With more and more brands turning to social media to promote their products and services, reaching consumers organically is becoming increasingly difficult. That's where paid social media campaigns come in. Why is paid social important? It offers a data-driven solution by allowing brands to target specific demographics, increase brand visibility, and drive conversions through strategic advertisement.

Why is Paid Social Important For E-Com Brands

The world of e-commerce is rapidly evolving, and success nowadays relies on a great product that effectively reaches your target audience and talks directly to them. Here are 5 reasons why paid social is important for ambitious e-commerce brands:

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1. Increased Visibility and Awareness: Paid social media advertising helps e-commerce brands appear in front of the right people on social media platforms. This increases your brand awareness and makes your e-commerce brand more visible to users who fit certain targeting criteria but may not have discovered your business otherwise.  
2. Targeting: Paid social campaigns use precise targeting to reach potential customers, using demographics, location, interests, and online behaviour. Precise targeting options like these ensure your marketing strategy is tailored to the right people who will likely engage with and buy from your brand. 
3. Fast Results: Our industry knows that securing traffic and results from organic social media efforts can take a long time. For e-commerce brands looking to make an instant impact in their sector, paid social media can help instantaneously deliver results and work towards hitting your goals as ads run straight away. E-commerce statistics have shown that online retailers with a social media presence make, on average, 32% more sales than those without.
4. Data-Driven Decision-Making and Measurable Insights: Paid social media advertisement will provide valuable data and analytics for your campaigns, audience behaviour, and content performance. These valuable insights can be used to inform other areas of your overarching marketing strategy and improve your paid social media strategy. Key metrics to track include click-through rates, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and ROAS. You can also track the exact revenue generated from ad spend. 
5. Remarketing and Retention: Paid social media marketing is crucial to retaining an audience. Through strategic retargeting campaigns, you can re-engage with previous customers through a remarketing strategy and encourage repeat purchases or reinstate interest in your brand. By introducing retargeting, your ad engagement could rise by 400%! 

What Are the Most Effective Paid Social Platforms for E-Commerce Startups?

For startups, navigating the vast web of platforms available for managing your social media presence, both organic and paid, can be daunting. Finding the most effective e-commerce platform might not be as simple as a quick Google search and picking out the first recommendations. It pays to put your time, effort and budget into the platforms your audience is using and ones that align with your goals.

You should never pick the social media platform you like the most or that seems shiniest; always consider your buyer persona, goals and budget when it comes to paid social media advertising.

Here are 3 things we recommend startups to consider before choosing a social media platform:

Make a Buyer Persona: A common mistake we see from start-up e-commerce brands when we start a project is spreading themselves far too thin on various social media platforms. By this, we mean setting up profiles on every single social media channel possible without any research into the effectiveness of a platform for your industry or niche.

We recommend starting with the basics, such as a couple of buyer personas to navigate this. A buyer persona is a detailed description of a person who represents your target audience. It’s based on deep research into your ideal target audience, and it includes research into demographics like age, gender, income, location, family, behaviours, likes, dislikes and education. Research has shown that 3-4 buyer personas account for over 90% of a company's sales.

By ironing out the above, you can dissect your audience and learn about their behaviours and what social media platforms they use regularly. This will help you to understand where your target audience spends their time online and how to reach them.

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Understand Your Goals: When putting your brand on a social media platform, understanding your goals for both the overarching business and that platform is crucial. Your social media goals should come from your overarching business, marketing, and social media strategies.

Say your overarching business strategy is working towards increasing sales by 50% in the next quarter; your marketing goals would decipher how you will achieve this, including all of your marketing output such as SEO, Paid Google Search, OOH Marketing and organic and paid Social Media Marketing.

You should be able to connect your business and marketing platforms to an individual channel based on valuable content, your audience's pain points and the social media channels they use often.

Setting goals and KPIs is valid for choosing a social media platform, keeping track of progress, and having something to work for.

Navigate Budget: When it comes to your organic social media presence, the costs are near enough to zero. On the other hand, paid social media advertising requires an additional budget to get the ads going. When choosing the right platforms to invest in as a startup e-commerce business, you should consider the costs of each significant advertising platform.

It is essential to consider the ROAS and set clear and concise goals when choosing which platform to advertise. Although £50 a day on TikTok may seem like a significant amount, the return via sales can not only equate to your spending but exceed it, resulting in a profit.

Here are a few examples:

LinkedIn: Minimum ad spend of £8 per day.

Facebook: Minimum ad spend of £2 per day.

Instagram: Minimum ad spend of £1 per day.

TikTok: £50 per day per campaign when using a daily budget. £20/day when using a lifetime budget.

YouTube: This depends on ad auctions and the price you will pay for your ad to appear. This is typically $0.10 to $0.30 per view.

For more information about the costs of advertising on social media, see our recent blog, 'How Much Do Paid Social Media Advertisements Cost'.

Our Final Thoughts

Paid social is indispensable for e-commerce brands aiming to thrive in a competitive digital marketplace. By leveraging precise targeting, increased visibility, and data-driven insights, brands can effectively reach and engage their target audience.

With the opportunity to generate fast results and implement strategic remarketing campaigns, e-commerce brands have unprecedented opportunities to improve conversion rates and retain a loyal customer base.

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!

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