As you look at your overall marketing strategy, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that social media is here to stay. You likely already have a business page on Facebook (and other social media channels) and might be doing a great job of maintaining an organic content calendar. However, these efforts likely aren’t delivering the number of qualified leads and sales you need to meet your marketing goals. That’s why when it comes to social media, you not only need to maintain a great organic calendar but also invest in paid social media advertising.

Social media advertising can refer to paying to “boost” one of your organic posts so that it’s seen by more people, or creating a specific ad campaign that appears either as sidebar banners or within a feed and will be served to audiences meeting the targeting criteria you choose.

It’s estimated that by 2020, social media ad spend will reach $37.71 billion in the US alone. With such a competitive landscape, why should you consider advertising on social media? We’ve rounded up the six reasons paid social media should be part of your omnichannel marketing strategy.

1. Paid Social Media Has a Low Cost of Entry

One of the core benefits of paid social media is that there are options for every budget. Facebook and Instagram allow business pages to boost organic posts for just dollars a day to serve existing content to additional audiences outside of your page’s followers. As your marketing budget increases, you can plan to make additional investment in your top-performing outlets, or expand your budget into additional paid social channels where your audience can be found.

2. Stretch Your Content Efforts

Paid social is an easy way to enhance your content marketing efforts. Marketing personality Gary Vaynerchuck frequently discusses his GaryVee Content Model, which hinges on producing high quality “pillar” content, then segmenting and repurposing that content into smaller snippets and additional assets, called “micro-content,” for further distribution. Using this model, you can increase your content marketing longevity and make your content work harder for you. By planning paid social efforts behind micro-content, you can drive your social audience to your website and pillar content in order to fill your funnel with qualified leads.

3. Use Paid Social Media to Conduct Market Research

As you invest in paid social media, you can get a pretty good picture of the audience members who engage with your content and are most interested in your product. Using social media insights, you can gain a clear understanding of your target audience’s demographic information, such as age, gender and location. If you’re a B2B company and investing paid social dollars in a platform like LinkedIn, you can also see the industry verticals and job titles of the individuals who most frequently view, engage with and click on your content. Using these insights, you can further develop your buyer personas and enhance your omnichannel marketing efforts.

4. Enhance Your Targeting on Social Media

Paid social media not only allows you to see who is looking at your content organically, but also select who else should see it. Depending on your spend and platform of choice, you can select targets in a specific demographic group or geographic area to ensure that the users seeing your content align with your ideal buyer persona’s needs. Paid social also allows you to place greater emphasis on desktop or mobile.

5. Expand Your Reach

Like most other outlets, paid social media is favored in content algorithms over organic social content. While you should invest in both paid and organic efforts to make the most of your digital marketing efforts, only roughly 4% of your followers see your organic posts. With paid social, you can ensure that your content is seen by both.

6. Build Your Brand Voice

In addition to the hard metric improvements that paid social media offers, you can also gain qualitative insights that inform your overall brand identity. Based on the content that performs well on social, you’ll gain an understanding of the visual and written language that resonates most with your audience. By emphasizing and evolving these identifiers, you can truly set yourself apart from competitors and ensure that your brand speaks to your audience effectively.

Paid Social Media Advertising Tips

When you set out to start paid social media advertising, Keep the following in mind:

  • Make sure that your content is timely, concise, and relevant to your audience
  • Before you begin, make sure you have clear targets
  • Be sure you’re able to map both your organic and paid social media leads back to your overall marketing goals via accurate campaign tracking
  • Make sure that leads who have been qualified through social media are continuing to receive content regularly
  • Fit social media into your overall marketing automation strategy
AUTHOR
Joel Garland
Joel Garland