Today we are going to talk about how to advertise your business or website through social media. Currently, various businesses and individuals are getting high incomes through social media and thus other people are using these things a lot to advertise their business activities. In the last few years, new methods were also used when a large number of people started doing business through the internet. Many businesses use e-commerce websites to provide superior customer service to their clients and run their business through social media. Apart from that, people also started new businesses and making money online. Especially here are the platforms and websites that are free and can be easily accessed by beginners and people of all ages. None of the sources shown here are rated at our discretion and may vary depending on individual decisions.
Facebook is now one of the most popular marketing platforms on the planet. As the social giant has grown to more than 2.7 billion active users, it’s also expanded its advertising network to suit a wide range of businesses.
Now a ton of the benefits of advertising on Facebook are obvious, but paid advertising does come with a lot of complexities. It’s important to understand what Facebook offers businesses and how its paid ad network is built to offer a bunch of advertising options before you can see how it might help you reach new audiences.
So we’ve written this blog to help you understand – and take advantage of – Facebook’s advertising benefits.
Facebook’s market share for digital advertising is close to 20%, making it one if the single largest options for advertising, behind only Google. Plus the 2020 corona virus pandemic has given digital advertising some unexpected swings, Facebook’s Q2 revenue is well past $18 billion, an 11% increase over 2019! And average ad costs are lower than last year as well. As the world adjusts to decreased store traffic and lower brick-and-mortar results it only makes sense to consider the benefits of Facebook advertising for your business. Online-first companies and eCommerce are set to become the norm for businesses and the advantages of Facebook advertising over its competitors make it a good option.
Facebook’s advertising model functions on the ubiquitous “pay-per-click” model which has become the single biggest system for internet advertising. The reasons why PPC is important are also the same benefits of Facebook advertising: it’s affordable, effective, and fast.
1. Facebook ads can give results very fast
Facebook business ads are ideal for brands that are looking to run both short-term and long-term digital marketing strategies – since they can start providing revenue/conversion as soon as they go live. But they’re best for fast results.
Once ad campaigns are set up in the Ads Manager, are reviewed by Facebook, and once they go live, they start working immediately and begin showing your brand/products to potentially thousands of people instantly. Ads are normally approved within 24 hours, so the Facebook advertising benefits come from giving businesses a way to start getting sales within a couple days.
2. You reach more people than with just organic social media
This is another reason why advertising on Facebook is worthwhile. Because businesses will reach more people than with just their organic social media marketing. And they’ll be able to expand the reach of their existing content both on-platform and off.
Paid advertising and organic advertising aren’t exclusive though, you can do both! And with ad types specifically designed for engagement, signups, or followings, paid-ads can actually improve your organic traffic as well. And they’ll do it faster – one of the key benefits of Facebook advertising. Paid ads get better engagement, far greater impressions, and more conversions. This means your content gets more views.
3. They give better content marketing results
Facebook ads can be used to bolster an existing content marketing campaign. Content marketing is a broad digital marketing method that involves on-site content, blogging, social-media, and even search engine optimization. Facebook can help in all of these areas.
Facebook ads can help a business get more visibility for their Facebook content and boost traffic to their core website content – whether it’s cornerstone site content, simple ad copy, or blogs. Facebook ads can be set up to target greater site traffic, more impressions, and even click-through-rate (CTR).
Ad Objectives are set up specifically with these goal as available targets:
Traffic as an objective means ads built specifically to get people onto your site, for specific landing page.
Engagement as an objective can help people interact more with your organic content on your business page – using comments, likes, shares, etc.
Video views can be prioritized for multi-media and video content campaigns.The ability to incorporate your content with your paid-marketing efforts means better success. This is likely why Facebook ads are one of the most popular channels there is, in fact 90 million small businesses use Facebook for marketing. And in 2020 it’s expected that 87% of U.S. marketers will take advantage of Facebook ads.
Pinterest is often undervalued by social media marketers and considered an unnecessary component of a marketing strategy — unfortunately, if this isn’t the case for your team, you could be missing out on a major source of traffic and income.Pinterest offers plenty of unique opportunities for marketers to reach leads and influence consumer purchasing behavior. In fact, Pinners are 7x more influential than any other platform along their purchasing journey.
Pinterest Advertising With over 442 million monthly active users, Pinterest is a great place for businesses to advertise products. Ads show up on users’ feeds and searches in the same format as a regular Pin, making the experience unobtrusive for users while putting your content right in front of them.
There is a large potential reach when you create ads for Pinterest audiences — and, best of all, users are also actively searching the site for products like yours to buy.
1. Gain Brand Awareness
Pinterest ads are an efficient way to gain brand awareness and recognition online. When compared to other social media platforms, Pinterest is the most suitable for branded content as users are more acceptable for it, nor the content itself is invasive for the experience.
Pinterest is a discovery tool, and users tend to look for new ideas, and brands can use it to their benefit. More and more users see brands on Pinterest the first time, especially with promoted pins.
Utilizing the platform in your marketing strategy increases the number of touch-points your target audience can engage with you online. To build brand recognition is all about being more seen and available than ever before.
Brands on Pinterest can benefit from three different metrics to measure their success on the platform: Increased awareness, boost favorability, and brand perceptions.
Introducing new ideas and topics with your brand to users who are researching and engaged with these topics and ideas, is a benefit of Pinterest ads, that in other platforms is hard to replicate.
Every brand and business can benefit from the use of Pinterest ads in their online marketing strategy, but its key to discovering your perfect audience for best performance.
2. Pinterest Benefits To Content Marketing
Pinterest ads are an excellent add-on to any content marketing strategy as it offers a visual platform to post your content, expanding and giving you more options for your content distribution strategy.
Using Pinterest in your content strategy, you can modify your content from other platforms to fit the Pinterest standards easily to connect with your audience there too. Creating a cross-platform social media strategy is an effective method to increase your reach online.
For example, you launch video ads through Facebook and Youtube, and in most cases, you can use the same videos in Pinterest ads or by modifying it a little.
Creating engaging Pins to reach your audience and increase your target audiences makes Pinterest an excellent option for content marketing. Create Pins that showcase your products, services, and ideas.
As an Image-based platform, the most crucial part of Pinterest is to have clear, high-quality, and engaging images. You want to use images that will spark interest and make your audience engage with it whether to go to your website, saving the pin for later, or sharing with friends.
The benefit of Pinterest is you can share different types of images to elevate your brand through the network.
By learning what types of pins to post to your target audience, you will increase your reach and results of any Pinterest goal you might want. Replicating successful pins over and over again will make the platform into a traffic-generating channel for your business.
3. Increase Your Reach, Traffic, and Sales
Utilizing high-quality images within Pinterest search can bring more traffic to your websites and landing pages while increasing your brand awareness, traffic, and sales.
A benefit of Pinterest is it can bring more online traffic to your business, whether the traffic is paid or gained organically on the platform.
83% of weekly pinners have purchased from a brand seen on Pinterest, making the platform a social destination for users with a high purchase-intent to your website. The opportunity to target users of higher conversion rates for businesses is vast.
As users on Pinterest are more open to new brands, using Pinterest in your marketing strategy, even for smaller brands can bring much-needed awareness and sales.
Pinterest ads can expedite your strategy for the platform successfully. Using ads to promote your content further is crucial to gain more traffic and brand awareness and helps your content become more viral on the platform.
Using Pinterest as a marketing strategy offers a long-term generator of online traffic, reach, and visibility for businesses of all kinds.
For companies competing for online visibility, not using Pinterest may hinder your business’s competitiveness.
TikTok
If you’re a Baby Boomer or somebody who hasn’t kept up with the social media habits of youth, you might be surprised by the recent popularity of TikTok. As we showed in our Ultimate TikTok Benchmarks Guide, TikTok has quickly grown to become the world’s 7th most followed social platform. It has a more sizable following than some of the arguably better-known platforms, such as Snapchat, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Indeed, TikTok was the 6th ranking app globally by monthly active users in 2019, and its success has continued into 2020.
The nature of TikTok, featuring videos of 15 to 60 seconds, does limit the number of ad spots available, compared to some other apps, such as Twitter, meaning that your ad is less likely to get lost in a crowd of competing ads.
TikTok introduced a self-service advertising platform in 2019, similar in style to Facebook’s offering, making it easier to create TikTok ads than it had previously been.
However, TikTok advertising isn’t for every business. The first rule of social advertising is to market where your target audience spends its time. Therefore, there is little point advertising on TikTok if you sell to the wrong demographic. TikTok is overwhelmingly the realm of Millennials and Generation Z. As we found in the previously mentioned TikTok benchmarks article, 41 percent of TikTok users are aged between 16 and 24, and roughly 50% of TikTok’s global audience is under the age of 34. If you mainly sell to Baby Boomers, there is probably little point in having a presence on the platform.
1. You can reach a diverse audience through TikTok ads
It is no secret that most of the content creators on TikTok are GenZ, but a common misconception about TikTok is that every user is between the ages of 16 and 24. While 41% of users do fall into this age range, this means that 59% of the platform is made up of users from the Millenial, GenX, and even Baby Boomer generations (my 60-year-old father is on the app—hi dad!).
In fact, within the past 18 months, the number of US adult TikTok users has grown 5.5 times, receiving more downloads within Q1 2020 than any other app ever during the same time span (likely due to the spread of COVID-19 and quarantine, but 5.5 times is still impressive).
Most of the ads that I see on my TikTok are for ecommerce, streaming service, and app downloads, usually wanting me to take some sort of action like go to their website or start a free trial. And as you know, there are streaming services, apps, and other platforms and products for all ages and walks of life. Emily True, one of our Account Managers at WordStream who is a Millennial, also sees ads on TikTok for products in line with the lifestyle of her generation. “I see a lot of eCommerce and lifestyle ads on TikTok,” True says. “Some ads are from my favorite clothing brands, and I tend to see a lot of electronics and tech accessories too.”
As you can see, there is a very apparent opportunity to advertise to the GenZ demographic on TikTok if your brand matches that demographic. However, with 59% of users being 25+ along with the unique communities within it, there is opportunity to reach countless other niches, age groups, and other specific demographics by advertising on TikTok.
2. TikTok makes it easy and affordable to create great campaigns
Many brands, especially small businesses, don’t think it’s worth the time and money to be advertising on TikTok, thinking it’s too difficult to set up campaigns, create authentic and engaging video content, and keep track of yet another platform’s data. In reality, it isn’t that hard to set up a TikTok campaign, and there are many other resources to help you get started.
And if you were worried about not having the budget for advertising on TikTok, fear no more! TikTok is helping small businesses advertise on their platform through their relief program, Back to Business, which is providing $100M in ad credits for advertisers worldwide. Their goal is to help small businesses who have been financially impacted by the COVID-19 crisis and get them back to business. Eligible businesses can claim a one-time ad credit worth $300 USD to be used by the end of 2020.
Advertisers who utilize this program will have access to self-serving advertising features such as creative tools, flexible budgets, performance targeting, and business accounts. They will also have the ability to potentially reach millions of users worldwide and create meaningful brand content that shows creativity and drives engagement.
3. TikTok is great for influencer marketing
Collaborating with TiKTok creators is a powerful form of influencer marketing, which enables you to promote your brand via content that has the highest potential reach, behind Facebook and Instagram.
These creators (influencers, celebrities, bloggers, and athletes) use TikTok to share their perspectives, recipes, families, dance moves, and other aspects of their daily lives. But unlike Instagram which uses heavy editing, professional studio lighting, makeup, and camera work, the idea on TikTok is to share experiences in the raw. This makes for more relatable and genuine content.
Many influencers like Charli D’aMelio and Addison Rae have been discovered through TikTok and have gained tens of millions of followers within the past year, not to mention forged many business partnerships very early in their careers.
LinkedIn isn’t just for professionals and job seekers. Sure, millions of professionals use LinkedIn every day to grow their networks and their careers, but you can use LinkedIn to grow your business too. This social media tool exposes you and your business to millions of connections that you can use to build relationships with individuals and other companies to boost your brand.
At its core, LinkedIn is a professional social network. It’s all about career development, professional connections, industry discussions and other business-related activities. You can find customers, employees and partners alike on LinkedIn.
1. Importance of a LinkedIn marketing strategy
LinkedIn is less about selling or marketing your products and services than other social platforms. On LinkedIn, blatantly pushing your business, spamming and obvious hard-selling are highly frowned upon. This is why having a marketing strategy specific to the platform is so important. Because the network consists of a totally different audience, LinkedIn marketing requires a different approach to get the results you want.
According to Sprout Social, businesses marketing on LinkedIn generate 277% more leads on average than those engaged in Facebook marketing alone. Surveyed B2B marketers also said that LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of their social media leads. Used appropriately, LinkedIn is an effective marketing tool that can take your business to the next level.
2. You want to be viewed as a thought leader in your industry
When you maintain an active LinkedIn profile, you build your position as a thought leader within your industry. Over time, your followers will see you as the go-to person when they want to learn more about your area of expertise. This approach elevates your personal and company brand while educating those around you. You likely will not notice an immediate return from this part of the tactic, but it’s well worth the long-term return on investment.
3. You want to build relationships with individual members of your audience
LinkedIn is more focused on individuals than it is on companies. As such, it’s a wonderful tool to help you build meaningful connections with others in your industry, as well as prospective customers or job candidates. Those LinkedIn members often have something to teach us, and we can learn about them in the process.
By building these connections, you can identify who might be a good fit to join your company’s team or who might find great success using your product or service. This approach can help you identify specific targets and give your recruiting or sales team a head start.
With more than 1 billion active users, Instagram is a leading social media platform. Not convinced by this number? Well, just a little while ago, Instagram announced its 700 million users milestone. A growth of almost 30+% in a little time tells us more about this platform’s popularity and future potential than anything else.
In simple words, it has become a huge and diverse online community with unlimited marketing potential.
Of course, Facebook has more active users than Instagram. However, shear numbers may not be the first thing to consider when advertising a small business. If you want to successfully promote your small business, you should look first at the relevant data. The statistics are more than just simple numbers calculated in order to attract more users.
According to Forrester, Instagram is the king of social media with a 4.21% engagement rate.
This is a huge number, considering that Facebook and Twitter combined barely reach a 0.10 engagement rate. “Instagram delivered 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter” Forrester ads.
1. How to promote your small business on Instagram
There are several options when launching an Instagram campaign. But you need to know from the start exactly what you want and what your target is.
Learn as much as possible about Instagram and Instagram advertising by reading everything you can find online about this topic.
You’ll have to choose which type of your campaign will be the best for your business. Basically, there are 2 advertising methods on Instagram, the free one and of course, the paid ads feature.
2. Build a following for your brand
While people go to social networks to connect with their family, friends, or to see what their favorite celebrities’ are up to, millions check out what brands are sharing. It’s not every platform that users actively do that. In fact, 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile each day. 81% of Instagram users also use the platform to research products and services. In addition, now that Instagram recently made shopping more prominent on the platform, 130 million users tap on shopping posts every month.
This is your cue to step in and show off what you’re offering in a captivating, visual manner. If done right, brands can build a significant following and drive business from the platform, so don’t hold back. Develop a strategy for the platform on its own but also consider how it will play in your holistic marketing and advertising strategy. Develop and use visually appealing and compelling content, and see how Instagram fairs for your brand and the products or services you provide.
3. Showcase your brand through Stories
Snapchat may have been the first with ephemeral content, but it’s not the last. Instagram developed its own version after Snapchat declined Facebook’s acquisition offer and quickly surpassed Snapchat’s userbase. While Instagram Stories isn’t new, more brands continue getting into this popular placement and seeing great success. Currently, a half billion people are watching Stories every day, thus further emphasizing why it’s important to add Stories into your organic and paid advertising strategy. While it’s true across Facebook’s advertising ecosystem, it carries over into Instagram as well, that you can easily connect with target audiences that may not know you exist and that you could add value into their lives. By showing up in front of them, you can quickly captivate using Stories given the brevity of the content and then get people into your funnel. With more than half of users saying they become more interested in a product or service after they see it in Stories, you might as well bet on yourself and see what kind of results Instagram Ads can bring you and your business.
