All kinds of companies, whether business-to-business, business-to-consumer, service-based, or product-based, leverage paid social media. For many businesses, paid social media represents a significant source of leads and revenue.
Social media makes it easier than ever to advertise to any kind of audience, globally or locally. But before you jump into paid social media advertising, there are some answers to common questions you might benefit from.
Let’s examine some of the most frequently asked questions about paid social, starting with the most commonly asked question: What is paid social media?
1. What is paid social media?
Paid social media refers to any marketing content you promote through paid placements on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and X. You pay the platform to push your message to a specific audience instead of relying only on organic reach.
What is paid social media mainly used for? In general, the main goal is to reach a wider audience, drive traffic, capture leads, and increase sales with precision and effectiveness. You choose your target audience, set your budget, and launch ads that match your goals. The platform uses its data to place your content in front of users who are most likely to engage or convert.
Paid social offers fast visibility, strong targeting options, a flexible budget, clear performance data, and better control over your reach.
When you combine paid social media with a strong content strategy, you transform your social channels into a consistent source of traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Now that we understand what paid social media is, let’s look at some additional questions.
2. How do you make a good social media ad?
Before creating your ad, it’s essential to understand your prospective customer. You need to know as much detail as possible about their life. Some things that are useful to know are:
- What their problems are
- Their goals and dreams
- What kind of product or service they want
- What daily activities they engage in
- The type of content they prefer to consume
Knowing the answers to these questions will help you understand the kind of messages that will draw their attention.
Understanding your audience and anticipating their needs helps you design a buying process that maximizes the returns on your marketing efforts. The next step is determining what your audience needs to know or do to do business with you.
Are you looking for them to become more aware of your brand?
Or do you want them to buy from you?
It may not be right for your business to jump directly into sales, especially if your product requires more brand awareness before someone is willing to make a purchase.
It will be helpful to create buyer personas and outline the buyer’s journey at this stage to visualize what information needs to be shared, what actions the customer needs to take, and when those actions need to happen.
Start by creating a hook
You can start by creating something that will hook them into your ad.
Your hook should focus on your audience’s problem and then on the solution to that problem. Address the problem and show that you have a solution. It needs to be short and attention-grabbing. Demonstrate to your audience that your product or service will help them achieve their objectives.
Consider these example hooks:
- How to avoid expensive car repairs
- 5 things you to do right now to avoid cooking nasty home meals
- How to run without knee pain
- Looking for a meaningful gift?
- Biggest sale for our women’s line of the year!
- Decorate your work desk with these unique items!
Each of these hooks addresses specific problems, such as expensive car repairs, horrible home cooking, and runner’s knee, among others. They also hint that the audience can solve their problems.
What’s next?
They are curious and want to hear what you have to say.
If your hook isn’t good, your audience is much less likely to read the rest of your ad.
Provide value
Create your ad so that you are talking directly to your customer. Don’t merely show them an ad; give them a solution to their problem.
This is giving your audience value.
Here is where you present your pitch. Show an ad for your product that helps them make quick work of a difficult task or demonstrate a service that allows them to avoid problems. Show the benefits someone will get if they purchase your product or service.
Make sure the media you are using, whether that is an image or a video, is good quality and easy to understand. Use clear lettering and direct language.
Call them to action
A clear message is essential, but you risk losing your audience without a clear call to action. Revisit what you learned about your audience and what you want them to do. Then, create clear invitations to act.
Here are some examples:
- Like, share, or comment on this post.
- Visit our website.
- Sign up for our mailing list.
- Purchase this product.
Social media companies like Meta have clear and concise CTAs built into their platform.
Besides the hook, the call to action is the second most important part of the ad. Without a clear call to action, your ideal customer won’t know how to do business with you.
3. Is it difficult to manage social media ads?
The answer to this question depends on what kind of company you have and the products or services you are offering. Setting up and testing an ad campaign is time-consuming, and maintaining it once it is working requires consistent effort.
To give you an idea of what it’s like running a paid social media campaign, here is what we do when we get a new account here at Revity.
Set up the account
Before running ads, ensure you are active on your social media. This is for two reasons: to gather information and to be active on the platform. We have found that Meta has a “hidden” policy where activity before starting ads positively correlates to a return on advertising later.
For the first few weeks after opening a new account for a large business, we are active on social media, creating and testing posts to determine what yields the best engagement, and taking note of what works.
For smaller accounts, we strive to be as active as possible on social media. The first 50 or 100 posts are likely to receive little engagement or return. That’s okay; we simply try to push out content and gather as much information as possible from it. Once our posts start gaining traction, we can gather more accurate information.
During this phase, we will activate and monitor pixels to ensure they help us track the performance of our ads once we go live. We’ll also test content through boosted posts to see which content gets the most engagement.
In this phase, we aren’t looking for specific engagement benchmarks; we simply want to know what content works best. This period may last two to four weeks and requires us to post on the account daily. Once we have gathered a few weeks’ worth of user information, we are ready to test ads.
Create and test ad content
Following the ad-making process mentioned earlier in this blog, we create ads that effectively target our audience.
Sometimes, it helps to create a story around your product or brand. This may make it easier to connect with your audience on an emotional level.
Depending on your budget, consider running multiple ads simultaneously to determine which messaging and media formats are most effective.
Depending on your product and industry, it can take anywhere from two weeks to three months to start seeing big returns on your ad spending. Until you start making a profit on your ads, focus on making them break even. From there, you test different ads to determine which one works best for your audience.
Continue testing new content
Even if your ads perform well, you shouldn’t stop testing new variations. Continue to create new ads that outperform the previous version. This is where you will start to see the most significant returns on your ad spending.
4. What social media platform should I advertise on and why?
Facebook and Instagram are the greatest revenue sources in the social media industry. Before Meta changed its privacy policy a couple of years ago, Facebook and Instagram ads generated returns of up to 80-90% for businesses.
Now, in the aftermath of criticism over their use of user data and disputes with Apple limiting the scope of the data they collect, Facebook and Instagram don’t perform as well as they did. However, they are still the best social media services for advertising.
Other social media platforms don’t track and use data as well as Meta’s platform does. In general, it is easier and more lucrative to use Facebook and Instagram, especially since Meta’s platforms have the largest user base among all social media platforms.
Go social with Revity’s social media marketing and management services
If you want to use social media advertising to reach new customers and drive growth, Revity Marketing Agency is ready to help with our social media marketing and management services. Our paid social specialists build and manage high-performing campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and more.
We take time to understand your goals, audience, and budget, then create a custom strategy that delivers real results. With clear reporting and data-driven insights, you always know how your campaigns perform and where to optimize.
Don’t let the complexity of paid social slow you down. Contact Revity today and start seeing the real benefits of smart, effective social media marketing and management services.
