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Do social media ads work?

Nov 07, 2022

Social media advertising is an effective and cost-efficient way to build awareness, generate leads, and increase sales. It is an effective tool to help influence consumer decision making along the path to purchase.

Social media ads can be found across a variety of different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube. All of these social media channels provide excellent ways for brands to reach their target audience.

Social media ads are particularly successful because they can be tailored to the user’s interests, needs, and even location. Not only do they align with the audience’s personal interests, but they can also be interactive, encouraging people to engage with your brand’s content.

At Icon Visual Marketing our clients often ask us ‘'why is social media advertising effective’, and we tell them complement other marketing activities and form a key part of many of our campaigns.

What are social media ads?

In simple terms, social media advertising is a form of internet advertising that allows you to reach potential customers on social media. This can include display ads on your favourite social media site, like Facebook or Twitter, or consist of a sponsored post from an influencer with a Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter account.

Social media ads are particularly impactful because they allow you to deliver your advertising message to your potential buyers throughout their decision making journey.

Social media advertising is different from traditional advertising due to its sophisticated targeting capabilities and enables brands to connect with the ideal buyers based on their geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioural characteristics/traits.

Why is social media advertising so important for the marketing funnel?

A marketing funnel is used to represent the steps your customers take from brand awareness to purchase, and social media advertising can play an important role across many different stages.

The upper funnel marketing activities are focused on making sure you have brand awareness among prospective buyers. The middle funnel is ensuring your brand is part of the consideration set when a customer is actively researching their options. And the lower funnel is doing everything you can to convert known active buyers to purchase your product.

Social media advertising can be used in each of these stages to help guide your audience along the customer journey.

Reasons why you should advertise on social media

There are many reasons why you should advertise on social media including:

Reach new customers
Low cost of entry
Gain audience insights
Wide range of formats

1. Reach new customers

Social media advertising allows you to reach out to and connect with new people who may benefit from your products or services.

Social media ads target users based on their interests, behaviours, and other demographic data, and can reach people who may not know about your brand or that your products or services even exist. By seeing your prospecting ad, they may realise that they could benefit from your product or service.

2. Low cost of entry

Compared to traditional advertising, the cost of social media advertising is significantly lower, so it is ideal if you only have a small budget.

3. Gain audience insights

Using the built-in tools of social platforms, you can understand audience breakdowns and how they relate to performance. On Facebook, for example, you can view a particular audience’s age and gender breakdown, relationship status, education level, job titles, location, device activity, and more.

By using reporting, audience insights, and ad placement-specific features, you can gain valuable information to target your prospective customers. You can also use these learnings to apply them to other advertising platforms.

4. Wide range of formats

Each social platform has its own ad specs, placements, and formats, but there are common denominators across platforms. You can also use a range of images, video footage within horizontal and vertical formats and really mix it up. An option that has become popular is the ‘reels’ or ‘stories’ format. It can be found in organic posts but also for social media advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.Compared to traditional advertising, the cost of social media advertising is significantly lower, so it is ideal if you only have a small budget.

How effective are social media ads?

You can measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and your return on investment by tracking your results. On Facebook, this information is built directly into its Ads Manager platform, making it possible to view your budget's performance and analyse return on ad spend, cost per website purchase, cost per lead and much more.

You can directly track how your ad spend is performing, making it possible to cut under-performing campaigns and ramp up successful campaigns to bring even more results.

What social platforms can you advertise on?

There are many social media platforms to choose from, and each comes with an audience that brings different advertising potential. When deciding which social networks to use, it depends on who you’re trying to reach and which social platform that audience favours.

Popular choices include Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, but there is also Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest.

Facebook

Facebook has almost two billion daily active users, making it one of the most popular social media platforms today. It has built-in tools that are great for optimising and targeting, enabling marketers to create a true buyer’s journey within the platform.

It’s an ideal platform if you have a good understanding of your niche audience and you’ve determined that they are big Facebook users.

Instagram

Instagram has around 500 million daily active users and is particularly popular amongst 18 to 34-year-olds. It’s a very visual platform so needs to include high-quality photography, both still and video to stand out from the crowd.

YouTube

YouTube boasts an audience of over two billion monthly users, is especially popular with younger audiences and reaches more adults aged 18 to 24 than any television network. YouTube is the obvious platform for long-form video content, but it’s also focusing on competing with TikTok and Instagram in short-form video.

For YouTube advertising to be successful you need to understand who your niche audience is and whether they are on YouTube.

Need help creating your social media advertising campaign?

To help you incorporate social media advertising in your next campaign, you need the help of a professional digital marketing agency like Icon Visual Marketing.

At Icon Visual Marketing, we have a team of digital design and strategy experts who can develop your digital strategy, create your display ad assets, and execute, optimise and report on your campaign performance.