When I first started in marketing, social media didn’t exist. Even 10 years ago, social media seemed to be an unproven way of interacting with an audience that I wasn’t sure was there or interested. Now, the landscape is completely different.
More than 2.2 billion people use social media, making it the marketing channel with the most potential. Unfortunately, businesses and marketers still struggle with how to tap that potential and how to measure its ROI.
Social media has the unique ability to impact any stage of a buyer’s journey if marketers understand how to focus resources where they can add the most value.
According to an April 2016 eMarketer report, social network ad revenue is expected to hit $32.91 billion in 2016, growing 30.9% from last year.
Paid, owned and earned social media strategies are becoming more intertwined for companies able to take advantage of their brand equity and use it to leverage their marketing strategies.
Why Use Facebook Advertising?
Over 1 billion people log into Facebook each day. As a hub for discovery, information and fan interaction, Facebook is an extension of many brands’ websites and Facebook advertising is a core component of their marketing strategy.
With Facebook’s Direct Response Advertising, ads can be shown to a highly customized audience segmented using a multitude of Facebook’s demographic, behavioral and interest data. Or ads can be shown to existing customers using Facebook profiles to deliver ads directly to their desktop or mobile Newsfeed.
Facebook ads give marketers the ability to capture real-time leads. Here are some types of ads marketers use effectively on Facebook:
- Drive foot traffic to your store location
- Promote coupons
- Gain new mobile app installations
- Raise brand awareness
- Increase website and landing page traffic
- Generate and collect leads at the click of a button
- Increase Facebook followers
Why Use Instagram Advertising?
Instagram is one of the fastest growing social networks in history. The mobile photo and video-sharing app boasts more than 500 million monthly active users, 80 million photo posted each day and 3.5 billion Likes per day.
Instagram’s ad offerings have diversified over the past year. Marketers can opt for photo, video or carousel ads, all with the option to link to a website to learn more. To ensure your best reach with social media marketing, multi-channel campaigns should integrate Instagram advertising with their Facebook advertising.
Conclusion
The major directives of any marketing team are usually to create brand awareness and to drive demand by generating leads and retaining current customers. In order to successfully fuel these components, marketers need to understand how social media can contribute.
We need to measure not only engagement and traffic, but also conversions that result in revenue generation with social media being an important part of any multi-channel marketing campaign.
And don’t overlook the benefit social marketing can provide of buyer advocacy once a purchase has been made. Referrals, influencer activity and positive social word-of-mouth testimonials can impact your company’s bottom line.
There’s little doubt today that your audience is on social media. Now get out there and take advantage of social marketing’s ability to influence their awareness and decision making before your competitors do!