Social media advertising provides cost-effective reach to shoppers as they engage with popular networks. In addition to its user targeting capabilities, social advertising fosters two-way dialogue between brands and consumers better than most marketing channels.
This article primarily focuses on Meta Ads, a top platform offering ad placement across Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta products. However, most concepts and best practices translate well to advertising on LinkedIn, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and similar platforms.
Campaign Setup
Unlike traditional advertising mediums, social ads can run effectively without overly expensive budgets or lengthy campaign duration. This flexibility allows small businesses to create effective ads on short notice for a weekend pop-up sale or to experiment with multiple messages and placements before committing to a larger ad budget.
Depending on your goals, campaigns can be geared towards specific objectives such as growing your followers, driving website traffic, and increasing e-commerce sales.
Campaign Targeting
Similar to other digital advertising, social ads provide the ability to target ads to specific user segments. Shoppers can be served ads based on their location, demographics, interests, and behaviors (as permitted by platforms’ ad policies.) You can also leverage remarketing-style campaigns to recent website visitors or an uploaded customer list.
Ad Creative
Creative assets are essential to campaign success, especially on social media. Use quality original photos and video as often as possible to stand out from stock photography and AI-generated assets. Other traditional advertising practices also translate well to social media success, including the use of offers as applicable and “social proof” of other customers’ success stories.
Most platforms also provide a range of ad formats, including image carousels and video. For e-inventory-based businesses, dynamic product content can often be automatically pulled from a product feed and incorporated into ads.
Measuring Your Ads’ Impact
Critical to any advertising campaign is tracking the engagement and conversion performance of campaigns and individual ads. Most platforms make this measurement rather easy to implement with proprietary tools, including the Meta Pixel and LinkedIn’s Insight Tag.
Additional attribution tools can be found in our guide on marketing measurement.
Summary
Social advertising provides targeted, cost-effective reach to your ideal shoppers. When paired with proper campaign setup and analytics tracking, social ads can help grow your business and provide transparent ROI.
