Paid social has a place in every brand’s marketing strategy but, what exactly is it? And more importantly, how can it help you achieve your business goals?
Paid social media marketing is the practice of paying a social media platform (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn) to promote a specific piece of your content/collateral to a targeted audience.
Most commonly these ads are billed based on clicks (CPC) but, depending on your marketing objectives, you can also elect to pay by impressions (CPM), or video views (CPV). The average cost per click can range from $0.38 (Twitter) all the way up to $5.26 (LinkedIn), which makes paid social a relatively inexpensive marketing strategy.
Paid and organic social media marketing both utilize the same platforms, but their use cases are different. Organic social media marketing is great for building and nurturing relationships with current customers, while paid social is better suited for generating brand awareness and gaining new customers. The top of the funnel is where paid social shines the brightest but, make no mistake, paid social has an important role throughout the entire funnel.
The primary advantage paid social has over organic is the ability to target specific audiences. Creating marketing collateral for every stage of the buyer’s journey is important for most marketing strategies but, paid social has the added benefit of ensuring that the content you create is shown to buyers during the correct stage of their journey.
Meta (Facebook and Instagram) is the biggest player in the paid social game which makes understanding their ad targeting options essential for any digital marketer. Those options are “Core”, “Custom”, and “Lookalike” audiences. I’ll define each option in depth as I explain their roles in the marketing funnel.
Awareness
Stage Goals: In the awareness stage, customers are aware that they have a need but, they don’t know how they’re going to address it. In this stage, the goal is to reach potential customers that haven’t heard of you and get them acquainted with your brand/products.
Content: Paid social content for the awareness phase shouldn’t be overtly promotional, instead focus on sharing fun, engaging, informational, industry-relevant content.
Targeting: Core and Lookalike audiences are used for the awareness phase. Core audiences allow you to target your ads to potential customers fall under a specified set of demographics. Use your Buyer Personas to determine which demographics should be targeted.
Additionally, the demographics that you wish to target should be used to inform the social media platforms where you place ads. For example, if you’re selling life-alert bracelets, Facebook will probably be a better choice than TikTok.
Lookalike audiences are also a powerful tool for the awareness stage, ads that use lookalike audiences are targeted at users that “look-alike” current customers. Lookalike audience targeting works by showing your ads to users that are similar to the selected “source audience” (such as fans of your Facebook page).
Consideration
Stage Goals: In the consideration stage, your potential customers are aware of your brand and/or actively seeking solutions to their problems. The goal in this stage is to explain the benefits of your products and how they can solve your customer’s problems.
Content: In this stage, you can become more promotional. Content may highlight the best features of your products or offer testimonials from satisfied customers.
Targeting: Core and lookalike audiences are an excellent option for this stage as well. You can also use the viewers who engaged with your awareness phase content as the source audience for Lookalike targeting. Another great strategy in the consideration stage is using Custom audiences to retarget users engaged with your awareness phase content.
Decision/Conversion
Stage Goals: In the decision phase, buyers are aware of their problem and have evaluated the potential solutions. They’ve decided on a solution category and are choosing between the different brands/products within that category. The goal in this stage is to give them the final push towards conversion (often a purchase).
Content: Content for the decision/conversion stage is the most promotional, it’s the kind of content that most people think of when they hear “advertising”. Your content for this phase should motivate buyers to convert with calls to action, discount offers, and the like.
Targeting: The decision/conversion phase is the perfect time to retarget users that engaged with your consideration phase content. You can retarget by creating custom audiences from engagement with previous ads, website traffic, and other conversions. It may also be beneficial to target lookalike audiences that highly resemble your most valuable customers.
The Other Type of Paid Social: Influencer Marketing
As customers have become more adept at ignoring advertisements, influencer marketing has skyrocketed in popularity, and for good reason. At the end of 2018, 89% of marketers surveyed reported that the ROI on influencer marketing was comparable, if not better than other methods.
The strategy of influencer marketing involves paying prominent social media figures (in cash or product) to endorse your brand and products.
Influencer marketing gives brands the unique opportunity to purchase positive word-of-mouth. Even though influencers are legally required to disclose when they are being paid to promote a product, the trust they’ve built with their followers can make the endorsement feel authentic and credible.
KPIs (Keep Paying Influencers)
The effectiveness of an influencer marketing campaign can be more difficult to measure than other digital marketing campaigns but, it’s still completely possible. Monitoring the use of brand-specific hashtags or keywords is one method. Success can also be measured through the engagement a sponsored post receives. Last, but certainly not least, influencer-specific tracking links and promo codes can be an excellent way to measure (some) of the conversions generated by an influencer.
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