What is Social Media Advertising? Tips and Strategies for Successful Social Media Ads.

1. What is actually Social Media Advertising?
2. Overview of platforms: Which channels is social media advertising broadcasted on?
3. What are the advantages and disadvantages of social media advertising?
4. What do Social Media Ads cost?
5. How do you measure the success of Social Media Ads?
6. Which tools assist you in creating Social Media Ads?
7. Checklist for Social Media Ads
8. Conclusion: Who are Social Media Ads suitable for?

Over four billion people worldwide use social networks. Nearly three billion users are found on Facebook alone, two and a half billion on YouTube and one and a half billion on Instagram. Nowadays, you can say that a large part of the world's population uses Social Media. But users do not only interact there with their friends, acquaintances, or strangers, they also inform themselves about products and services.

Social media platforms have increasingly evolved into global marketplaces in recent years. So whoever needs to place advertisements cannot avoid social media ads anymore. Because every one of the billions of users is a potential customer.

The platforms differ significantly in user behaviour. So advertising on social media initially requires a deep understanding of how the respective platforms and their users tick.

This should not deter you and your marketing teams: because social media marketing follows rules and best practices that you can learn. The right advertising strategy is important to get the best possible result from your advertising budget.

We have summarized here for you what you need to consider today regarding Social Media Advertising (SMA), which platforms are the most important and which tools will assist you in implementing your advertising campaigns.

What is actually Social Media Advertising?

Social Media Advertising (SMA) is comprised of paid advertisements appearing in the feeds of social media users and are intended to generate leads, conversions (usually referring to purchases) or awareness, depending on the objective.

However, social media ads are usually not standalone pieces but part of a cross-platform Social Media Campaign, referred to as multi-channel marketing. Thus, a company or brand's Social Media Marketing includes social media campaigns composed of individual social media ads.

Social Media Advertising fundamentally refers to all advertising measures taking place on the various social media platforms. For the users themselves, these platforms are almost always free of charge. However, since social media platforms with billions of users have immense ongoing costs, they must generate their revenue and profits from advertising income.

Overview of platforms: Which channels is social media advertising broadcasted on?

You could say that almost half of all humanity is on social media. As a brand, this means, regardless of the product or service you offer, you are guaranteed to find potential customers on social media. However, each platform has its own rules that you must understand before advertising anywhere.

Not only the number of users, user behaviour, approach and simple „sound“ of the platform can vary significantly: what might pass as a joke on Reddit could spell the end of a career on LinkedIn. Your commercial ads' design will also differ from one platform to the next: square image or portrait format, a 15-second video clip without sound but with subtitles, or a one-minute video.

You can find a detailed and comprehensive overview of all platforms, their relevance, and user behaviour in the article about Social Media Platforms. We'll provide a brief introduction to the most important platforms:

Facebook

The most crucial platform from a marketing perspective also has the best targeting options: you can define your target group nowhere more specifically than on Facebook. And due to almost 2.9 billion users globally, a lot of user data accumulates.

For you and your marketing team, this means: You can set almost all parameters that might be meaningful for your targeting. In addition to the usual data like age group, place of residence, monthly income, and interests, you can specifically target individual Facebook group members or offer your services and products to users who have previously shown interest in something similar.

The Meta Business Manager is simultaneously a powerful evaluation tool with which you can measure the success of your ads. Also, because Instagram is part of Facebook, the ads configured via the Manager can be broadcasted cross-platform on Facebook and Instagram.

YouTube

In 2022, about 2.56 billion users from around the world are on YouTube, making it the second most used social media platform in the world. As for users aged 18-34, YouTube actually ranks first.

YouTube was designed as a pure video platform but is now also including text-based content and Reels into its users' feeds. Therefore, marketing teams have many options to design their advertising according to their target audience.

Incidentally, Germany is among the top-8 countries in terms of YouTube usage: 66 million German users are found on the platform.

YouTube was founded in 2005 and was bought by Google a year later for a then-record sum of 1.65 billion US dollars. Therefore, you will need a Google Ads account to be able to advertise on YouTube. YouTube now accounts for about 6 percent of Google's total advertising revenue.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp is the most widely used messaging service by far: nearly two billion registered users use the app to send messages to their friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. WhatsApp, like Instagram, is part of the Facebook Empire (or Meta) and has been ad-free until now.

However, this is expected to change in 2022. Details are not yet known, but it is assumed that the ads, similar to Instagram, can be displayed between the stories of contacts.

Instagram

Instagram counts nearly 1.5 billion users worldwide. The app had already acquired over one million users just two months after its foundation in 2010, and it's by far the most significant photo-sharing app on the market. Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012. Therefore, Instagram advertising is designed, steered, and tracked via the Facebook Manager.

The then completely new advertising concept of influencer marketing was also born on Instagram: Influencer Marketing means that brands and companies leverage the reach and social proof of well-known influencers and cooperate with them.

With the necessary tact and cooperation with the right influencers, win-win situations can arise which are very advantageous.

Even though Instagram started as a pure photo-sharing app, you can now post stories like on Snapchat and upload Reels similar to TikTok. Thus, advertisers find themselves in the excellent situation that they can reach Instagram users in three ways: advertising in the feed, advertising between stories, and advertising between reels.

TikTok

A few years ago, very few brands and advertising agencies seriously considered the platform. By 2022, TikTok already has already amassed two billion users worldwide - still steadily increasing. For the target group of 16- to 24-year-olds, TikTok has significantly overtaken Instagram.

TikTok's algorithm distinguishes itself from the Instagram algorithm in that as a user, you see posts from all users rather than just your friends. This implies that everyone has the chance to go viral - on Instagram, you would first need to have a corresponding number of followers for that.

For brands or marketing teams who can handle the dynamics of this platform, there are opportunities to achieve maximum results with relatively low budget and reach.

The most used social media platforms worldwide in January 2022

What are the advantages and disadvantages of social media advertising?

Social Media Ads are an essential part of every marketing mix nowadays.

The advantages are obvious:

• A huge number of users are concentrated on a few platforms and can therefore be addressed globally with little effort.
• You have full cost control with minimal scatter - provided you understand your target group and have clearly defined objectives and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Your predetermined maximum amount will not be exceeded.
• The evaluation possibilities are far more precise than with other media: algorithmized evaluation tools are available for you and your marketing teams, with which you can check almost every parameter. And not only afterwards, but while the campaign is still running. Once broadcasted, television or radio commercials cannot be adjusted, but social media commercials can.
• Real-time communication with potential customers leads to stronger customer loyalty, as users are collected in their own world.
• Completely new and innovative products and services can be pointed out in visually striking messages - even if no search requests for the solution exist yet. The message is „pushed“ into the market.

Beside the countless advantages, disadvantages can arise, especially if you are not clear about your target audience before your social media advertising campaign or what exactly you want to achieve with your advertising measures.

Social Media Ads usually go wrong when companies appeal to a target group that does not correspond to their actual branding - or jump on social media trends that they perhaps don't fully understand. Not without reason, „Cringe“ was the youth word of the year 2021: those who exaggerate on social media or do not understand the unwritten rules quickly become embarrassing.

Even though each platform dictates its own design and formatting guidelines causing each of your social media ads to look different: your style guide should be sacrosanct and must never be discarded in the hunt for quick clicks.

To best exploit the advantages of Social Media Advertising and minimize the risk of potential disadvantages, you or your marketing team should follow trends precisely on the one hand while never losing sight of your brand's identity on the other. Hiring external social media managers or social media agencies can quickly pay off here.

What do Social Media Ads cost?

One of the major advantages of social media marketing is the ability to precisely control your costs. This is done simply by setting your maximum amount. The so-called Max Ad Spend limits your daily or total budget to the amount you have set, and your social media ads are simply published until your budget is exhausted. So you never pay more than planned.

Most social media ads follow either the PPC or PPV principle. PPC stands for Pay-per-Click, which means that you only pay for your advertisement when it is actually clicked on.

PPV stands for Pay-per-View: here, the cost of the advertisement arises from the impressions, meaning how often the ad appears on the users' screens.

How much each click or impression ultimately costs not only varies from platform to platform, but also depends on the competitive situation: Prices are auctioned in real time, and advertising space is allocated accordingly. Your previously set Max Ad Spend is never exceeded.

How do you measure the success of Social Media Ads?

Another advantage of Social Media Ads is the ability to evaluate in real time. Print or radio advertising, once printed or aired, can no longer be adjusted. However, with your Social Media Ad, you can observe and trial what works and what doesn’t by A/B testing during the campaign's duration.

It is obviously important that you have clearly defined your goals in advance and know your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) precisely. Do you want to increase your sales? Create brand awareness, thus increasing your brand's reach? Or generate leads that, for example, grow your mailing list?

If formulated well, all these KPIs are quantitatively measurable. Unlike print or radio advertising, suffering from too broad and indeterminable spread, you can genuinely say whether and how successful Social Media Ads were.

The platforms provide you with analysis tools for this purpose. For example, Facebook provides the Meta Business Manager, a comprehensive evaluation and analysis interface. Of course, you can also revert to external tools with which you can individually manage the tracking of your KPI.

Which tools assist you in creating Social Media Ads?

There are many tools that can help you better plan and implement your Social Media Ads. On OMR Reviews, we have looked at which tools are indispensable and which ones you can neglect.

With Canva Pro for instance, you can professionally design your advertisements without relying on Photoshop or external graphic designers.

When it comes to advertising on Facebook and Instagram, the in-house Facebook Creator Studio suits you best: it optimally plans all your social media ads from conception to broadcasting and evaluation.

Besides Canva Pro and Facebook Creator Studio, other well-rated tools certainly worth a glance include Hootsuite, Emplifi or Facelift. These three tools promise comprehensive planning of social media campaigns across all platforms.

If you want to get a quick overview, you can delve deeper in the article about the 7 best Social Media Tools in comparison.

Checklist for Social Media Ads

We summarize for you what you should keep in mind for a successful Social Media Ad:

1. Define goals: What should your Social Media Ad achieve, which KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are important to you? Do you want to generate leads, collect addresses for your email distribution list, increase your conversions and sales, or create brand awareness? Your Ad strategy depends on this. The goals should be measurable: How many leads should ideally be generated? How many followers should the Ad bring you? How often should your page be called up? And by what percentage should brand awareness increase in your target group?
2. Determine target group: Targeting must be on point. Who should see your Ad, when and where? Social media platforms with their billions of users are huge databases just waiting to be optimally utilized by you and your marketing team. Targeting options are becoming more sophisticated and target groups can be addressed better and more specifically.
3. Select the platform: Where do your potential customers hang out? Different users are on Instagram than on YouTube or LinkedIn. Each platform also has its own design and formatting guidelines which will determine the further course of your advertising strategy: square image or portrait format? Video or Reel, sound or no sound? How many seconds do you have before the user continues to click? After all, the general engagement rate and duration of use varies from platform to platform. Users might watch a one-minute commercial on YouTube because they are ready for longer formats. Probably not on TikTok
4. Establish approach: Your advertising's appearance and sound is determined by your style guide. However, adjustments are possible and necessary here. How do you address the users of the respective platforms so that they understand your brand immediately? A successful social media advertisement does two things at once: it clearly communicates your brand and what you stand for - while also adapting to the platform-specific UX without irritating the users.
5. Evaluate advertising: Your work does not end with playing out the Ads. Powerful tracking tools keep you up to date on how each of your ads is performing. Real-time evaluation provides valuable learnings: you should not only keep an eye on conversion, but also parameters such as bounce rate, click rate, and engagement duration. Ideally, you should also conduct A/B tests. Sometimes, those social media ads, which you might not have expected, perform best.

Conclusion: Who are Social Media Ads suitable for?

Whether you want to increase your sales, create awareness, or generate leads: there is no way around Social Media Ads today. The billions of users can be found and addressed through precise targeting. The equally precise evaluation possibilities mean that you can constantly improve your advertising based on your customers' needs.

Social Media Ads are now simply part of a successful marketing mix. And any brand that has clearly defined its goals, knows its target group exactly and has understood the laws and rules of the respective platforms can only win with Social Media Advertising.