Throughout social media marketing campaigns, you will likely utilize a combination of organic and paid media. Social media is one of the best marketing channels for generating organic media. However, organic media alone might not be enough to accomplish all of your social media marketing goals. You may want to implement the fifth pillar of social media marketing: paid social media for some of your campaigns.

Benefits of paid social media

Paid social media involves displaying paid ads or sponsored marketing messages on social media platforms to target a specific audience. In other words, paid social media is marketing you pay for on social media to share your content with specific audiences. By developing highly-relevant advertisements or paying to boost your organic content, you can more effectively reach both new customers and returning ones.

Examples of paid social media:

• Pay-per-click advertising is a type of advertising where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
• Branded content is any post that is produced by a third-party product, brand, or sponsor.
• Influencer-generated content is any post created by an influencer that promotes a brand’s products and services.

Paid social media is a great way to increase brand awareness. It allows you to place your ads in a prominent position in your audience’s feed. This helps get your audience’s attention, even if they weren’t searching for you or following anything related to your brand.

Another benefit of placing paid ads on social media is that they can reach your audience quickly. Organic posts can sometimes take days for your audience to see due to platform algorithms, and this time can cost you leads, especially if you’re running a shorter campaign. Paid social media can increase your posts’ rank and reduce the amount of time it takes for people to see them. You can also target your most relevant customers through paid social media. For example, you can set up campaigns to only serve ads to people in a certain age range or region.

You can also create campaigns to target followers, previous customers, or people who have bounced from your website. Platforms have ad preferences that users can set, so they see ads based on what they’re interested. You can ensure your ads are displayed to the people most likely to click on them.

Using paid social media, you can increase your remarketing capabilities as well. Remarketing is the process of displaying paid ads to customers who have visited your website, app, or social media profile. When a social media user visits your website, you can send them remarketed ads over social media multiple times in different formats. This will increases the likelihood that they will purchase your product over a competitor’s.

Paid social media can increase the success of your marketing campaigns. It can boost brand awareness, get your message to your audience more quickly, and help you target and remarket to specific customers.

Integrate paid social media into your strategy

Organic social media is ideal for nurturing connections with customers through communication and relationship-building. Paid social media, on the other hand, is best for raising brand awareness, targeting specific audiences, and driving conversions.

Previously, you learned that you could gather data about your content’s performance using analytics tools. By analyzing this data, you can identify the content that resonates most with your target audience. Then you can use funds from your paid media budget to boost top-performing organic content; so it reaches more people. You are either set up to promote content manually or automatically based on your platforms that meet the top-performing criteria.

Using the data you’ve gathered about your existing customers, you can create lookalike audiences. A Lookalike audience is people with similar demographics and behaviors who haven’t yet been introduced to your brand. For example, you might create a lookalike audience similar to customers who have purchased from you in the past six months. Then you can craft ads that are highly relevant to that audience.

Before running an ad, you can use A/B testing to optimize it. A/B testing is comparing two versions of an ad to determine which has the higher conversion rate. You want to test contents with a small audience to see how well it performs before spending a budget on it. You can assess the strength of your ad’s messaging, calls to action, copywriting, visuals, placement, and formats. Test your ad among different demographic groups as well as organic posts. The results will help you make decisions about what content you should pay to promote and what elements to include in your ads.

Finally, remarketing ads on social media to drive more conversions. Through remarketing, you can reach people who are already familiar with your business. For example, a person adds a pair of jeans to their shopping cart on your website but doesn’t follow through with the purchase. By nudging them with a remarketing ad for that pair of jeans or similar items in their social media feed, you may be able to move them into the conversion stage.

Paid social media can be highly effective at moving your customers through the marketing funnel.

Happy learning and good luck!