How To Establish a Comprehensive Paid Social Media Marketing Strategy in 2024
Did you know that 74% of people rely on social media to help them make purchase decisions? If you’re not building up your social media presence, you’re missing a prime opportunity to get leads familiar with your business and boost engagement so that you can nudge them toward conversion.
This year has witnessed a transformative shift in how brands connect with their audience, driven by innovative technologies and changing consumer behaviors. From the rise of short-form video content to the increasing reliance on AI-driven strategies, the trends shaping social media advertising are as diverse as they are impactful.
A critical component of that strategy is paid social media, which we’ll cover in-depth in this blog post.
In this article, we will delve more deeply into paid social media advertising, and how it differs and complements organic social media advertising, the different formats that social media can be undertaken in, and the various paid advertising options that exist on different social media platforms. Finally, once we have delved into all of this, we will establish 7 guiding principles to help your business establish an effective paid social media strategy.
What is Paid Social Media and It Should Be Part of the Growth Marketing Framework of Your Business
Paid social media is the practice of advertising your brand through social media platforms.
A paid social media strategy leverages external marketing activities on social media channels that support PPC advertising. It involves using the ad tools native to those social media channels to create, schedule, and post targeted ads that will reach a specific target demographic and market. The objectives of a paid social media strategy can include awareness, consideration, leads, or conversions.
With this strategy, you pay to put your brand in front of people who follow your business. Paid social media targeting allows you to put your products or services in front of those who don’t follow your business but are interested in the products or services you offer.
Social media advertising spending is expected to top $57.9 billion in 2024. That’s nearly 20% of the total expected advertising spend by all North American businesses this year.
The amount of money spent on paid social media ads has been steadily climbing since 2019, With businesses preparing to spend nearly a fifth of their ad budgets on pay-to-play social media, it’s clear that social media ads are becoming a staple in marketing strategies across small and large businesses.
Ultimately, paid social media helps with targeting audiences and driving sales just as organic social media does. The advantage of paying for this type of value? Message frequency, reaching those that are most similar to your customers, and the ability to reach customers on time (ex; when they are looking to buy, look more deeply into the products and services your business offers) etc.
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. If you’re running a short campaign, that ramp-up time can cost you visibility and leads. With paid social media, your campaign can get started with an extra boost at a speed that organic posts just won't ever achieve.
In addition to sustaining views, traffic, and engagement for as long as your credit card can stand, you’ll have the benefit of retargeting consumers with your ads to achieve an advertisement frequency that you can control.
Paid social media advertising can appear in several formats such as images, videos, and carousels. Typically these are shown with tags like “sponsored,” “promotion,” or simply as an “ad.”
Running paid social advertising campaigns helps large and small businesses increase brand awareness, reach new customers, and grow their revenue.
A business pays for an advertisement to be shown to a target audience. This helps them reach new people who are likely to be interested in their product or service and drive leads and conversions.
Paid social is a broad aspect of effective social media management.
Advertisers plan campaigns and pay for them using a dedicated budget.
They can then measure the success of campaigns by looking at some or all of the following metrics:
Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per action (CPA)
Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Return on investment (ROI)
Unlike traditional advertising (like direct mail, television ads, and billboards), paid ads on social media give you direct access to audience and campaign data.
Which tells you who is seeing, engaging with, and clicking on your ad.
What this allows you to do is use this information to create better-targeted ad campaigns. Drive more revenue for your business.
Organic vs. paid social media: What’s the difference?
When you learn about paid social media, you may wonder how it differs from organic social media. While these two components have some similar functions they are used differently. With organic social media, your posts only appear in someone’s feed if they follow you.
The key objectives that organic social media marketing seeks to achieve include.
Increasing brand awareness
Increasing engagement
Providing customer service
Building relationships
With paid social media, your ads appear in your target audience’s newsfeed regardless of whether they follow you. Paid social media involves:
Earning followers on your page
Reaching a larger audience similar to those early adopters and brand advocates
Building brand recognition
Increasing sales and/or leads
While paid social media and organic social media can have similar goals, organic social media focuses more on building foundational relationships while paid social media focuses on pushing people to become leads and convert. Both are crucial to your social media strategy.
Why Paid Advertising on Social Media Can Be an Integral Part of Your Growth Marketing Funnel
There are a few clear-cut benefits of undertaking paid social media advertising on various social media channels that are relevant to your business:
1)The Ability to Create Engagement Right Away
Organic posts help promote your business. Nevertheless, they can take time to build up views and engagement since social media algorithms need time to determine if your posts are engaging enough to be seen by a wider audience.
In contrast, paid advertising can instantly get your business and its message out to your target audience.
This means you can start generating engagement (like clicks, comments, shares, and direct messages) on your advertising campaigns immediately. Which can help improve awareness and reach. Rather than waiting for your organic posts to gain traction on their own.
2) Target a Specific Audience
Paid social media marketing allows you to position your business in front of a targeted audience that’s likely to be interested in your products or services.
This increases the chance they’ll view, engage with, or click on your ad.
Many social media platforms let you target broad or specific audiences based on certain characteristics. For example, Facebook lets you target ads based on location, age, gender, interests, behavior, and language.
While your campaigns are running, you can collect data to learn more about your target audience, and you can use this data to tweak your creatives and the messaging inherent within them to continuously improve performance.
3) Drive Leads and Conversions
Paid social media advertising is a great way to encourage your target audience to click on a call to action and become a lead.
A lead is someone who matches your ideal customer profile and shows interest in your business’s products or services. For example, clicking a button to download a case study or registering to attend an event.
You can then nurture leads into becoming customers through webinars, case studies, whitepapers, etc.
A paid social media campaign can also help generate conversions by promoting sales and special offers, especially as it pertains to e-commerce businesses.
What you count as a conversion will depend on your business and its goals. Common examples of conversions include when someone:
Purchases a product
Creates an account
Signs up to an email list
How to Incorporate Paid Social Media Marketing As Part of Your Growth Marketing Strategy
Having a paid social media strategy can work to optimize your efforts when your marketing budget might not be substantial enough to operate as a larger brand would do through traditional media channels, or if simply put, your competitors have a significantly larger marketing budget. If your business is working with a limited budget to reach hefty ROI goals, look no further. We've gathered the important things you’ll need to know about using paid social media ads.
To create an extremely efficient paid social media strategy, you’ll want to start with two critical items: An objective and a budget.
Paid Social Media Strategy Objective
Setting the objective for your paid social media strategy gives your subsequent tactics a direction to work with and a goal to achieve. Think of this strategy as a road trip. You start your journey at your house to make it to your destination by a certain time. Paid social ads work the same way. Your target audience is essentially starting their journey with your brand on their newsfeed and the idea is to lead them to the destination (a content offer on your website, an email subscription form, or even your social media profile itself).
To establish the exact characteristics of your target audience, you’ll need to use filters, settings, and other criteria to narrow down your audience. This can be a physical location, by age, hobbies, and even their occupation.
Once you have a starting point, it’s time to define your destination. Different social media ad platforms have proprietary conversion tools, but the end goal is almost always the same, which is to get people to share their contact information with your business. You might do this with a form fill or a visit to a landing page on your website. Depending on the needs of your business you might prefer one or the other.
Paid Social Media Strategy Budget
Paid social media advertising is one of the more flexible types of advertising available in the traditional and digital markets. The pay-to-play model for these channels makes them flexible enough to target only the people your business wants to attract, therefore you only have to pay for those you can reach.
Unlike TV or radio ads that are priced based on the length of the spot and the time the ads will air, social media ads are priced based on the length of the campaign and the potential number of impressions you'll be working toward with your ads. This allows for more favorable KPIs to track cost per thousand impressions, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend — as opposed to traditional ads that can only vaguely track cost per million impressions.
Spending on this type of advertising is virtually unlimited, but you can set a limit that will stop the campaign from spending more money than you’ve allowed.
What are the different formats that exist within social media marketing?
Image Ads
Image ads are one of the most popular ad formats. They include a single photo, ad copy, and a call to action (CTA).
You can use image ads to promote your product or service and convince people to take action. For example, click a button to shop your store or call your business.
2. Video Advertising
Video ads promote your product or service using video.
Video ads can be highly engaging and immersive, they’re great for capturing an audience's attention.
Using video in paid social campaigns also allows you to share a single, clear message in an easily digestible format.
3. Native Advertising
Native advertising appears in an audience’s feed and looks like an organic post. Except it’s advertising content.
The idea of native ads is that they fit seamlessly into the user’s social feed, meaning they don’t interrupt the audience’s browsing experience.
4. Influencers
Influencer marketing has become a driving force for brands, and social media has become the largest way of propagating campaigns. Since it typically yields a positive return on investment (ROI) for brands, expect this to continue in greater magnitude.
What this involves is that businesses can partner with social media influencers to promote their products and services.
Using influencers to advertise your business comes in two forms:
1. An influencer is paid to feature a product or service in a post
2. An influencer posts about a product or service with a link or promo code to make a purchase
How to Use Different Paid Social Media Marketing Platforms as Part of Your Growth Marketing Fundamentals
1. Facebook
Facebook is the most-used social media platform worldwide, with over 3 billion monthly active users. This signals a huge opportunity for brands to put their products in front of a large, diverse audience.
You can share ads in various formats, including images, videos, carousels, polls, and slideshow while accessing Facebook’s advanced audience targeting features for each one.
Facebook allows you to set a choice of six campaign objectives for your paid social media advertising:
Awareness: Improve brand recognition and make potential new customers aware of your business
Traffic: Increase traffic from social media to your website or landing page to continue on their customer journey
Engagement: Encourage likes, comments, shares, and saves of your ad
Leads: Get your audience to take action (e.g., fill out a form, share an email address, or register for an event)
App Promotion: Increase downloads of your app
Sales: Gain more customers, increase sales, and generate revenue
Make sure you set clear goals for your paid social campaigns on Facebook. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to generate a positive ROI.
Tips and best practices for getting the most out of Facebook’s paid advertising options:
Facebook is best for e-commerce, direct-to-consumer (DTC), and business-to-consumer (B2C)
Familiarize yourself with Facebook’s audience-targeting tools
Install the Facebook pixel on your website for enhanced analytics tracking
Use retargeting features to maximize returns from your campaigns
2. Instagram
Instagram is great for creating eye-catching, immersive advertising campaigns that help capture audience attention, drive engagement, and grow your audience.
Ads can appear in feeds, Stories, Reels, the Explore page, and other locations on the Instagram platform.
Paid social campaigns on Instagram can contain images, videos, carousels, CTA buttons, and links. All of which can help encourage engagement.
Instagram offers the same six objectives as Facebook: awareness, traffic, engagement, leads, app promotion, and sales.
Tips and best practices for getting the most out of Instagram’s paid advertising options:
Design your ads for mobile viewing
Test various ad types to find the right fit for your audience and brand
Include closed captions so your video ads are easy to understand with the sound off
3. LinkedIn
Using LinkedIn for paid social advertising puts your business in front of an audience of over 950 million professionals.
This makes the social media platform perfect for running paid social advertising campaigns that target knowledge workers, decision-makers, executives, and industry experts.
Types of ads on LinkedIn include in-feed ads, sponsored messages, dynamic ads (personalized ads based on user profile data), and text ads. What’s more, you can even target campaigns to audiences based on aspects such as demographics, job title, seniority, company, and more.
4. TikTok
Running paid social campaigns on TikTok allows you to connect with a highly engaged audience and drive sales.
The reason for this is that 1 in 3 TikTok users bought a product after seeing it on the platform.
For advertisers, this serves to demonstrate that TikTok is an effective place to run campaigns to increase conversions.
Businesses have a wide choice of advertising formats on TikTok. Including image and video ads, shopping ads, and carousel ads.
But one of the most popular ways of advertising on TikTok is through influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing helps build consumer trust, acts as authentic social proof that your product or service is worth purchasing, and quickly expands your reach and awareness.
Tips and best practices for getting the most out of paid marketing on Tik Tok:
Partner with social media influencers to run ad campaigns and leverage their existing audiences
Monitor and use hashtags to stay on top of trends
Create videos designed for mobile viewing
7 Tips to Help Your Business Establish a Proper Paid Social Media Strategy in 2024
Now that we have established the context for paid and organic social media marketing, let us now proceed with some tips to establish to launching proper paid social media campaigns.
1. Identifying your target audience
Before you start choosing platforms and launching campaigns, you must begin by identifying who’s in your target audience. To determine your target audience, look at a typical customer and define characteristics such as
Demographics
Occupation
Purchasing habits
Interests
Hobbies
Socioeconomic status
Identifying these characteristics will help you know who you’re trying to reach on social media. Once you identify who you’re targeting, you can figure out where to target them.
2. Find the right platform
Another critical part of creating a successful paid social media marketing strategy involves finding the right platform(s). When you advertise on social media, you don’t need to have a presence on every platform. Your audience may not be on every social media site The key is to connect with them on those social media platforms where they spend the most time.
You’ll want to look at the demographics for each platform to see where your target audience spends their time. It will help you focus on platforms where your audience is most likely to engage with and respond to your ads.
3. Use high-quality visuals
High-quality visuals are essential with paid social media marketing campaigns. They serve to catch your audience’s attention and get them interested and engaged with your ad. You can use static images, or choose to incorporate multiple types of multimedia in your ad, including
Photos
Videos
Infographics
Custom graphics
Whatever format you use, make sure your visuals have high resolution and are visually appealing to your audience. Using the right visuals will ensure that your audience engages with ad content.
4. Create compelling ad content
When you do paid social media, your visuals aren’t the only important part of your ad. Visuals drive people to take notice of your ad, but your ad content and the inherent messaging within your ads are what allows you to keep them engaged and eventually, to click.
When you craft your ad content, focus on delivering essential information to your audience first. What do they want to know? What unique selling points will convince them to convert?
When you create your ad copy, you want to be direct and tell your audience exactly what to expect if they click on your ad.
So, when you craft your ads, make sure you’re giving descriptive ad content along with high-quality visuals to deliver the best ad experience.
5. Keep track of ad performance
With your paid social media marketing strategy, you’ll want to keep track of how your ads perform. In doing so, you’ll want to watch out for metrics like
Clicks
Click-through rate (CTR)
Conversions
Traffic source
Cost per acquisition (CPA)
Keeping track of these metrics will help you understand your ad’s effectiveness and see if your ad enables you to grow your business. If you don’t see great results, you may need to try using a different version of your ad, which brings us to the next tip.
6. Test your ads
Which leads to this particular point. There’s a lot of trial and error with paid social media marketing. You may launch an ad that drives results for your business, but you also might launch an ad that generates no buzz or interest. It doesn’t mean that paid social media isn’t working for you. It may mean that you need to change something inherent in your ads.
Among those things include:
Visual format of the ad
The color scheme of the ad visual (if a graphic)
Call to action (CTA) choice
Ad content information
You can conduct an A/B test to help you compare two versions of your ad to see how they impact engagement. When you conduct testing, make sure you only test one element at a time. If you try to test too many elements, you won’t know which changes impact your ad’s conversion rate.
7. Make use of remarketing ad strategies
When you run advertising campaigns, you will have people who engage with your business through your ads or pages on your site, but they don’t convert right away. Instead of chalking it up to a lost lead, you can use remarketing ads to attempt to bring those leads back.
For example, if you’re advertising on Facebook, you would use dynamic retargeting to put your products or services back in front of these interested leads. By taking advantage of this feature on social media platforms, you can remarket your business to interested leads and turn them into conversions or potential leads for your business.
Make 2024 The Year that You Incorporate Paid Social Media Marketing Into Your Growth Marketing Process
In this post, we have attempted to emphasize the point that paid social media marketing is an excellent way to accelerate and extend your reach. We have pointed out the different paid advertising options available to growth-focused businesses within different social media networks as well as a number of the different formats that businesses can choose to leverage paid social media marketing with.
With the insights within this article, you are well on your way to getting the most out of your paid social media marketing insights.
However, If you’re paid social media strategy and execution in 2024 is something that you are struggling with, why not access the support of our paid social media specialists? Our paid social media marketing analysts will examine your business and provide a tailored plan coupled with a systematic approach to help you reach your goals.
Whether specific to paid social media marketing or your marketing efforts as a whole, growth marketing consulting is a service that is available on demand to businesses looking to achieve rapid growth. In addition to examining your current campaigns and tactics, we will provide you with specific recommendations (and work with you in tandem to implement them) Few businesses truly take advantage of this.
That‘s why there is no better time than now to reach out to our growth marketing experts for a free initial consultation.