Chapter 4
Social Media Paid Advertising
Supercharging Your Strategy With Paid Advertising
For a lot of people, using paid advertising seems like a scary thing, but in today’s social media landscape, it’s a necessary evil.
On most of the popular social media platforms (especially on Facebook) organic reach for business pages is almost non-existent. In fact, it is estimated that only 7-10% of your current audience will see a piece of content that is posted on Facebook.
While most other channels aren’t nearly that bad, it is still extremely hard to grow a social media channel relying on organic posting alone.
This is where using paid advertising comes in.
How much money should I spend on social media ads?
Now we aren’t telling you to spend a ton of money and run yourself out of business – we typically recommend $100-$200 per month for an average local client that wants to run Facebook or Instagram ads, but you can spend more or less than that if you want depending on how large your local market is and what type of service you are providing!
For example, if you are an eCommerce brand that has a large national audience, you are going to want to increase this budget pretty drastically. What we have found is that it is not how much money you spend, but how you spend it.
This budget, however, can vary dramatically depending on which channels you plan to advertise on. Facebook and Instagram ads, for example, can still be well under $1 a click. In comparison, LinkedIn Ads we would expect to be in the $5-$7 per click range. This means you would have to increase your budget by about 5-7 times to generate the same amount of clicks.
Long story short, most local businesses can do a lot of good with very little budget using social media ads.
How do you create a simple ad strategy that works?
A lot of us are familiar with that “boost” button at the bottom of Facebook and Instagram posts. Now, most agencies are going to tell you to avoid that button at all costs… We disagree. The boost button on Facebook and Instagram (and now LinkedIn) is an incredibly useful tool for small businesses. While you might not get all the features of creating an ad from scratch, it’s quick and easy to understand, which a lot of the ads platforms are not.
We have multiple other blogs available that talk about boosting posts on a variety of different platforms that you can check out to learn about some mistakes to avoid and other best practices that will help you greatly!
We wrote a blog post on how to boost a Facebook post the right way!
What types of posts are you looking for to boost?
There is a term we have in the industry called “social proof”. Social proof means that a post performs extremely well organically with your audience.
This is so important because it gives you reassurance before you put money behind a post that your money is going to be well spent on a piece of content that you know for a fact will resonate well with your audience. Look for those posts that are outperforming the rest in terms of engagement and use those to send out a broader audience of people that might also be interested in what your business has to offer.
One quick last note: Don’t just boost one post and call it quits. Boosting posts, while simple, still takes a little bit of finesse and experimentation to get just right. So, when you boost a post, look at the results, and make adjustments. Try different audiences, objectives, and calls to actions, and then make your judgment as to whether or not something is working.
So… What Now?
I am not going to lie, I’m a little surprised to see you here! I know reading guides the entire way through is not something people normally do, so the fact that you made it all the way here to the end must be a good sign!
What were your biggest takeaways? Did you learn something new? Did you ask yourself some questions that you haven’t asked yourself in a long time? Did you discover inspiration in something you read? I hope all of it!
If you remember way back to the opening section, the goal of this guide is to help you build the foundation for a killer social media strategy that will help your business grow and reach new people. We wanted to take social media marketing, something that people tend to overcomplicate, and give you simple methods to make it effective. These are the exact steps we take with our small business clients every single day and we stand behind them 100%.
But the world of social media marketing is always evolving and changing. As I sit here today, these are the best methods of seeing success, but next year, next month, or heck even next week, things could all change. What I want you to realize is that building your ideal customer profile and your content strategy will never change. No matter what new platform bursts onto the scene next, those two exercises set you up for long-term success.
To summarize, here are the 3 biggest things for you to take back to your business.
- Know your audience. Really, really know them.
- Create the content you enjoy creating.
- Execute.
And that is what you do now. You execute!
