Now you might be wondering whether or not this type of advertising really works and if it’s worth your time and monetary investment.
How effective is social media advertising?
Did you know there are over 2.38 billion monthly active users on Facebook?
Or that there are over 500 million daily Instagram users?
And did you know 74% of global marketers already invest in social media marketing, which includes social advertising?
Not to mention 70% of businesses say they generate leads on social media and 58% of marketers say social media has helped them boost their sales.
These are just some of the many stats related to social media advertising that prove its impact and importance among all types of businesses.
The cherry on top?
Social media advertising is more cost-effective than traditional advertising.
With social media ads, you can easily set a budget and add to or remove from that set amount within the social platform you’re using.
Now that you have a better understanding of the power of social media ads, let’s cover the steps involved in making an advertisement on social for your business.
How to Create a Social Media Ad
Here are the major steps involved in creating a social media ad that you’ll want to follow.
Use CRM and web analytics data to inform your ad campaigns and discover what ads are covering the most visitors into customers.
1. Think About Your Budget
One of the most daunting things about social media advertising is determining your budget.
That’s because there are so many unique and flexible options on every social platform for your ads and campaigns.
For example, if you’re looking to run a social campaign on Facebook with the Facebook Ad Campaign tool, start by setting a budget.
Then, Facebook will run your campaign for you and spend your budget as evenly as possible throughout your selected time period (or until your budget has been completely used).
You can then leave your Facebook ad campaign as is or add more money to your budget to continue.
To help you plan your budget, be sure to align your marketing objectives with your social media advertising strategy.
Consider the amount you’re comfortable pulling out of the larger marketing strategy to put towards your social ads.
Use this paid advertising budget template to map out your costs before you launch your ads.
2. Choose Which Type Of Social Media Advertisement You’ll Run.
The landscape of paid social advertising is constantly changing; new technologies, channels, formats, and trends emerge every day.
That means there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to which social channels you should advertise on.
Ultimately, testing different channels is the best way to determine what works best for your business and audience.
Here are some of the most common types of social media platforms you can advertise through and which demographic of people you’ll want to target through each:
About 69% of adults use Facebook — although 25-34-year-olds make up the greatest number of users on the platform, Facebook still has the widest age range of active users of any other platform. This includes teens and seniors — in fact, 62% of online seniors, ages 65+, are on Facebook.
Instagram is ideal if you’re targeting younger generations.
That’s because 75% of 18-24-year-olds use the platform and 57% of 25-29-year-olds use it. Meanwhile, only 8% of people over 65-years-old are on the platform.
Twitter is a good option if you’re looking to target young to middle-aged adults with your social media ads.
That’s because 22% of adults use Twitter. 38% of users on the platform are between 18-29-years-old while 26% of users are between the pages of 30-49-years-old.
It’s no secret LinkedIn is a professional network — meaning, you’ll likely want to stick with more formal, business, and career-related advertisements on the platform.
This also means the demographic on LinkedIn you’ll want to target includes current or soon-to-be members of the workforce.
There are over 660 million LinkedIn users and 37% of adults between the ages of 30-49 use the platform.
And in terms of students and college grads, 51% of college graduates are said to be on the platform.
- Snapchat
Snapchat is a platform you’ll want to advertise through if you’re looking to target a young crowd.
The platform has around 210 million daily active users — about 90% of Snapchat users are between 13-24-years-old.
3. Make Your Ad Relevant
Your ads should be relevant to your target audience and customers.
There are a few ways you can ensure this is the case.
Use your buyer personas to target the interests and needs of your audience and customers.
Conduct customer feedback surveys and focus groups to fulfill the needs of your target audience even when they aren’t actively searching for solutions
Search engine optimize (SEO) your social content so it’s more likely to organically appear when specific keywords and phrases are being searched.
4. Design a Beautiful, Eye-Catching Ad
On social media, it seems as though there’s a never-ending amount of new visual content.
So, how do you make your social media ads stand out?
Your ads need to be engaging, beautifully-designed, and eye-catching — they should make someone who’s scrolling through their feed stop in their tracks and want to take a closer look at your content.
You also want your ad to look on-brand so your audience members can easily associate the ad with your business , (This will help you continue to build brand recognition, too.)
Every word and character you include in your advertisements count.
This is especially true of social media ads which often have word-count and text limitations.
5. Measure Your Ad’s Success
With social media advertising comes a multitude of metrics you should monitor to determine the success of your work.
It’s vital you focus on the social media metrics that matter most to your campaigns and business when doing this.
