5 key ways to smash your Paid Social Advertising!

Are you starting out your career in paid social advertising and are daunted by the complex nuances of social media? Worry no longer, read this guide to find out how to smash your advertising.

Colleagues working on a marketing strategy
Colleagues working on a marketing strategy

Is Paid social advertising worth it?

Paid Social advertising are sponsored ads that run on social media. Brands pay money to run these ads on these platforms to reach users specific to their objective and target audience.

By using Paid Social advertising, it gives your brand a guaranteed reach as you’re essentially paying for your target audience’s attention. Through paid social, you can set up specific target audiences to best accompany the objective of your campaign whilst supporting your organic social media campaigns long-term.

5 key steps into running a successful paid social campaign

1. Pick the right social media platforms to run your ads on

There are so many social media networks to choose from, however choosing the right platform to advertise your ads on can be tricky.

Facebook/Instagram is one of the most used social media platforms with over 2 billion active users, which makes this platform great for awareness and creating a brand presence. This accompanied with its audience targeting and various content placements make this a great starter platform!

Snapchat, a Gen-Z dominated app, is where users post and engage with short-form videos which makes it perfect to advertise using the Snap Ads/Commercials placements. Snapchat also offers Filters/AR Lens which brands can use to incorporate their business.

Twitter, the platform for conversation around topics, can be great when using keyword targeting as this puts your ads within the key conversations taking place in real time.

Lastly is TikTok, which although is a new platform, it has risen in the ranks of social media popularity tenfold! As this is also a Gen-Z dominated app, brands can instantly connect with the next generation of consumers with trending short-form videos which makes it great at driving awareness and conversions.

2. What is the objective of your campaign?

To consider the objective of your campaign, first you need to decide what your business goals are.

  • Awareness – shows your ads to people who are most likely to remember them
  • Engagement – gets more video views, messages, or post engagement
  • Traffic – sends people to an online destination such as a website or app
  • Leads – collects leads for your brand
  • App Promotion – find new people to install your app and continue to use it
  • Purchases – find people who are likely to purchase your products or services
3. What KPIs will you be measuring for success?

A key performance indicator (KPI) is a measurable value that is used track success. Some options to measure are:

  • Cost-per-Thousand Impressions (CPM) is the amount you pay for every 1,000 impressions your ad receives.
  • Cost-per-Click (CPC) is the actual price you pay a publisher every time an online user clicks on your ad.
  • Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click on your ad/url over the number of impressions made.
  • View-Through-Rate (VTR) is the percentage of completed views of a skippable ad over the number of initial impressions.
4. What are the best creatives and copy for this campaign?

Take some time to research the perfect creatives and copy for your ads. By using Facebook Ad Library, you can spend some time browsing other ads that your competitors may be running but make sure to be original and not to copy! Take note of what creatives jump out at you, and how ‘good’ ads speak to their customers.

5.Track your paid social campaign with analytics

Lastly, tracking your paid social analytics really determines if your campaigns was a success or not. By using the platforms ad reporting tool, you can deep-drive into your campaign’s performance and understand whether you saw an ROI for your campaigns and opportunities to optimise future campaigns.

Now it’s time to try it yourself!

Remember paid social, like a lot of other marketing channels, takes time and practice so don’t worry if you don’t see results the first time. There’s so much to learn so make sure you keep up to date with industry news and sign up to our newsletter!

Read more on our digital apprenticeships and tips here.