Are paid social media ads worth it?
There’s only so much free social media, also known as organic social media, can do. If you have been availing of multiple free marketing platforms and you are still not seeing quality results, it may be time to rethink your social media strategy by investing in paid advertising. Online paid advertising will generate valuable traffic to your website, create brand awareness, increase leads, and make sales… when done right.
What is Online Paid Advertising?
With a surge in today’s social media, it can be difficult for your company’s message to be heard organically.
Organic social is when a business posts their content for free and that content will show up on the social feeds of people that already follow them.
Paid social is shared with money behind it to reach a larger audience. These posts will show up in whatever audience you determine as your ideal target market based on demographics, location, interests, and more.
Paid advertising is often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC). PPC includes Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Instagram Ads among other social and digital platforms.
What are the Benefits of Paid Online Advertising?
1. It’s cost-effective.
Online advertising is affordable because you only pay when a user lands on your website making it good value for money. You can start advertising on Facebook for as little as £1 per day and then increase your budget as you grow. As you run your campaigns, you can make many small adjustments to improve based on what works best.
2. It works fast.
Paid advertising works fast because you are targeting a specific customer who is already interested in your product or service. Paid Ads help generate leads that are already there to make a purchase. You will see the impact of your efforts almost immediately. Organic search engine optimisation (SEO) tactics can take months to make a difference.
3. It’s Measurable.
When you set up an advertising campaign on social platforms, you don’t need to wait for results. You can track the success of your campaigns in real-time and gain insightful information that can help you further.
You will get access to analytics that will inform you of which campaigns get the best engagement. It will also tell you how many converted into sales and leads, and how much you’ve spent/made on your campaign meaning you can make changes to get better results.
4. You have more control.
Not only are paid campaigns measurable but you can select your keywords, make updates, changes, or remove ads instantly. You can run a last-minute sales ad and then take it down when you run out of stock.
5. It’s specific and targeted.
With paid social advertising, you can target specific customers when you use data collected by a social media platform. You can run multiple different ads that target different types of customers. Each customer will only see the ad that is most relevant to them based on demographic, language, the device used etc. This segmented strategy allows you to get your business in front of multiple potential customers.
What are the disadvantages of paid advertising?
Some of the challenges of paid advertising on social media include:
1. Time investment
You can't just set up your ad campaigns and leave them. You need to invest time into optimising and improving to get the best results.
2. Skills required
Paid Advertising can be hard to master. While it can be easy, to begin with, it takes work to ensure keywords are up-to-date and relevant. Ads can be competitive in bid and quality. It can take some practice to set up effective campaigns. Many businesses choose to use a specialist agency.
3. Costs can quickly add up
If you are receiving a lot of irrelevant clicks, it can quickly become expensive. If you aren't monitoring and optimising your campaigns to make sure you get a return on investment, money will end up being wasted.
4. Clicks and visits don't always lead to sales
Paid Campaigns don’t guarantee sales or leads, especially when they are not reviewed or amended to improve the settings or creatives. Sometimes the problem lies in the landing page connected to the ad not being conducive to bringing the customer journey to the desired outcome. So paid ads can waste a lot of money by producing no sales or leads or waste money on poor quality leads or low-value sales. This tends to happen because not all accounts are actively managed. Oversight of the sales funnel that brings a customer to be a converted sale is crucial.
Need help getting started with Paid Advertising?
You have a marketing strategy in place but with so many possibilities, platforms and different types of campaigns to run- it can be a minefield. You want to increase the traffic to your website and grow your business at the same time - paid advertising is a brilliant method to drive targeted traffic to your website fast.
At Ruthless Media, we work with you to create targeted and effective ads that will make sure your potential customers find you online.
Discover how intelligent, data-driven campaigns have helped clients achieve success on social platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Snapchat, and Tik Tok.
Ruthless Media can plan and manage paid campaigns for you, or you can sign up for the ‘Boost Your Own Business’ Programme to have your ads manager set up correctly with custom audiences, bespoke paid ads strategy and 1:1 mentoring to give you confidence to run your own campaigns.
Buy your ‘Boost Your Own Business’ Package or contact Ruthless Media to find out more about our full range of paid ads services.
