In the world of digital marketing, paid social advertising has become an essential tool for businesses looking to reach their existing and new audiences. But what is paid social advertising and a paid social agency, and how can paid socials drive conversions? Discover all this and more by diving into this helpful blog post on Soar With Us!

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What is Paid Social?

Paid social means using paid advertising on social media platforms to promote a brand, product, or content. This involves paying the platform to display your ads to a targeted audience to achieve greater online visibility and increase engagement further than organic posts might achieve. Common platforms for paid social include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Through a paid social media strategy, businesses can target and reach their target audience using specific demographics, interests, and behaviours, enhancing their marketing efforts. In 2024, social media ads account for 28.8% of all digital advertising spend, which is no surprise due to its strategic ability to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to a website, or generate leads.

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What is a Paid Social Agency?

A paid social agency like Soar With Us specialises in creating and managing paid social media campaigns for businesses. They help companies reach their target audience effectively and drive engagement and conversions to generate consistent, profitable results.

They manage your social media advertising campaign from start to finish, conducting key research into your audience, their search behaviour and traits, creating ad assets, monitoring performance, and evaluating and refining campaigns.

What is the Role of Paid Social?

The role of paid social is simple: generate results and help brands reach their business goals through paid advertisement. Your business can achieve unparalleled business growth by creating engaging advertisements and enticing your audience. It requires an in-depth knowledge of your audience, their paint points and needs, quality asset creation, robust targeting and an eye for analytical evaluation.

What is the Difference Between Organic Social and Paid Social?

When managing your brand's visibility on social media, understanding organic vs paid social media is key; we like to think of them as cousins, related but not the same. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned pro, knowing the key differences between these two types of social media is critical.

Organic social media is the easiest way to impact social media. All it requires is a social media account and some content. Organic social media allows brands and businesses to post content in various forms on their chosen platform to their followers.

Organic social is free and allows brands and businesses to do so without relying on an advertising budget or campaign set up to secure engagement and reach.

Your organic social media posts will only be shown to users who follow your brand's page. In some cases, your organic posts can appear on other user's feeds should your posts have been engaged with or shared by your followers.

Utilising paid social media correctly is an effective way to reach a broader audience, including users who have previously interacted with your brand or are completely new. Your paid social campaign will leverage your organic profile and existing social media presence to target new business opportunities, increase brand visibility and website traffic, generate new business opportunities and grow revenue. This form of advertising has seen a 27.7% increase in spend since 2019.

For more information, see our recent blog, ‘What is the Difference Between Organic and Paid Social Media?’

Driving Conversions With Paid Social

Let's look at 8 key elements of paid social to drive those all-important conversions.

Understand your target audience

Understanding your target audience is key to driving conversions from your audience. Understanding the demographics, interests, behaviours, paint points, and what motivates them to take action online can help brands to create content and ads that resonate with them and, in turn, drive conversions.

By knowing your audience, you can use relevant language and imagery to resonate with them and meet their needs.

Set clear goals and KPIs

By setting clear goals and KPIs, you are solidifying what you would like to achieve through a paid social campaign. Setting goals and objectives is crucial to paid social success as it helps brands remain focused and track their progress as their campaign runs.

An example of a paid social goal could be increasing social media conversions by 30% in the next quarter.

Creating Compelling Content

The content you create and use within your paid social strategy is crucial to grab the attention of your target audience and persuade them to take action. This could include eye-catching visuals, attention-grabbing headlines, and clear calls to action. You must ensure that your ad content is relevant and valuable to your target audience to drive engagement and conversions.

Choosing the Right Platforms

Choosing the right social platforms means identifying the platforms your audience will likely use to maximise ad spend and opportunity. Different social channels work better for other businesses and niches, and a significant part of creating a successful social strategy is knowing where your audience is and making use of those platforms, not just jumping on every platform for the fun of it.

For example, Instagram is known for its image content, while TikTok prioritises video content. By choosing the right platforms, you'll be able to reach your target audience where they are most active and engaged.

Ad Placement and Targeting

If you're not optimising your ad placement and targeting, you can kiss ROI goodbye! Optimising your ad placement and targeting ensures you place your social media ads on platforms and in front of the right audience. Ad placement is where your ad appears on platforms, which in most cases is the news feed. Optimising your targeting allows brands to narrow down who will see their ad using traits, demographics, interests, behaviour and location of their target audience.

Testing and Iterating

In most parts of life, including paid social media, trial and error exists in the form of testing. 

Testing is the process of testing various ad versions and testing them with small, refined pools of your target audience to gauge the better-performing qualities such as the visual, CTA and text.

You can test up to 5 ad variations at once to identify which resonates best with your audience and optimise your campaigns using your learnings to maximise the online opportunities. 

Using the analytics and performance data from these A/B tests, brands can establish the kind of content their audience and potential customers would like to see and use this to inform future strategies to get the most out of their social media marketing efforts.

Measuring Results

Analytical data is any marketer's best friend, and it should be no different for business owners. Your metrics and results aren't meant to scare you. Sure, you may not rack in hundreds of conversions in campaign one, but the data you see from running a paid social campaign is invaluable. You should regularly review and analyse your results to make informed data-led decisions when running your next campaign or optimising your current one; doing so will allow you to get the most out of your social media advertising and give you the best possible chance of increasing ROI.

Utilising Retargeting

The ones that got away...

Retargeting is all about rekindling those old connections with users who have interacted with your brand in some way, whether it be visiting your website, engaging with your content on social media, or clicking on a previous ad.

It uses cookies and pixel tracking to discover those users. It is part of a strategy that can be a powerful tool for improving conversions because it allows you to reach people who are already familiar with your brand or have similar interests and behaviours. According to research, 77% of marketers use retargeting in Facebook and Instagram advertising. 

This strategy makes reaching a marketing-qualified audience more likely and can increase the chances of driving conversions. 

 For more, check out our recent blog, ‘How to Run a Paid Social Campaign’. 

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Our Final Thoughts

Paid social advertising is a dynamic and powerful tool for brands aiming to enhance their online presence and drive conversions. You can reach a broader and more engaged audience by leveraging targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Focusing on understanding your audience, setting clear goals and objectives and maximising our conversion-driving tips, your brand can use paid social advertising to reach wider audiences and curate a successful digital marketing strategy! 

Our savvy social media specialists utilise dynamic social strategies to unlock exponential growth for ambitious E-Commerce brands. Check out our Paid Social Media Services today!