Social media marketing has become a very important component of the marketing strategy of most businesses. Large and small companies realize the value that social media influencers have in influencing users.
Social media content can be used to promote a brand in two different ways: through organic marketing and paid social ads. Organic marketing is when a company does not pay the social media platforms to promote the posts that it makes. It merely makes posts and relies on the shareability feature of social media sites to spread them.
Social media ads are different. Social ads are run by companies that have a larger portion of their budget allocated for marketing. They use strategies that, even though they cost them a bit, can bring about faster results.
The popularity of social advertising keeps increasing as newer social media platforms emerge in the market. By conducting social media advertising, businesses can penetrate the mobile phones of their target customers. A phone is something that a person checks every few minutes or hours. Having space in the customers’ mobile phones is a big deal for most brands and goes a long way in influencing sales.
Today we’ll be discussing the benefits of advertising on social media, but before that, let’s define what exactly social ads are.
What Are Social Ads?
Social advertising refers to creating and deploying clickable advertisements to reach and influence target customers. Social ads are not only the advertisements that appear on social platform news feeds. Social media ads reach target audiences through messaging apps, social media banners, social media page posts, and even outside the social media apps and websites.
Companies use social media advertising for building brand awareness, generating leads, and eventually capturing sales revenue. Successful entrepreneurs know that if social ads are used in the right way, they can enhance customer engagement and increase conversions. One reason for this is that social media sites provide advertisers highly actionable and specific user data. Very often, the statistics companies get by running social media ads are more comprehensive and thorough than any website statistics.
The statistics that businesses get by running social ads define audiences based on their past behavior and purchasing history. This data is highly valuable for matching your audience with your buyer persona.
Often the viewers of social ads are completely unfamiliar with the brand that’s being advertised. Even then, the message that’s sent out in these ads has a high chance of resonating with the viewers’ mindset. Therefore, social media ads can often get immediate responses. Since the social media environment is highly personalized and data-rich, users do not feel shy in reacting to social ads in a frank manner. This helps businesses collect honest feedback from their audiences.
But there are more specific benefits of advertising on social media. Let’s have a look at those one by one.
The Benefits of Using Social Ads
Here are the top 7 benefits of using social ads for promoting your brand.
1. Build Brand Awareness
Social media ads help companies in building brand awareness. Being reminded about a particular brand and its products in the social media news feeds goes a long way in creating a brand image in a user’s mind. Users usually trust the messages they get in social media because they see social sites as friendly platforms where friends share entertaining stuff with each other.
When social media ads are combined with influencer marketing, the results are even more magnified. Influencer marketing refers to using popular figures on social media to influence the buying decision of their followers.
2. Improve Conversion Rates
Social ads increase the conversion rates of websites and landing pages. People react and click on social media ads and end up on the brand’s website. As they browse through the website and if they like what they see, they might take a desired action that causes a conversion for you. This conversion can be as small as subscribing to your newsletter, or even as big as making a purchase.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Higher conversion rates, whether directly or indirectly, increase a company’s sales volumes. This, in turn, brings in more revenue to reinvest in more social advertising.
3. Get Ahead of Competitors
Social advertising gives businesses a chance to fight in the highly competitive digital environment. The better your targeting is for your social ads, the more edge you get over your competitors. There is no better way to reach your target audiences than by appearing again and again in their social media news feeds.
If you master the skill of targeting your social ads based on the users’ past behaviors, interests, and personal characteristics, you can beat your competitors by having a powerful influence on the users’ minds.
4. Increase Brand Loyalty
The more the users can relate to the marketing messages you send out via social ads, the faster they will increase their loyalty towards your brand. Being able to do this effectively is called empathy marketing, whereby a business is able to inspire the feelings of its audiences by poking at the soft corners in their hearts.
Increased brand loyalty helps in retaining old and existing customers. When your customer base is intact, you feel very secure about your streams of income. This helps you maintain focus on the other areas of your business as well.
5. Enhance the ROI
When social ads help you retain your existing customers, your return on investment is enhanced by default. This is because, for most businesses, it is more cost-effective to continue to serve the existing customers than to persuade and get new customers.
A higher ROI is good for your business by all means. It allows you to have more budget available for investing in more creative marketing strategies. It also gives you access to the means of expanding your business operations and penetrating new markets. A good ROI makes funds available for product line extensions, which add to the variety of products that you can offer to your loyal customer base.
![Screenshot of Strikingly user's website selling stress health products](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/dEnNIO6WaSdOERV0LBDFVPW8vWGW8o7T8OnVYiPDhMaQAdJeqI3vODffk5wXSLrYDk-cxCTJWi-g4kXblg4xm4lmbnL86X7x244JWSqtGsqODQc9IVziOhypDgngDMx6xfGl7IpA "Screenshot of Strikingly user's website selling stress health products" =602x195)
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
6. Get Detailed Market Insights
As mentioned above, social advertising gives you access to very detailed market insights. This data is precious for improving your targeting skills and keeping yourself updated with any changes in the market trends. Different types of social media advertising give you access to different types of data. This data is usually more thorough than website analytics.
If you build your website on Strikingly, you can get access to your website analytics via the Strikingly editor. You can also choose to add your site to Google Analytics by entering your Google Analytics tracking code into your site’s services settings.
Image taken from Strikingly
7. Improve Search Engine Rankings
Social ads help you improve the search engine rankings of your website. Social advertising encourages users to react and interact with your posts, which in turn builds brand engagement. The effect of this increased engagement falls on your website as well, and hence improves your site’s position in the eyes of Google bots. This is how social media advertising helps you in search engine optimization as well.
The rest of your SEO can be improved by taking on-site SEO actions, such as writing a good description of your site and keying meta tags into your web pages.
Image taken from Strikingly
Tips to Create Social Ads That Convert
The ultimate goal for a business for running any kind of ads is to convert the audience into customers. Here are a few tips to create social media ads that convert.
- Try to make visuals and copy work together. Creating social ads with the right mix of text and images brings the best results.
- Run different social ads for different customer segments. For example, the ads you display to your potential customers should be designed differently from those that you show to your repeat customers.
- Do mention your value proposition in the images of your social ads.
- Create a highly converting landing page that’s connected to your social media ads. When users click on your social ads, they will land on a page. But if that page is not appealing enough, the users will be disappointed. This will have a negative impact on your future site visitors. To avoid high bounce rates, make sure your landing page is just as attractive as the social ads that drive traffic to the page.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Now that you know how to create good social ads, why not build an awesome website as your landing page, and start promoting your business over the internet? If you are looking for a quick and easy platform to create a website on your own, try out Strikingly.
At Strikingly, we believe in providing full support to our users to help them build and maintain their website with us. Our support team is available 24 hours a day to resolve any issues you may have. We offer a lot of website templates that serve as ready-made web designs for you to choose from. Our features enable you to create your web pages right away and launch a complete website in just a few hours.
Once your website is ready, you can integrate your social media pages with your site. This will give you an added advantage to link all your marketing platforms together.
