Social media advertising in Malaysia has become increasingly important with the direction that marketing has taken it locally, this ensures that there is a pivot in focus towards ensuring that digital marketing is becoming the major focus of campaigns with traditional marketing become the auxiliary channel. This shift was especially due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and the many quarantine and self-isolation protocols established to curb the spread of the pandemic.
With all of us stuck at home with nowhere to go, social media was evident for individuals to spend time looking at throughout the day. Many companies took full advantage of leveraging that to help with targeting audiences and driving up sales. By paying for their social media posts to be seen by their targeted audience while driving up sales, they will obtain the benefits of frequency, campaign sustainability, and speed to market. This made paid social media posts stand out.
With the amount of money spent on paid social media only increasing, it has become apparent that social media ads are becoming an integral cog in marketing strategies in all businesses regardless of their focus or size.
It can take days or weeks to build organic social media traffic using the algorithms of social media giants like Facebook and Google. When running short campaigns, that ramp-up time can have a significant negative impact on your visibility and leads.
Alternatively, using paid social media will enable your traffic and engagement to be sustained for as long as your company’s budget lasts. This will facilitate the ability to have the best viewer outreach.
These benefits are further emphasized by the added benefit of the retargeting of consumers with ads to achieve an advertisement frequency that your company can handle and afford to optimize your employees’ efficacy as best as possible.
By the end of this article, we’ll discuss what is social marketing and the strategies for the implementation of a good social media strategy.
WHAT IS PAID SOCIAL MEDIA?
Paid social media is leveraging popular social media platforms and their outreach to target specific audiences by displaying advertisements and sponsored marketing messages that they would be interested in.
When scrolling through your social media account, you will see an example of paid social media advertisements when you see a post with a “sponsored” or “promoted” tag near or within the post. This can be in different forms such as pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, influencer-generated content, and display ads. All are significant examples of paid social media.
By understanding the different advertisement content available along with the niche of every social media channel, you will be able to see the differences in paid social media on each platform along with how they differ. Based on the niche of the social media platform, the campaign and targeted audience will differ. Twitter will offer short-form content, Instagram focuses heavily on visual content, Facebook has its marketplace within the app for shopping enthusiasts, and LinkedIn is the focus of networking professionals.
All of these websites would be used for different purposes and to reach certain target groups. Let’s explore some strategies that will help decide how to use paid social media to the benefit of your company’s brand.
PAID SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
A strategy that we plan to implement leverages external marketing focused on PPC advertising on our selected social media channel. By using ad tools native to the social media channel, we can tailor our campaign. We will be able to create, schedule, and post targeted ads that will reach a specific market. The objectives of the campaign can be anywhere from awareness to conversions.
Your paid social media strategy can help optimize a marketing budget that might not be substantial enough to promote large brands via traditional marketing. (For more on Traditional Marketing, click here to read more). By using paid social media ads, you can work towards hefty ROI goals with your limited budget. The 2 major factors when designing your paid social media strategy are an objective and a budget.
PAID SOCIAL MEDIA OBJECTIVE
Setting up the objective for your paid social media strategy gives your plan a direction and a goal to achieve. To establish where your audience is starting their customer journey, you will use filters and other criteria to narrow your audience to your pre-emptive target audience.
Once the starting point is locked in, it is time to decide your destination. Every site has its personal conversion tools but the end goal is to generate leads for further escalation. By using form fill or a visit to a landing page on your website, you’d be able to ensure that you will get the ability to generate leads and the potential of converting said leads into accounts.
PAID SOCIAL MEDIA BUDGET
The major benefit of using paid social media marketing is that it is one of the least expensive types of advertising available regardless of traditional or digital channels (click here to read more on their differences). This gives these types of ads a favorable KPI to track the cost per acquisition which can give a better idea of generated revenue when compared to traditional methods which can track cost per million impressions.
Depending on the bidding model and lottery system some platforms use to bring ads onto users’ feeds, prices can start as low as RM1. Spending for this type of advertising is virtually unlimited but fear not, you can set a limit that will stop the campaign from spending more money than you’ve allocated for a certain campaign.
SCALING YOUR PAID SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
When putting money behind a campaign, you’ll want a sustainable ROI that shows the budget, effort, and resources exerted were all worth it. The ROI growth means you’ll be able to scale your future campaigns moving forward, the conversion of paid ads can further fuel your success.
It’s easy to think that ad spend is just for the big brands, but making informed decisions benefits every business.
Social media channels are making advertising accessible to all businesses regardless of size and revenue. Once you learn how to plan, create, and position your ads to your target audience, you’ll have a much smoother time proving the ad campaign’s ROI. If you do not have the human capital for this, there’s no need to worry. With ViSight Marketing as a Service, you will be able to sign your business up to try our comprehensive Digital Marketing services today and guarantee your company a smooth transition.
Contact Cyngus Technologies to digitalise your business with our comprehensive Digital Marketing services today and be ensured with a smooth pathway into the digital era, the new normal. For more information, click here. For any more of our articles spanning various topics, please follow us on our social media platforms or click here to check out our blog.
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