Paid advertisements on social media channels can be very useful for your marketing strategy. Throughout this article we will refer to paid advertisements as paid content and we will refer to free content generated by you without any sort of boosting as organic content. Organic content on social media channels is vital to the success of brand awareness however, with the incredible increase of companies on social channels, paid content has become necessary in order for companies to reach target consumers via social media. As users are exposed to more posts, the impact of each message becomes weaker. Facebook and other channels have built their algorithms to offer only the most relevant content to users in order to not overwhelmed users. This is where paid ads come into play.

“78% of the U.S. is on at least one social media channel”

Paid ads are offered to increase reach to target audiences segmented by age, location, job title, income, interests, and more. For Facebook, this ensures users are receiving messages they would be interested in reading, maintaining user satisfaction. For businesses, this means increasing return on investment by targeting users specifically interested in what they have to offer. From either side paid ads are profitable and help to cut out barriers.

Paid ads mean a greater reach for your content, and not by increasing views by general users but by potential customers. If you were to look into your current social market you are almost guaranteed to find users you do not consider your target market. It is important that your social audience matches your customer base. By creating a focused audience, your content will begin to reach other consumers similar to your focused audience, and perpetuate ROI.

“65% of B2B companies have acquired a customer by using LinkedIn and its ad features”

Once your audience has grown,  engagement should naturally increase. This is a result of choosing the correct market. If you do not immediately see an increase in engagement however, don’t worry. Consider paying attention to your most successful posts and take note of trends across the individual posts; word use, call to action, use of photos, use of links, etc. Then take what is most engaging and turn it into a paid ad. Most social platforms offer different types of ads for different ROI objectives. For increased engagement, use an ad targeted at increasing engagement for example a promoted post. Create a post similar to your most engaging posts and boost it to a much larger Facebook audience. This should not only increase engagement for the individual post but other previous organic posts and posts to come.

Paid ads can be extremely useful for promoting your business across social media channels, with 78% of the U.S. on at least one social media channel, ignoring its importance could be very harmful for your business. Now that you have a little background information, lets dive into the different platforms you should be utilizing.