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Social media advertising uses social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok & LinkedIn to promote business & products while users are browsing their news feeds.
Highly targetable and very effective at building brand presence, social media presents multiple ways for a business to get a message out to new and existing customers alike.
While the approach changes depending on the platform, the fundamentals are similar. While it helps to have a good understanding of who your target audience is, these platforms can also help you find your target audience through the sheer amount of data they collect on all their users.
Once you’ve defined your audience, or asked the platform to do it for you, you can then add image or video-based ads, write your copy, and start showing those ads to your chosen audience.
Social media networks charge for impressions (i.e. every time your ad shows incurs a cost) but, unlike SEM, you don’t get charged for clicks.
Take the opportunity to showcase exactly who you are as a business. Establish your brand, tell people what matters to you, and show that you matter.
Get more people engaged in your brand. Newsletter subscriptions, page likes & post engagements all help remind people that you’re here to stay.
Encourage your audience to check out your online offering outside of social media. Increase product views, blog readership, and general site engagement.
Get your audience to connect with your brand in the most meaningful way. Whether that means leads, transactions, or something else altogether, measure your results & grow.
Paid social media involves spending money to place ads in front of a very specific audience. Organic social media involves creating engaging content and publishing to your business’ news feed.
Paid social is better for driving conversions, while organic social media can be effective in generating better brand awareness without the ad spend.
Yes and no. YouTube is primarily a search engine similar to Google. In fact, it’s the second-largest search engine in the world.
However, similar to social media, you can post videos & content, which is why it also holds the title of being a social media platform.
To access YouTube’s advertising features, you need to use the Google Ads interface, which is a Search Engine marketing tool, so whether you describe YouTube as a social network or search engine, you’re right.
Meta is the name of the parent company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp & Threads, a similar platform to Twitter (now called X). It was previously known as Facebook, Inc. until 2021.
Meta was chosen because it is more demonstrative of the company’s objective of creating a metaverse – an online community blending social media & virtual reality.
When someone refers to Meta Ads, they are referring mostly to Facebook & Instagram advertising.
X has its own marketing platform as well, which is a rehashed version of Twitter’s tried-and-tested advertising platform.
By way of full disclosure, Stark Digital does not run ads on X as the platform.
They are hard to compare because they have slightly different applications.
Consider the idea of a marketing funnel. At the top of that funnel, we have a huge audience of people who have never heard of you. At the bottom, we have die-hard followers of your business that promote your brand every step of the way.
In between those two stages, you have varying degrees of knowledge / interest in your brand and products.
SEM, particularly Shopping & Search, is generally focused on people who already know they want a product or service – their decision is just from whom they buy it.
Social media is better for convincing people they need something, then trying to sell it to them. It doesn’t convert as well as SEM for that result, but people are more likely to remember their interactions with your business on social media, helping build brand awareness.
This all depends on what your business does and what you want to sell.
If you’re selling a product, Facebook & Instagram are generally regarded as the best around. Even small businesses with no real brand awareness can make a success of Met Ads.
If you’re selling B2B products & services, there really is nowhere better to be than LinkedIn.
If you’re trying to raise brand awareness in young audiences with a limited attention span, choose TikTok or Instagram.
However, this isn’t always set in stone, and sometimes the right channel for you might surprise you.
Of course. Similar to most marketing platforms, social media platforms have been developed to be as simple as possible. They offer streamlined and automated campaign creation that lets you build and launch your ads in a matter of hours.
However, like all advertising platforms, these streamlined tools are the tip of the iceberg. Beyond the surface, there are a huge variety of ways that social media ads can be tailored, customised, constructed and targeted about which most people simply won’t know unless they have been specifically trained.
You can run them by yourself, but you may find your ads run out of steam quickly.
Yes, but it is generally best to support it with at least one other marketing channel such as organic social or SEM.
Social media increases brand awareness, and a lot of users will then use search engines such as Google to research the businesses they find on social networks. If your business can’t be found there, then social ads can only do so much for you.
However, this is a recommendation, not a requirement, and establishing brand awareness can help more people discover your business organically.
Like most forms of digital marketing, the answer varies depending on where your business is in its growth cycle, the size of your audience, and your objectives.
We suggest starting with a minimum of $100 per day (approx. $3,000 per month), but that depends on how well established your business is as well.
There are two answers to this:
The first is ‘as long as you like.’ Turn it on and off at your leisure.
The second is a little more complex, and utlises data to give you an idea of how long you should run one campaign.
According to an admittedly older study by Neilsen, it takes 45 days for a brand to do enough advertising for users to become unconsciously aware of your brand.
In that 45 day window, you will need to show your ad about 6-8 times per person to increase brand recognition, and 8-10 times for them to take action after seeing your ad.
For these reasons, we generally recommend refreshing your campaign & messaging around 45 – 60 days. Longer than this can cause your ads to become ‘noise.’
Of course, this depends on your audience and budget. If you’re targeting 10 million people with a budget of $10 per day, it will take you the best part of a year to reach that entire audience.
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