Social Media Marketing  

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is a type of unpaid internet advertising that uses social media platforms as a marketing tool to interact with the target audience and allow them to share content for a greater reach. SMM is like that ‘evening adda’ where a group of people in your neighborhood gossip about the ongoing news, cricket, and many more things happening around. While Social Media Marketing is a great advantage for budding businesses, it is never a one-shot process. Your target audience will take time to gather around your news topics and nurture your social media page.

Social Media Advertising 

Social Media Advertising is a channelized form of SMM where businesses can get information about the audience demographics and target their ads accordingly. In short, it is a paid version of SMM which offers more advantages like geo-targeting, behavioral targeting, socio-psychographic targeting, etc. to make detailed target group identification possible. With social media advertising, advertisements are distributed to users based on information gathered from target group profiles.

Spending your money on Social Media Advertising will eventually have some sort of returns. Those returns can be as follows: 

Generating Leads

For every social media post on your page, the landing page and the CTA will maximize the effectiveness of the campaign. It’ll also allow you the ability to monitor the effectiveness of the campaign.

Increase Your Visibility

Promoting posts on Facebook will lead to increased visibility of your content. Your post will appear nearer to the top and in more people’s News Feeds than if it wasn’t promoted. 

Reach an Engaged Audience 

Your target audience is likely to spend time on social media platforms most of the available free time. Ads on social networks are more likely to be seen, clicked and shared.

Almost 3.5 billion people around the world now use social media, with roughly 98 percent of them accessing social platforms via mobile devices.

Exploring each platform’s latest advertising audience numbers offers a valuable perspective where throwing money at paid social will certainly result in some sort of return. 

But how do you know what your doing is having a real impact? Let’s take a closer look at the key developments and trends to jot down the strategies for better performing ads.  

Step 1: Choosing the Best Campaign Objectives

Every business has its unique objectives through which it wants to connect with its target audience. Be clear with the campaign you want to go first and add a tinge of creativity to it to attract eyeballs.  

Step 2: Select Your Social Platforms

By now, you should have decided on a clear cut advertising goal–the next decision? It’s time to pick and choose which social media platforms you’ll use for your ad campaigns.

There’s plenty of benefits to using one network over another. However, you have to understand each business has its unique reasons to promote on certain platforms. Here are a few immediate key questions to consider:

• Is this channel performing well organically for me?
• Does this channel’s demographics match my brand?
• Do our competitors target users on this network?
• Does my target audience consistently engage here?
• Does my ad format (multi-photo, video, GIF, etc.) fit the platform?

Step 3: Find the Middle Ground of Your Social Audience Targeting

Targeting an audience for social media ads is not an easy task. Trust us–we’ve spent hours working on Facebook Ads Manager, trying to select our target audience and share the best content. Trying to do this while matching your brand voice, while seeming appealing to completely new users who’ve never heard of you is tough work.

Whether you’re a pro at social ads or just getting started, one thing remains the same–you have to find a middle ground with your targeting. Ad platforms are only getting more complex and sophisticated, so it’s important to spend your time wisely by creating workable target audiences.

For starters, Facebook works as a great introductory space to work on your core audience. Use targeting features such as Interest Targeting to build your custom audience. This allows you target solely on interests and things that users like and share on their Timeline.

Additionally, you can use the Audience Behaviors feature to narrow down users who have specific intents like purchasing behaviors or traveling intentions. All these things lead to sales and with the right behaviors selected, you’ll see those who are active with brands that relate to you.

Lastly, it’s necessary to know your core demographics when you target specific users. And to that point, you should know the demographics of your network to understand how audiences will react to your ads.