What if you had the option to put your product in front of your perfect customer at the exact moment that they wanted to make a purchase? Sounds pretty good, right?
In a nutshell, paid social media, or paid social, ensures that your social media advertising campaigns get seen by the right people. But how, exactly?
Well… you’re essentially paying for your target audience’s undivided attention through an ad, but through the recording of demographic information and behavioural metrics, you’re also gathering hugely important customer data at the same time.
This builds a substantial picture of who your most profitable audiences are, for you to hone in on the exact people that are most interested in your products or services through your multi-channel marketing activity.
It’s important for businesses to recognise that free traffic can only get you so far. This is why paid social not only accelerates your online presence, but also gives you access to multiple channels that can give you insight into important insights… like who is visiting your website, who’s left items at checkout and what kind of people are making purchases.
The power of target audience research
The first step in improving your paid social media advertising strategy is to improve your audience data research! You have to think about what sector you advertise in and who your target audience is. It’s Important to know the answer to these questions before you start advertising so you’re not throwing your money away on people who are not interested in what you’re selling.
To understand your target audience and their online behaviours, you have to have a few tricks up your sleeve! We first and foremost recommend that you connect the Meta Pixel to your website as well as Google Analytics so you can start gathering data about who is visiting your site as soon as possible.
For more on specific Facebook ads targeting, check out this blog post.
Keep an eye on the competition
By looking at your competitors and analysing who they’re targeting in their ads, you can see if you want to target the same market or if you should differentiate your brand from that audience. This is crucial in improving your target audience in the right way instead of gaining data that is full of low intent users, and therefore, low profitability from your online advertising efforts.
Laser-focused targeting
Before running any type of paid social marketing it’s crucial to look at the existing reach you’re generating through SEO or organic means. This way you can expand your reach in your existing demographics while branching out to attract new customers.
Paid social gives you the targeted reach that organic cannot. With social media showing no signs of slowing down, as of July 2021, there have been 4.48 billion social media users. This means you can tap into a huge new customer base and get your products or services shown to a lot more people.
Identifying your target audience should be the first step of any marketing strategy, however, many marketers see success but never delve into the customer avatars who are generating the success for them.
Once you’ve gathered your data and you have a clear idea of who your target audience is, create 3-5 detailed customer avatars that hone into who each individual is, their interests, hobbies, age, marital status and more!
Don’t be afraid to get detailed; the more you drill into who your ideal customer is, the better your ad targeting will be!
Learning from your data
Not only is paid social important for generating results such as direct conversions, sales and lead generation, but it’s also important to learn from your data so you can get even better results with every campaign, resulting in a huge return on investment.
After completing your first campaign on your chosen social media platform, it’s crucial to review your data. This is where you can learn if your initial thoughts on your customer avatars were correct or not, and if not, this is the time to tweak them until you get the perfect customer avatar built out.
Many of the popular social media platforms have paid features that allow you to delve into the data which your campaigns are generating. For example, Meta, previously Facebook, has Ads Reporting, which allows you to build custom reports that show you the facts and figures that are most relevant to your business growth.
You can use this information to cross-reference your data from Google Analytics to build a fuller picture of your audience too for even better paid social ad targeting.
Paid social content
When utilising paid social media marketing, you’re able to advertise to custom audiences that have specific interests or locations. However, you cannot just advertise any piece of content to them just because you have identified them as your ideal customer, it has to be the right content for the right person!
For example, if you’re advertising a clothing brand to a younger audience, then the content they’re being shown needs to be relatable and attractive enough to them. That includes creating the perfect ad copy that sells your products and services.
This is where you will be able to get more accurate information on your audience data as you’re giving it the best possible chance to convert.
The best part of paid social is the effect it has on your business overall, which is why you can use aspects of your business that are working, such as the type of content that is chosen for your social media ads strategy. For instance, if you have an Instagram reel that is performing well organically, you can then transfer this over into your paid social advertising to give it an additional boost and raise your brand awareness.
Always remember to appreciate your current customers while you continue to expand your target audience, you don’t want to lose the customers you already have while gaining new ones. Use organic social to connect to your existing customer base, reply to messages and comments and review any feedback you get in a timely fashion.
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For more marketing tips & tricks make sure you’re following our socials @circulatedigital for our latest updates. Or, to learn more about paid social across the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, TikTok and Spotify – and how you can make it work for your business, contact a friendly member of our team today.
