Social advertising provides businesses with cost-effective reach to shoppers as they engage across popular networks. This article will focus on Meta Ads which remains the top platform and offers ad placement across Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta products. However, most concepts and best practices translate well to advertising on LinkedIn, 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 a larger ad budget.
Depending on your business goals, campaigns can be set up based on specific objectives such as growing your profile’s followers, increasing the reach of a recent post, driving website traffic, and even goals such as e-commerce sales.
Campaign Targeting
Similar to other digital advertising, social ads provide the ability to target ads to specific sets of users. Shoppers can be pinpointed based on their location, demographics, interests, and behaviors (as allowed 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 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.
Summary
Social advertising provides a targeted and cost-effective channel for businesses to reach shoppers. When paired with proper campaign setup and analytics tracking, social ads can help to grow your business and provide transparent ROI.
