Social advertising is the best way to find these potential customers. It allows you to create additional demand for your product rather than simply responding to existing demand.
And because social advertising finds you more of your best customers, it can unlock the kind of growth that will remain elusive to those who are advertising on PPC alone.
The opportunities and challenges of paid social
Social media advertising hasn’t been around for as long as PPC, and that helps to explain why many established brands haven’t quite mastered it yet.
Another reason is that social media advertising requires a more subtle approach than PPC. It aims to engage your prospects on their terms. To succeed with social advertising, a lighter touch is needed.
Social native brands understand this. Social media is their natural habitat, after all. They know perfectly well how to communicate with their customers and prospects on social because they’ve been doing it since day one.
Social native brands are also obsessed with how social media is evolving. They see how Instagram is becoming a shopping platform and they’re determined to take advantage of it.
Social media advertising, then, comes with both opportunities and challenges. While there’s a chance for you to get an edge on more established brands, there’s also a danger of you falling too far behind social native brands who are already excelling in this space.
How do you know if social media advertising is right for your brand?
PPC works best when the consumer realises what they need, and knows how to search for it. So when they do, your brand can be in the right place.
Social media advertising is different. It works best when what you’re doing is more than simply responding to a consumer need. Social media advertising allows you to build a creative and visual story of your brand.
And this story can reach and engage those consumers who aren’t currently searching for your product but will love it when they do find it.
Start small and then scale
With social media advertising, you’re not just reacting to existing demand. You’re creating more of it. You’re not relying on people searching for you - you’re going out and finding them.
And because of the vast quantity of potential customers you can find on social media, your opportunities for growth are virtually limitless.
Social media advertising offers you the potential to scale once you have a message that resonates with your best customers and you know what profitability means for your brand.
An acquisition model helps you to estimate the level of ROI that you can expect for a particular amount of investment. But in order to validate this model and to know when to scale, you have to experiment.
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all method. Your brand is unique. So you need a unique combination of audience, creative and placements in order to achieve your goals.
This can take some time to get right. You won’t succeed overnight. That’s why it’s best to run small experiments until you hit upon just the right combination of creative, audience and placements.
When you do, you’ll be able to scale up and reap the rewards.
