Who could argue the benefits of organic social media aren’t great? It’s free to post; as a brand, you can connect with your audience daily, get valuable feedback, and gain lifetime followers. What more can a brand ask for?
“Once the person is in your community, you can have his attention literally for the rest of his life, as long as you engage appropriately.”
Dave Kerpen
However, organic social media for corporations is not all sunshine and rainbows; there are hurdles brands need to overcome to gain a loyal audience. First, social media news feeds are saturated, and people continuously update their feeds. So unless you post when your follower is scrolling, it’s very easy to be missed. Even more challenging is gaining a follower in the first place. Only the people the brand has already been convinced to follow will see any organic post. Of course, a person can see the post if their friends share or re-tweet but relying on new followers in this way is very slow.
“Organic social media traffic can take days to build due to the algorithms at work behind the scenes of the most popular social media sites.”
Basha Coleman
Enter Paid Social Media Advertising: A Marketers Delight
Instead of reaching a new audience with organic social media, brands have the opportunity to buy ads that are guaranteed to land in a specific target audience’s news feeds. Paid social media advertising is the fastest way to reach new followers, plus it’s inexpensive, and it’s easy to track ROI (Return On Investment). In marketing, when corporate leaders run their entire business models on making money, marketers are delighted to show their managers that the advertising campaign efforts are paying off.
Breaking Down the Benefits of Paid Social Advertising
As someone who has been in the marketing field for over 15 years, I genuinely appreciate the benefits of paid social advertising, and here’s why:
- Targeting: Because people share so much about themselves, social media networks have a plethora of data on people. With this data, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., can help brands reach very specific audiences. For example, you can reach 25-30-year-old males living in Hartford, CT, interested in fishing and playing the drums. The list of interests can keep going.
- Speed: With paid social advertising, social networks will guarantee a certain number of impressions (people who view the ad) to make sure your target audience sees your ad. Because the ads are seen and not overlooked as an organic post might, it allows the audience to engage and get the brand results faster.
- ROI: Each social media network tracks the performance of an ad campaign with a variety of metrics, the most common being impressions, cost per click, campaign-specific KPI’s (Key performance indicators), and conversions (desired actions a user took). From these metrics, the marketing team can quantify if the advertising is producing the desired results and share the results. And as an additional bonus, most social media networks allow the brand to adjust the campaign as needed to make sure it’s performing on track.
- Budget: Paid social advertising is as cheap or inexpensive as you want it to be. According to Facebook, “If you want to spend $5 a week, you can do that. If you want to spend $50,000 a week, you can do that too.” Social media networks work with your budget, and daily spending limits can be set, so the budget is not used up in one day.
Although I’ve stated a few reasons why paid social media is beneficial to a brand, there are a few things to watch. The first is your budget. Be sure not to let Facebook automatically run the budget; the max budget can be reached much faster than the intended campaign flight window. Also, paid social advertising is advertising, so people can find it bothersome. In this case, make sure the ads are engaging and informative. Avoid strong sales pitches and use a friendly, conversational tone when developing the creative.
How Paid Social Ads Helped STIHL
A few years ago, the global outdoor power equipment company, STIHL, introduced a new backpack blower called the BR 800. It is an incredibly powerful blower, yet no one knew about it and sales were low. It’s also an expensive machine that caters to the professional landscaper audience, so it would not be included in the brand’s traditional advertising campaigns. Instead, the marketing team decided to create a separate Facebook campaign.
Two 8-second video clips were produced, one to highlight the BR 800 features, and the second showed a user review. The campaign’s goal was to raise awareness and drive traffic to the BR 800 landing page. Both ads used the call to action: Shop Today. The core audience targeted were professional landscapers, arborists, and construction professionals interested in outdoor power equipment and lawn care companies. After running the two video ads, the results were staggering- all KPIs exceeded expectations.
The result proved that the professional landscaper market was hungry for professional equipment information. In addition, the STIHL analytics team found 83% of the BR 800 landing page traffic was from first-time site visitors. The team also learned that the video showcasing the product benefit performed better than the video with a product review.
A Second Paid Social Advertising Success Story
Photography-focused Instagram was the perfect fit for the fashion brand, Milly, to show off it’s latest collection. In 2018, the contemporary clothing company wanted to increase brand awareness for their 2019 Spring/Summer line and drive traffic to their 2018 fall/winter collection product page. To help reach these goals, Milly used two different ad units. The first was a carousel ad featuring the colorful new spring/summer collection and used the call to action: Learn More. It was shown in users’ news feeds. The second ad unit was a video that showcased the current fall collection and asked viewers to ‘Shop Now.’ The video ad unit ran in Instagram Stories.
Compared to previous Milly Instagram campaigns, this new campaign successfully gained more interested customers. At the end of the three-week campaign, which targeted women ages 25-65, Milly reported a 44x increase in online purchases and an 8.6x increase in online product news for the ads shown in the Instagram news feed. In addition, ads shown in Instagram stories saw a 3x increase in online purchases and a 3.2x increase in landing page views.
Wrapping Up
Social media users are an attentive audience; they’re ready to be entertained or learn something new. If a post is engaging, the viewer will most likely respond. The response may not always be a ‘heart’ or a retweet, but at least an impression was made. Using paid social media advertising helps brands reach more people faster in our overly saturated advertising world. It also allows brands to build lifetime loyal customers.
