What’s the first thing you do when you are all done creating your social media accounts for your business or brand? Of course, you publish content to build the reputation of the profiles. Next comes the stage where you advertise on social media platforms so that the users on the platform can see your best posts and offers.
Often, many users have an interesting question: why do they need to pay for reaching the platform’s audience? In other words, they are asking that when the access to the platform is free and everyone can talk to everyone, why should they need to pay to present their content to the users?
The answer lies in how social media platforms have evolved over the years.
All social media platforms started as small online communities with tight-knit groups of users. As the groups grew and communities interconnected, the platforms evolved and the concerns about privacy and user rights emerged.
As a result, the days of easily reaching the audience without much investment in time and resources are gone now. Now you have to make efforts to reach the target audience and present content in the format that appeals to them.
While there are several great strategies & social media marketing tools for reaching the right social media audience, social media advertising is one with excellent ROI and outcome.
In this article, we will cover several pros and cons of social media advertising so that you can make an informed decision about spending your money on these platforms.
Pros of Social Media Advertisement
Before you pour in a huge amount of money into social media advertising, you need to have clarity about the goals you wish to achieve and the audience you wish to reach through the advertisement.
For many brands, the goal is to acquire more business and increase brand visibility and reach. Note that while the direction of the goals remains consistent, brands need to focus on multiple aspects to make sure each campaign brings in results. Similarly, the target audience should be as close to the ideal customer profile as possible. Like the campaigns, the target audience remains consistent with minor tweaks to accommodate the goals of individual campaigns.
How to Schedule Instagram Posts Are you looking to save some time when it comes to promoting your products or services on Instagram? Whether you’re using it for your business or just your personal life, there are lots of tools out there that can help. One of the most popular is Instapost. They offer a free package that is perfect for most users, and most paid packages are affordable for small businesses. Once you sign up, you can create or upload an Instagram post, set the date and time you want the post to go out, and write any additional text you want to go with it. They can do things like changing the caption of the post to match the time, so it’s always relevant to your audience
Once you have determined all these things, the next decision is about the platforms you will advertise at. This step could confuse many users, not because of the number of available platforms, but because of the potential loss incurred by running ads on an inappropriate platform.
A good way to select the platforms is to first test the audience engagement by posting consistently. As a result, you will see a small community around your brand. This is the group of users who are a good fit for your ad campaigns because they are already receptive to your content.
Once you have a clear idea of the audience and how they respond, your next challenge is to get a clear idea of what type of content works. Here is where the experience of building the community helps you out.
Nop you are all set to run your paid campaigns.
Before you get into it, it’s better to look at the pros of social media advertisement.
Cost-Effective
What comes to your mind when you hear the word cost-effective? Of course, low budget or something that doesn’t dig a deep hole in your pocket.
When all things are considered, social media is cost-effective. From creating your account to promoting your content, the initial stages are completely free until you start planning your paid campaigns.
According to a recent Ad Espresso study, it costs an average of $28 per click for U.S focused ad campaigns. Note that many social media platforms offer a Pay Per Click (PPC) model where you need to pay for every click that leads to your target website page.
Some users would be confused about cost-effectiveness when planning the advertising budget. Note that while you do have to spend for social media ads when compared to other advertisement options, they are still cost-effective in terms of the returns.
Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty is a core metric that every social media manager monitors diligently. It indicates the number of social media users that prefer your brand over the competition and buy your products and services.
Social media advertisements often increase brand loyalty because they increase the frequency of interaction between your social handles and the target audience. As such, these users often have more exposure to your message and offers for products and services.
By running ads that carefully cultivate the audience and present your products as the solution to the pain points of the larger target audience, you have a higher chance of building brand loyalty and footprint.
Social media ads also help bring the ündecided” section of the audience over to your corner. By seeing your ad and comparing your products and services to similar offerings, this segment could be persuaded to follow or like your social media handles.
Customer Engagement
Customer engagement and satisfaction are the central part of any business strategy. That is why you are willing to spend a good amount of money on social media advertisements. You generally see higher customer engagement on ads and posts that present your offer to the audience. The customers often comment on these posts, communicate better and help you better understand your customers.
Cons of Social Media Advertisement
Social media advertisement also has some downsides that you should also consider carefully. While the following cons are to be considered, they should not become a roadblock in your planning and execution. In many cases, you can actually use these downsides to plan your ad campaigns so that the final execution avoids these pitfalls.
Negative Feedback
When you own a brand, you receive all kinds of responses, from positive to very negative.
It is okay to have negative reviews as they help you improve the areas that the customers think you need to improve. Since social media offers a free for all platform, your users can leave their thoughts on your brand’s pages.
This can be considered one of the biggest cons of social media as negative feedback impacts the brand’s reputation and leaves a wrong perception on the customers. Unfortunately, some brands use negative feedback as an unfair tactic by using fake profiles to post negative comments and complaints on a brand’s social pages. A popular example is this phenomenon is Yelp, the popular review site that offers user-generated reviews about local businesses.
If you think you have the victim of such a situation, you can ask such users to reconsider their reviews and change their stance on social media.
There are different social media marketing tactics you can use to handle negative reviews & turn them into positive ones. For example, hiding the comment, offering a discount, sorting & solving the issue & getting back to them.
Misleading Information
It’s no secret that social media is a hotbed for fake and misleading information.
It is pretty common for competitors to use fake profiles to post misleading information about your brand. This often happens when you run an offer because the competition wants to divert the traffic to their brand pages. Many competitors often run pages with similar-sounding names and some users fall for such pages. The bad experience at these pages puts off these users with a consequent impact on the brand’s reputation.
In order to protect your brand, make sure your ads clearly highlight the official handles and provide links within the ad’s content.
Time Consuming
Keeping all social media channels updated and maintaining the engagement rate requires a serious time commitment. In addition, the quality of the content needs to be consistent because people quickly leave groups and pages if they think they are not receiving value from a brand.
In many cases, this discourages the team behind the brand with a serious impact on the quality of the content. This is where the brand can run ads to bring in new followers and boost up the numbers.
You need to use social media advertisements to redirect traffic to your posts so that the engagement rates remain constant. This often requires you to plan the campaigns carefully so that you can maintain the balance between engagement and offer placement.
A good way of saving time in managing social media presence is to use a scheduling tool that allows you to schedule posts in advance. These platforms also have a “recycle” feature that can be used to rerun campaigns without manually reposting content.
Final Thoughts!
We have presented all the essential pros and cons of social media advertisement that you must keep in mind before investing your money in paid campaigns. Now you can start working on your marketing strategies, discover the right platforms, and start creating compelling advertisements. During your planning, make sure you understand the dynamics of your audience and the type of content that attracts the audience. Make sure you have a schedule for taking the ads to live.
Keep all the pros and cons of social media advertising in mind, and go ahead with your next campaign.
Happy Advertising!
