Let’s face it - the world is run by social media these days. That’s why it’s important to have a social media marketing strategy that is built for success. While posting content that attracts and engages your audience is always a fantastic way to gain quality traffic and sales, it’s also a great idea to start investing on social media ads on the platforms on which you’re most active.
All major social media platforms offer opportunities for advertising, but what exactly are the best options for your business? Well, that depends on a few different factors, including your audience. As we covered in our blog post about choosing a social media platform for your business, certain social networks appeal to different demographics, so it’s imperative that you educate yourself and become aware of who your audience is and how to reach them on each platform.
Once you’ve determined who your target audience is and have chosen the social media networks you want your business to be on, then you can really narrow down the social media marketing strategy when it comes to advertising.
Facebook Ads
If you haven’t read our post about using Facebook Ads for Your Business, then you totally should. But to save you some time, we’ll give you a quick rundown about marketing on social media via Facebook advertising. Facebook Ads Manager makes it easy to set up, run, and view ads that you’ve posted for your business. These ads are used to create awareness for your brand, send traffic to your website, increase engagement, and create online conversions.
There are several types of Facebook Ads to choose from, including photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, and collection ads. Photo ads are static images that link out to your website when clicked by a user. Video ads are, well, videos, that are used to attract customers. Carousel ads can use up to 10 images or videos that link out to their own individual URLs. And, last but not least, collection ads display items from your e-commerce store and are customized for each individual.
Instagram Ads
Since Facebook owns Instagram, it makes sense that their ads offerings are similar. Just like with Facebook, Instagram’s ads are designed to create awareness, consideration, and conversion.
If your social media marketing strategy places focus on millennials and Gen Xers, then Instagram is the place for you. Instagram Business profiles have the choice from a variety of ad types including: photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, explore ads, and ads in stories. Photo, video, carousel, and collection ads on Instagram are all very similar in concept to those on Facebook, but explore ads and ads in stories are a little different.
Instagram ads in Explore show up in users’ “explore” feed. Explore feeds show photos and videos from creators who use hashtags on their posts relevant to the accounts you follow. So, when you visit the Explore feed, you may see ads that are relevant to your interests based on other accounts you may follow.
Instagram Stories have become increasingly popular over the last few years, and for good reason - Stories posts are easy to access, fun, and interactive. Make the most out of your social media marketing by running Stories Ads to try to reach up to 500+ million accounts each day!
Twitter Ads
If your business is on Twitter, then you should take advantage of Twitter Ads. Twitter’s advertising is designed to help you increase engagement, gain followers, promote brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website.
Unlike Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has two main options for advertising. One is Twitter Ad Campaigns, where you select existing Tweets or create new Tweets to promote as ads. The other choice is Twitter Promote, where Twitter’s algorithm picks Tweets to promote to your target audience. In addition, Twitter Promote also places your account in front of the eyes of potential new followers. All you have to do is choose up to five target locations or interests that you want your ads to be based on.
LinkedIn Ads
If your social media marketing strategy includes appealing to other businesses and industry professionals, then you may want to consider placing ads on LinkedIn. For example, if you have a product or service that you think professionals may need (ie. Website development), then thinking of a way to market your brand on LinkedIn sounds like a great idea.
LinkedIn Ads are designed to drive traffic to your site, collect leads, increase engagement, and provide a place for you to create more brand awareness for your company.
There are several types of LinkedIn Ads, including: carousel ads, conversation ads, dynamic ads, job ads, lead generation forms, message ads, single image ads, single job ads, text ads, and video ads. Seems like a lot, right? That’s because it is! The amount of options here are seemingly endless. Learn all about these different types of ads and how you can benefit from them.
YouTube Ads
If you’ve ever watched a video on YouTube, chances are you’ve definitely seen an ad or two. And that’s just it - the ads on YouTube get seen by users! So, why not incorporate them in your social media marketing strategy?
YouTube Ads are a wonderful tool for building brand awareness, driving quality traffic to your website, collecting leads, and more. The variety of YouTube ads includes: display ads, overlay ads, skippable video ads, non-skippable video ads, bumper ads, and sponsored cards.
While skippable video ads and non-skippable video ads don’t really need to be explained, let us break down the differences among the others. Display ads usually appear to the right of the video you're watching and above the list of video suggestions. Overlay ads are the ads that you see pop up on the bottom of videos. Bumper ads are video ads that can’t be skipped and require the user to watch up to 6 seconds of the ad before a video can be watched. Sponsored cards are a great tool to promote content that’s relevant to your video, like products your company sells that may appear in the content.
Woah. That was a lot to type, and we’re sure it’s a lot of information to take in at once. But you know what? You really don’t have to worry about these things if you don’t want to. You see, the digital marketing experts here at Greyphin are happy to help you with social media marketing and social media ads! All you have to do is contact us and we’ll be happy to get things started for you. Doesn’t that sound easy?
