How to elevate your marketing strategy with paid social integration

Social media is a powerful tool, but only if you know how to make the most of its resources. Consider how much traffic results in clicks that don’t lead to eventual conversions, or content strategies that teams spend months crafting, only for them to reach a tiny audience.

Want to actually convert those clicks into meaningful interactions with your business? You’re looking at literally months if not years of hard work. Unless of course, you speed up those results with a paid campaign. 

Paid social allows for targeted, data-driven campaigns that can significantly upgrade your marketing outcomes. They’re pretty vital in today's hyper-competitive marketing landscape. So understanding how to effectively integrate paid social is crucial for maintaining a competitive edge over your competitors.

This article will take you through each step of creating an efficient and targeted campaign. Let’s get started.

• What is Paid Social and how can it help?
• The benefits of integration
• The key channels for Paid Social ads
• Advanced targeting
• Curating engaging ad content
• Measuring performance

What is Paid Social and how can it help?

So what is paid social exactly? Paid social refers to advertising on social media platforms to reach a broader audience. You basically pay to show your ads to certain demographics or groups based on the algorithms of the platform you are on.

Paid social helps in targeting specific demographics, interests, and behaviours. So you can often select geographical locations, genders, interests or times of day to fine-tune who you show your ads to and how they are presented.

Paid social complements organic efforts by amplifying your reach. If you get it right, you’ll get a boost in engagement and your audience will become more focused and relevant to your business (so less wasted budget on users who aren’t actually that interested in your products or services!)

The other key benefit of paid social is the sheer volume of data that you collect during each campaign. This provides measurable results that can lead to valuable insights for refining your marketing strategies. Not just the paid campaigns; your organic marketing can also benefit from this same data set!

The benefits of integration

Running a PPC campaign alongside your existing organic marketing efforts has some pretty awesome benefits. Time to get to know them a little better…

Reach
Any paid campaigns will expand audience reach beyond your organic limitations. So it’s a great way to get more eyes on your latest product or service.

Of course, the only audience you’re really interested in is the one that is most relevant to your brand. So make the most of this boost in reach by using social media algorithms to display your ads to a larger, yet more relevant audience. Many algorithms are designed with relevancy in mind, so let them take some of the workload off your shoulders.

Brand Awareness
With this upscale in the number of impressions your ads are getting comes the enhanced visibility and recognition of your brand.

Want to really level up? Consistent presence across social media platforms builds trust and familiarity, so keep your organic marketing efforts firing across your social channels to bring in the best-unified result.

Targeted Traffic
Beyond more basic algorithm-led targeting, you have plenty of options when it comes to targeting your traffic. Through a careful selection of audience demographic preferences, you can drive high-quality traffic to your website or landing pages.

Your audiences can be segmented out to different stages of your sales funnel, interest groups, and relationship to your brand. By splitting your PPC efforts to target certain ad campaigns to specific segments, your traffic will be more relevant and useful as a result.

The key channels for Paid Social ads

Alongside more general PPC campaigns using Google, most social media platforms offer paid ad options. What you’ll find with each platform is that there are differences in how they show ads to users, so it’s important to choose the platform that will connect you to your audience in the most effective way. 

Facebook:
Facebook has a large user base that sees high levels of interaction with more mature generations. It also has some pretty robust targeting options to explore.

It’s a platform that can be effective for both B2B and B2C campaigns, due to its mix of image, video and carousel ads. You can even show ads in users' messenger app and stories.

TikTok:
This is one of the most rapidly growing platforms, hugely popular with a younger audience. You’ll have the most success with creative video ad formats suitable for viral marketing. Make space in your paid campaign for your most show-stopping product launches, and watch as the modern search engine for Gen Z discovers your brand in a whole new way.

Instagram:
This is a visual-centric platform ideal for engaging younger demographics. Video ads can do well on this highly interactive platform, which is paired through a strong integration with Facebook's ad management system.

LinkedIn:
As you might expect, ads found here are best suited for B2B marketing. LinkedIn allows targeting based on job titles, industries and level of seniority, so if you’re chasing a very specific professional audience, your campaign could benefit from this platform.

Advanced targeting

As you discover the nuances of your chosen platforms' targeting options, utilise demographic, geographic and behavioural data to refine your audience targeting over time.

A good starting point for your audience segmentation is to create custom audiences based on your existing customer data. Start with what you know, and build from there.

Use lookalike audiences to reach new potential customers with similar profiles. This can often be done automatically, using AI targeting based on the algorithm of your platform.

Like any paid campaign, continually test and adjust your targeting parameters to optimise campaign performance.

Curating engaging ad content

When it comes to crafting a campaign that actually brings in results, you need to be strategic to stay one step ahead of more generic campaigns.

Craft visually appealing and relevant ads that lean in to what matters most to your audience. Consider pain points and unique features that your products or services can offer and highlight those elements clearly. Use compelling copy that speaks directly to your target audience. Remember, you’re trying to break the endless scroll, so your ads need to be niche and intentional. 

We’d recommend experimenting with different ad formats, such as carousel ads, video ads, and story ads. You never know what is going to resonate with your audience in the most efficient and cost-effective way, so push for diversity and experimentation in the first few weeks of a new campaign, before cutting back on what isn’t bringing in results and doubling down on what is.

Measuring performance

Effective measurement of the metrics of your paid campaigns is vital to your campaign success, not to mention an efficient use of your budget. Track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS) throughout your campaign. 

Every paid social platform will have useful analytics tools built in to monitor ad performance in real time. This way, you get access to the most up-to-date data on your ads, so you can adjust and update as you go.

If you regularly review and analyse this data, you’ll soon identify trends and areas for improvement that you can then build out across your paid and organic marketing. What resonates with a paid audience will often be similarly useful with an organic one!

Summary

Integrating paid social into your marketing strategy is essential for staying competitive in today’s digital landscape. It’s the most efficient way to bring in increased reach, enhanced brand awareness, and targeted traffic to your brand at speed. But only if you are intentional with your campaign design, focusing on your specific marketing goals and not just a generalised approach.

By carefully selecting key channels, being selective with your targeting, creating engaging content and measuring performance, you can maximise the impact of your paid social campaigns. If you really want to make the most of your paid campaign, review your performance metrics regularly and make changes to your overall marketing strategy based on those results.

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