location, gender and interests.
There are more sophisticated ad types that can be explored which look into remarketing and further audience targeting. If you are interested in this for your business, get in touch with our social media expert on 01202 888200.
What social media advertising budget should I use?
How long is a piece of string? Unfortunately, it’s not a question we can answer without understanding more about your business and some information on your current marketing strategy. If social media advertising is completely new to you then you can always start small and see what results you get and grow it from there.
It’s good to spread your budget over various types of ads so you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. To give you an example, for one of our smaller clients, we run three types of ads each month on Facebook…
- A lead generation ad to get information from customers to add to a database for further marketing activities
- A page likes campaign to build up the Facebook page’s following
- A website traffic campaign to hit the referrals KPI that we have in place.
You could start with £50 to see how far that gets you, if you intend to advertise to a fairly small location radius. Facebook (in particular) gives you a lot of insights around each of your campaigns, this will include your spend, cost per result, reach, impressions and also the demographic that reacted to your ad the best. You can then use that information to build your next set of campaigns.
When is the right time to hire a social media advertising company?
Social media marketing is time consuming. There’s no doubt about that, and you need to be very ‘on it’ (those pesky algorithms will catch you out otherwise). So, if you’re trying to focus on other elements of your business then hiring someone to do it for you is the right way to go.
At CW Marketing, we have a Social Media Manager in house that can take that stress away from you. With your input we can take full control of social media platforms including your general posting, account optimisation, community engagement and your advertising.
Give us a call on 01202 888200 or email our Social Media Manager, Georgie at georgie@cwmarketing.co.uk. For more top tips and marketing resources, like our Facebook or LinkedIn pages.