Pay to Play: Why You Need to Start Doing Social Advertising Now

Did you know that 89% of adults between the ages of 18-29 are active on social media? Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that 43% of consumers over age 65 are as well. More importantly, 46% of Millennials (who, by the way, are expected to reach $1.4 trillion in spending power by 2020) say they count on social media when buying online.

If these eye-popping statistics aren’t enough to make you realize how important social advertising is, here are a few more reasons for you to consider.

Benefits of Social Advertising

First, this type of marketing leverages the almighty power of social influence. It’s sort of like digital word of mouth. Consider the fact that 51% of Millennials say that social opinions influence their purchasing decisions. The key difference between traditional advertising, like paid search and banner ads, and social advertising is that the latter is proactive rather than reactive. Instead of waiting for people to search for your product or service, social ads serve up your offering to relevant prospects before they ever Google anything.

Another great feature of social advertising is the ability to drill down and hyper-target. While traditional online marketing limits you to basic criteria like demographics and geographical area, social media allows for much more personalization, dramatically increasing the chances of successful conversion. For instance, social advertising lets you target your audience by:

• Interest. Based on a user’s self-reported interests, hobbies, favorite activities and even other pages or users they’ve interacted with in the past.
• Behavior. For example, you can target users based on how they use their devices or what their past purchase behaviors were.
• Specific Group. Custom targeting (offered by both Facebook and Twitter) allows you to upload a list of users’ contact information and target them specifically.
• Lookalike. You already know what your custom audience looks like, but this type of advanced targeting lets you reach new groups of users who are similar, thereby expanding your reach to even more relevant prospects.

Social advertising also includes some pretty spot-on analytical tools that can help you track your conversion rate (and ultimately justify your social marketing spend). In fact, if you configure your social ads the right way, you can even drill down on how effective each ad is in fulfilling its purpose (i.e. signing up for your newsletter or buying your product). All you need to do is add a snippet of code to the page where your desired conversion will take place. The extra work is worth it to be able to attribute each conversion to the ads that drove them.

Finally, social advertising allows you to take advantage of the huge mobile boom that we’re already experiencing. At last check, 71% of users utilize their mobile device to access their social media accounts. Furthermore, 50% of Millennials say they use their smartphones to research before making a purchase and 41% will go on to complete the buying process via mobile. Most social platforms provide enhanced mobile advertising, which, when combined with the other benefits listed above, places social advertising leaps and bounds ahead of traditional online marketing methods.

When it comes to successfully marketing your business, the one thing that remains constant is the importance of reaching your target audience wherever they happen to be. Given the statistics listed here (and countless others if you’ve got some spare time and care to Google), it’s more evident now than ever before that social media is where it’s at.

Are you capitalizing on this incredibly powerful tool for your business? What are you waiting for? Contact us today and let’s discuss how we can make social advertising work for you.