Among the innumerable platforms and options for promoting and advertising your business and its services and products, social media marketing is the most widely used and popular across all categories of audience. While there are several ways to go ahead with social media management, one of the most popular and successful methods is social media advertising. According to reports by Statista, social media users spend an average of 2 hours on social media on a daily basis. This article talks about social media advertisements and their benefits and how businesses use these benefits to meet their business goals.
Table of Contents
What Are Social Media Ads?
Any advertisement created specifically for social media platforms is called a social media advertisement. The social media ads are run on selected networks and comprise different multimedia elements. Another report by Statista has claimed that social media ad impressions have seen an increase of approximately 20% each year. Some common elements include clickable products, images, videos, and even call to actions to invite the audience to interact with the business via advertisements and encourage them to buy the featured items without much hassle.
While the elements of social media ads are largely the same in all cases, the format may change depending on the social media network platform the ad has to run on. However, more or less social media advertisements are more or less similar to ads run on different search engines like Google Ads and other platforms. Some popular types of social media ads include image ads, carousel ads, product ads, collection ads, interactive ads, lead form ads, and text ads and video ads. According to Hootsuite, among all social media platforms, Twitter’s advertising audience accounted for 187 million users in 2020.
Uses And Benefits Of Social Media Advertisements For Businesses
Given below are some notable benefits of social media advertisements that compel advertisers and businesses to use them for promotional purposes:-
1. Brand Awareness And Recognition
One of the most obvious benefits and use of social media ads is that they contribute extensively towards the awareness and recognition of your firm. Engaging and out of the box social media ads can truly boost the visibility of your brand and build awareness in large numbers by targeting users beyond your immediate followers and connections.
These advertisements can be used to familiarise your audience with what your brand does and what it has to offer in terms of products and services to build recognition around your brand. According to reports by Hootsuite, 52% of all the brands discovered online are through social media public feeds.
2. Increase In Potential Leads And Signups
Social media advertisements are a great way of increasing your business’s conversion rates. This may be in the form of potential leads, signups or even sales. Creating thoughtful and compelling advertisements with relevant statistical information can help you create reliability and trust in the brand which can increase the number of followers and subscribers for your brand.
Furthermore, adding call to actions to your social media ads and linking a landing page from your website can increase your potential leads and sales! In a research conducted by Global Web Index, it was revealed that 13% of internet users admit that adding a “buy” button is likely to increase their chances of buying products online.
3. Understanding The Target Audience
You cannot just use the social media platforms for understanding your audience but also use social ads to get clarity about your target audience and understand their interests and online behaviours while at the same time creating a newer audience. Reports by We Are Social have claimed that 2.18 billion people can be reached by using Facebook ads.
You can analyse your advertisements metrics to see which ones have performed the best in terms of website traffic, engagement and click-through rates, lead generation and other metrics. Furthermore, social media allows you to segment your audience as well as the advertisements on the basis of the available data which can help you discover new characteristics about your audience for company’ future advertising.
4. Better Price Deals
Social media ads cost businesses much less as compared to other methods of advertising and that is one of the major reasons why social media advertising is so popular among businesses. Furthermore, while other forms of advertisements generally demand a certain amount in terms of finances since the advertising firms decide upon it, in case of social media ads, mostly you get to make the financial decisions first.
You can set some part of the budget aside for social advertisements without having to deal with any additional expenses. According to reports by eMarketer, social media ad spending is likely to reach $49 billion by the end of 2021.
5. Segmentation
Segmentation is a great benefit of social media advertisements because they allow you to target very specific audience according to the demographical data at your disposal such as your audience’s geographic location, age, sex, language and other data related to their interest, hobbies, past social media behaviour and interactions on social media platforms.
On the basis of these, you can recognise and filter out your audience and then further divide your audience into segments and create unique advertisements. Reports by eMarketer have revealed that 52% of social media users say that the privacy policy of a particular platform while engaging with the advertisements on that platform is the most important factor.
6. Ability To Advertise More Creatively
Reports by Oberlo have claimed that 54% of social media users use the platforms to research about desired products before finalising a purchase. One of the many benefits of social media advertisements is that there are several ways in which you can advertise your products and services and be more creative with your ads.
And business owners and advertisers use this feature to advertise their brands through multiple content types. Social media advertisements are not restricted to just images and videos. Other than posting catchy images and videos, you can advertise through influencers, creating polls and surveys, conducting giveaways and quizzes to reach a larger audience in new and subtle ways.
7. Advertisements For Mobile Users
Social media is no more restricted to just desktops and this is one of the major benefits for advertisers and businesses. Think With Google has revealed that 35% of social media users who searched for a product on their mobile devices ended up spending more time on the store than they intended. Social media advertisements can be optimised to reach the target audience on both desktop devices as well as phone devices.
There are some key points when optimising your content for mobile devices such as using shorter content for ease of readability on phones, compressed images and videos to fit smartphones without compromising quality, and posting at peak times of desktop and mobile devices accessibility. However, there are many tools that you can take help from to optimise your content for mobile devices such as Pablo by Buffer, Magisto, MailChimp, and TinyJPG.
Social media advertising is one of the most successful forms of advertising and is constantly evolving with the advent of technology, new features and growing trends. The future of social ads is bright and allows businesses to mix social media with advertising practices for a creative, compelling and impressive case. If you still haven’t started it for your business, this is your call to start social media advertising now!
