Since social media is no longer just about conversations and content, keeping up with customer acquisitions, remarketing, and engaging existing customers can help boost you overall return on investment (ROI). Understanding why paid social media earns a better return on investment, when compared to organic social media, will help you make smart decisions on how to best invest in social media marketing.
As digital marketing experts, the team from FirstPage Marketing understands how invaluable paid social media marketing can be for reaching your target audience online. That is why they offer a range of social media marketing services, including helping you create the ideal social media marketing strategy for your unique business.
What is Paid Social Media?
Paid social media covers anything that can be influenced by advertising dollars spent on any given social media platform, including boosted posts, ads optimized for clicks, lead generation forms, and video ads. Since each social media platform is designed to facilitate different types of content to users, it is important to only select the best platforms for reaching your business goals—brand awareness, lead generation, website traffic, etc.
How Social Media Earns a Better ROI
Compared to organic social media, paid social media can be setup to help you find, target, and reach your target audience based on a range of specific demographics and behavioral factors; however, while the targeting capabilities of paid social media can offer a high return on investment, it is important to be aware of the mindset of the social users being targeted so that you can tailor the messaging to meet that mindset.
Paid social media earns a better return on investment, when compared to organic social media, because it:
1. Amplifies Your Reach
While organic social media posts from brands are slowly becoming deprioritized on many social media platforms, paid social media ads are guaranteed a place in the users’ feed. This means that advertising on social media gives your brand instant visibility and a direct window to help drive leads, website traffic, and sales.
In order to achieve the most reach with social ads, make sure to find out which platform your target audience spends the most time on. Doing so will allow you to maximize impressions by aligning the business’ social media marketing strategy with the behaviour of the target audience.
2. Is Tailored to Your Budget
Compared to more traditional forms of advertising, paid social media allows you to engage with niche markets for a fraction of the cost. You can start small and then scale out by investing more with the methods that generate the best results. After a few ad cycles, you also have the option to refine the target to drive greater results and ROI.
Social media platforms offer a variety of different ad objectives that determine when a business will get charged. Most of these ad objectives fall under one of the following categories: clicks, impressions, and conversions. Depending on the platform, objective, and ad type, advertisers will get charged differently. This allows businesses to align their budget with the intended goal. Some of the different options include:
- Cost per click (CPC)—Pay for an advertisement placement only when a user clicks on the ad.
- Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM)—Only be billed for every 1,000 impressions of an ad.
- Cost per view (CPV)—Charges you every time someone views your advertisement or interacts with it (depending on the platform).
- Cost per action (CPA)—Charges you when a user completes the action specified when optimizing the ad (downloading an app, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, etc.)
- Cost per like—Pay for every follower gained through the ad campaign or for every like given to a photo, page, or advertisement.
3. Enhances Targeting
Unlike other forms of advertising, paid social media also provides complete control over who sees your ads. Since each platform offers a range of targeting parameters, such as interests, personality types, and hobbies, businesses can create lookalike audiences that resemble their existing contacts in order to expand and engage their ideal customers.
4. Boosts Brand Awareness
Advertising on social media can be a great way to create exposure for any brand, as it allows a business to appear more regularly in the users’ feed. This, in turn, will increase the number of people who recognize the brand, enhancing the brand’s credibility, while also driving engagement and encouraging users to make purchases.
5. Maximizes Content Marketing
Using paid social media can be a great way to nurture the curiosity of users by providing them with quality content that will help convert them into qualified leads. In addition to coaxing users down the sales funnel, using ads for content marketing can also help increase website traffic, boost user engagement on social media, and improve the return on investment for the business’ content marketing.
6. Provides Access to Mobile Users Anytime
Since the majority of time users spend on social media is spent on a mobile device, utilizing paid social ads can make it incredibly easy to reach your target audience. Anytime a user wants to find, learn, or purchase something, an effective social media advertising campaign can provide them with the information they are looking for.
Paid social media advertising provides a cost-effective solution for generating new leads and website traffic. To learn more about why paid social media earns a better return on investment, get in touch with the digital marketing experts today.