Social media advertising is a very popular way to advertise online. We can use built-in advertising systems such as Facebook Ads for this purpose, but also brand profile maintenance or content marketing. Many people, having to spend a budget and hire an agency or start promoting a brand on social media themselves, wonder whether this is a good move. In this text we suggest whether it is worth investing in brand advertising on social media and what advantages such advertising has.
Table of Contents:
- Large audience as the key to success
- Targeting ads - how to reach your ideal customer?
- Free vs. paid methods of social media promotion
- Influencer marketing and sponsored content
- Summary and recommendations
Large number of recipients
The first advantage and at the same time the reason to advertise on social media is the large audience. Within specific social media platforms, we can most often reach hundreds of millions of users - as is the case on Facebook, for example. It is a hermetic place that gathers a very large number of categorized users that we can reach very easily. Compared to other methods of online promotion, this is a big plus. Most importantly, we can reach them relatively easily and we can benefit from a huge audience.
This plus will be especially appreciated by large global brands that want to reach huge numbers of users with their advertising. This can be a problem with other ways of advertising, such as through SEO, where organic traffic will be limited at a certain value. This benefit will also be especially appreciated by those who advertise in niches, i.e. in very narrow topics. Even in such cases, social media platforms give us access to a relatively large audience. Advertising in a narrow target audience will therefore allow us to show up in large numbers. This is very problematic with other means of advertising, as only social media consolidates and creates thematic circles so well.
Targeting capability
The second advantage of advertising on social media platforms is the possibility of targeting. We can do this in a very precise way, targeting with our advertising only those people who are really likely to use our services. This affects the effectiveness of the advertising campaign, as well as the efficiency of spending the budget. So if we spend less money to reach a specific target, we can increase the intensity of our advertising and earn even more.
When talking about targeting in social media advertising, we mostly have two types of targeting in mind. The first is natural targeting due to the place of publication of the material, or its nature. Thus, if we tag our advertising material appropriately and publish it in an appropriate subject group, we will be able to reach people who are genuinely interested in a given subject category for free. The second way of targeting is to select audiences in internal advertising systems, such as Facebook Ads. With detailed targeting, we can select many of the thousands of parameters and determine the ideal audience to whom we will display our ad.
The benefit of targeting advertising on social media, is also to build a positive image of our brand. By delivering ads aptly to the audience, we don't have to worry about negative reception. People who are interested in the subject category will, at most, receive our ad neutrally and will not be irritated by not understanding it or by pointless offers. By building a positive image as an industry leader, people who have received the advertising message in the past and now associate with our company will be able to benefit from our brand. In such a situation, even when they did not use the ad during its original display, they will choose our brand, rejecting unknown companies altogether.
Free and paid ways
Social media advertising is also advantageous in terms of flexibility. We can choose from both free and paid advertising methods, which we can implement on our own and by marketing agencies. This is a big plus, as we can decide whether and how much money we want to transfer to advertising.
Choosing free ways, we can also expect similar effectiveness or similar profits as in the paid ones. However, we will have to devote more time and attention to such advertising to achieve a similar effect. The upside, therefore, is that even without the means for paid advertising, we can still effectively promote ourselves on social media and attract customers.
Paid ways of promotion, on the other hand, are very powerful - even compared to other online marketing strategies. We can scale our activities very easily, and promote ourselves on a very wide scale. We can also completely automate the advertising process and set the campaign to display itself without frequent editing or supervision. This way we won't have to do any work on such an advertising campaign.
Paid ways of advertising on social media also include influencer marketing, or sponsored content, where we pay well-known people who run popular profiles to place our advertisement on them. We also have a wide variety of concepts to choose from, as well as opportunities for cooperation, which gives considerable flexibility in social media advertising.
Summary
The answer to the question of whether it is worth investing in social media advertising and promoting the brand in just such a way is in the affirmative. Social media advertising has many advantages that allow us to favorably advertise our products or services. Although it is not a "cure for all evil" and it will not be a universal way for every opportunity to get customers right away, in many cases it will be a very good direction of promotion. Therefore, if the characteristics of social media advertising match our goals or the characteristics of our brand, it is definitely worth at least to some extent betting on such advertising and developing it over time. Social media advertising can also become the main way to promote a brand, and in many cases we will be able to rely on this way of advertising.
