20 Feb Why Paid Media Must Be Part of Your Social Content Strategy
Since 2013, organic distribution of brand’s social media, especially on Facebook, has taken a hit. Today, brands are lucky to get 3% organic reach on their social content. This decrease in organic reach by platforms has caused a huge spike in brands paying billions of dollars to advertise to see any kind of meaningful results from their efforts. So why should you use paid media to support your social efforts? Reach and conversion are two very important reasons.
Importance of Paid Media in Your Strategy
Reaching Existing & New Social Audiences
Prior to 2013, you could push a social post out and expect a good number of your current followers to see it. Those were the days when acquiring as many fans as you could was an important metric. Now, acquiring fans means you are paying to acquire them and then you must pay again to reach them for every post you publish.
Increasing awareness and expanding to new audiences is a common objective for many of our clients. A key strategy to reach new audiences includes activating your existing fans to share and advocate on your behalf. While this is still relevant, we have seen it become less reliable. Overall, users sharing branded content has been declining; however, reaching friends of friends is still possible through Lookalike audience targeting. Creating Lookalike audiences allows you to reach people like your existing target audience based on their demographics and interests.
Putting paid media behind content can ensure you are reaching those audiences you worked so hard to build, as well as those you haven’t gotten in front of yet.
Converting Customers
Social media success has historically been very focused on how many likes, comments or shares a brand received on a post. Social media marketers would use these as benchmarks on what was or wasn’t resonating with their audiences. But those metrics are hard to bubble up to show how it drove sales or something tangible to the brand.
The good news for social media marketers is that the platforms have evolved in their metrics and tracking capabilities. Almost every channel has a pixel that you can place on your website to better track and retarget users throughout the customer journey. Converting can look different for every brand but essentially, it means to drive an action. This can be an online or offline sale, generating a lead or getting a person to take an action on a landing page. Optimizing your paid media for conversion will make sure that the people who are most likely to take that specific action are served that ad. Using social media to convert new customers is something that even upper management can get excited about.
The approach to using social media to convert customers is something we are passionate about and has led our social media advertising agency to a new approach. So far, we have seen some impressive results.
Let’s Start A Conversation!
Want social content that delivers real business results for your brand? Fill out the form below and let’s chat!
