The Definitive Guide to Crack Paid Social Ads in 2022

We saw the benefits of paid social media in the last article on paid vs. organic social. It helps businesses with quick visibility and leads during time-sensitive campaigns. It also enables them to start those campaigns at a boosted speed not possible with organic social.

Overall, the article highlighted the pros of paid social media for targeting audiences and driving sales, with its value for measurable KPIs.

Paid social media is a failsafe way for businesses to build brand awareness. With the increasing monetization of top platforms like Meta (earlier Facebook) and Instagram, B2C brands are setting up social commerce stores for direct selling and plan to spend big on ad campaigning to reach targeted demographics.

In 2022, ad spending on social will cross the $173 million mark, and the share of video ad spending will increase by a whopping 20.1%.

Image Source: eMarketer

Which means …

Unless you make paid social ads a core part of your strategy, it will fail to drive sales.

Read this article to learn the basics of paid social media and how to run successful ad campaigns. By the end, you will understand the differences between paid social and search and what factors you need to consider when estimating the cost of a social media campaign.

But before that, here are the key takeaways:

• Any content under the “promoted” or “sponsored” tag is paid ads on social networking platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• Brands can choose different ad formats as per budget and business goals. Most social channels offer image ads, carousel ads, product ads, collection ads, interactive ads, lead form ads, video ads, and text ads.
• The major difference between paid social and paid search relates to ad format. While the former has several options to hook user interest, paid search mainly includes keyword-focused text ads to match search intent on Google.
• There’s no right time to start with paid social ads. But great organic visibility and social media following are a good place to start for sizing up the potential returns from paid social.

  The boosted visibility from ads will not yield much if users don’t trust your brand via organic social media marketing.

• Craft a solid social media strategy to ace ad campaigns. Pick the right channel, ad format, audience, and metrics to measure the impact of paid efforts.

  Begin with competitive research and find the correct positioning to ensure your ads resonate with the audience.

Paid social ads are any content assets lying under the “promoted” or “sponsored” tag on social networks. They target a specific sub-audience and do not depend on dynamic algorithms for reach.

Instead, the money put into ad campaigns determines their views, traffic, and engagement. The three well-known types are pay-per-click advertising, branded, and influencer-generated content.

Paid social includes many display ads (more on it below) that have varying features and serve different goals. You can use them as stand-alone or in combination to achieve business targets. They offer plenty of options for ad format, budget, and audience demographics.

This makes them a must-try for brands to fuel their inbound marketing efforts.

Paid search includes keyword-focused text ads that match users’ queries on search engines. Though paid search has a better conversion rate than paid social, it doesn’t have many options to create laser-sharp ads matching netizens’ interests.

You need to combine the power of both to maximize the chances of business growth in the digital world.

Social networking platforms let brands pick an ad format depending on budget and the action they are trying to drive. To name a few, you can choose an ad format for boosting product sales, offering an immersive experience to users, and generating leads.

Ultimately, the key to running a successful paid campaign is knowing your options and how they serve different business goals.

Some popular ones include:

• Image ads: They perform best for driving site traffic. Image ads are easy to make and can include links to specific pages on your website.

  Visual-focused channels like Facebook and Instagram are the best bets for distributing them since the users actively engage with visual content.

• Carousel ads: They let you tell a fuller (and far richer!) story about your brand. Most ad formats allow you to pick anywhere between 5-10 images or videos within a single carousel, each with its specific CTA and individual link.

  With platforms like Facebook, you can also optimize the order of the carousel images, depending on each card’s performance.

• Product ads: They are great when you want to display multiple products or want to retarget customers dynamically. The top-performing product ads have high-quality images and little to no text.

  Instagram offers the option to tag multiple products directly in posts to help people easily find and engage with your products.

• Collection ads: They offer an immersive and visual-rich experience to the users. A subset of product ads, collection ads let people window shop in a virtual storefront. They usually have a big image (or video) banner with a row of four product images.

  When users click on a collection ad, it offers a fast-loading visual treat and lets them learn more about the product without leaving the channel.

• Interactive ads: They draw in users, encouraging them to interact with the content. They are experimental and push people to take actions like tilting a photo by 360°, replying to a question, or answering a poll.

  This interaction helps cement a stronger relationship between brands and their customers.

  Instant Experience, Messenger Ads, Stories Ads, and Conversational Ads are different types of interactive ads.

• Lead form ads: Also called ‘lead ads’ or ‘lead generation ads,’ they let you build a list of prospects for newsletters, event registrations, and follow-up services.

  Lead form ads work best when you provide useful content to people in the form of an eBook or resourceful guide.

  They easily integrate with modern-day MarTech like CRMs, messengers, and InMail services.

• Video ads: They are the topmost assets for hooking interest on social. Video ads perform well on almost every social networking site, including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

  They maximize views, reach, and other engagement metrics to offer capital real estate on users’ screens.

  You can run these ads in different formats like video story ads, video carousel ads, interactive video ads, and unskippable and bumper video ads.

• Text ads: Although they don’t get as much traction, text ads are a pocket-friendly option for businesses just getting started with paid social ads. You can either ‘boost,’ ‘promote,’ or ‘sponsor’ any text-only post on social channels to increase its reach.

  The best-performing text ads are short, targeted, and relevant to users’ pain points.

Research studies on the cost of a social media campaign peg it anywhere between $4000 to $7000 per month, with prices going upwards of $20,000 in some cases. But it can vary wildly based on business size and goals.

As you plan the budget for your social media campaign, think about:

• The scope of operations: Consider the kinds of content assets you will create, how you will socially engage with your target audience, and measure the performance of ads.

  For example, sharing videos and webinar recordings to drive sign-ups for product demos will cost much more than sharing infographics and online games to boost website traffic.

• The scale of the campaign: Do you plan to run ads on one platform, or would it be a cross-channel effort on all major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?

  Consider these questions alongside the amount of content you will need to create for each and if you will use Google Adwords to solidify your efforts with paid search.

• Internal costs: Not factoring in fees for a project manager overseeing the execution of your strategy or social media management tools can lead you to underestimate the cost of a campaign.

  The dollars you spend on creating content assets for social media (or hiring virtual assistants who do) are as important as the money paid to social channels directly.

• Paid metrics: You pay only for work that goes into creating content in organic social marketing. But with paid ads, metrics like cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM), cost-per-view (CPV), and cost-per-action (CPA) determine the cost of a social media to a great extent.

Any marketer worth their salt knows that a combo of organic posts and paid social ads are the best way to win at social media marketing. Unless you leverage the power of organic social to establish a solid brand presence first, your ads will fail to hit the bull’s eye.

So, long story short, there’s no right time for running ad campaigns.

But before you join the races on paid social, ask yourself the following questions. The more yeses there are, the higher the chances of your ads yielding the desired results:

• Is there great organic visibility to signal the authenticity of my brand?
• Do I have a considerable social following to engage and win traction with my existing followers with paid content?
• Can I allocate an appropriate budget to campaigns for the best returns?

Ultimately, the decision to run ads should rest on various factors, including your industry, business goals, creatives, cost-per-click, and the time for running a campaign.

Do not run ads without a concrete plan and tie them with the bigger revenue picture to fully benefit from the targeting and quick visibility that paid social offers.

A foolproof strategy is what a successful ad campaign rests on. As you get ready to try paid social ads, make sure to:

The Sprout Social Index, Edition XV: Empower & Elevate report echoes that the reach of a channel should be the topmost factor determining whether to target it or not. The fact holds true for both organic posts and paid ads.

Globally, more than half of marketers take it into account when deciding the platform for their social media marketing efforts.

Start where you have an established audience and do not run the same ad campaigns on different platforms.

Clarity on the goals for ad campaigns will help you pick the right metrics for tracking performance. Is it brand awareness or more product demo sign-ups or sales? Choose the desired results from your paid ads and build a campaign around them with the right creatives.

All modern ad platforms host the right features and options to support a specific brand goal and measure KPIs.

Sit down with competing paid social ads and notice their wins and losses. Do not limit yourself to content posted by big brands. Instead, actively seek out ad campaigns run by businesses of comparable sizes to see how their creatives talk to customers.

You can either find businesses on Meta Ad Library or take time to browse social media platforms for yourself.

Image Source: Meta

Ad platforms make it easier for beginners to set up campaigns by offering step-by-step tutorials. They let you touch base with call-to-action phrases, marketing messaging, target audience, and demographics.

Familiarize yourself with these aspects and finetune the details when running your first ads. It will help in strengthening the campaign and ensuring it hits a chord.

Paid social ads can burn a hole in your pocket if there are no checks in place determining their value for business goals. Use a social media management platform like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to check whether your ads are working.

These tools go beyond engagement metrics and clicks to offer insights that help clarify:

• Whether paid social ads work better than organic content
• If the paid campaigns drove ROI
• How to optimize future campaigns

Next, let us look at different platforms for running advertising campaigns.

Every social media platform has unique features that set it apart from others. Like I said before, paid ads on different channels will differ based on the campaign and target audience.

But the three essential components of a highly converting ad that each channel should offer are visuals, space for ad copy, and easy access to lead capture forms.

Meta, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter are four major ad platforms for most businesses. Here’s how you can get started on each one.

Meta Targeted Ads is the most robust ad platform that allows you to narrow your audience to a handful of people depending on demographics, interests, location, behavior, and connections.

Though not necessarily helpful for big companies, it makes all the difference for small businesses that are often short on resources.

To set up a Meta ad, visit your Business Manager account and follow these steps in the Ad Manager:

• Pick an objective for creating a sponsored post like “send people to website” and give a name to your campaign.
• Select a group for targeting by choosing from either of the three options: Core Audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences.
• Choose the placement for Meta to display your ad at the place most likely to reach the target audience.
• Set a budget by selecting “Daily” if you want the campaign to be continuous or run for a specific number of days. Alternatively, pick the “Lifetime” budget option, which lets you determine the ad spend over a given period.

  The advanced “Ad Scheduling” option goes a step further to let you choose specific hours and days of the week.

• Select an ad format for your campaign. While the single image option is self-explanatory, the carousel allows you to pick up to five images or videos to show multiple products, features, step-by-step guides, and brand information.
• Upload the media and ensure the images do not exceed 1200 x 68 pixels. The ad copy should not cover more than 20% of the image and must include details related to your business, including social profiles and the website.
• Finish the process by previewing the ad and placing your order.

Let us take an example. Consider this Facebook ad by Harvard Business School Online. It’s a perfect blend of creative and copy, persuading the users to hit the “Learn More” tab at the bottom of the ad.

There’s no doubt about the action it wants users to take and makes it easier for them to convert on the spot.

Image Source: Facebook

LinkedIn has an active user base of 830 million, with thousands of decision-makers, thought leaders, and hiring managers. If that wasn’t enough to prioritize LinkedIn as an ad platform for B2B firms, 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions and have 2x times the buying power of the average web audience.

That easily makes it the most popular ad platform for lead generation. You can set up an ad campaign on LinkedIn by following these steps in Campaign Manager:

• Select the company account and choose “Sponsored Content” to ensure your ad reaches the members right in their feed.
• Enter the campaign name and pick the option to create new sponsored content.
• Add the post text that includes a link to your website and upload an image with 1200 x 67 pixels. Remember to maintain a title safe space of 1000 x 586 to ensure it’s not cropped off.
• Choose your target audience and set the budget by selecting between CPM and CPC. While the former ensures more visibility, CPC has an automatic bid rate set by LinkedIn to reach most members.

  Fix your “Daily” budget and plan the ad schedule.

• Last, save your payment details, review the order, and launch.

Take a look at this LinkedIn video ad by Taj Hotels.

Source: Linkedin

It works for a couple of reasons. For one, it takes a women-first approach and instantly draws in the users to the vivid interiors of Taj Hotels. It keeps them hooked and makes most of the available space by combining the right mix of captions, copy, and headlines.

It’s the go-to ad platform for companies in the B2C space. Instagram has 1.16 billion accounts, and 84% of users find new products through social media advertising.

To run ad campaigns on this platform, sign up for a business profile and set up an eCommerce store on the app.

Because Instagram belongs to Facebook, your ads run on both channels and can be easily managed together from one center.

In the Instagram Ad Manager, follow these steps:

• Choose the objective for creating a sponsored post and give a name to your campaign.
• Select the target audience and pick placement. By default, Meta recommends “Automatic” placement. But if you wish to advertise on Instagram alone, deselect everything else and manually choose your placement.
• Pick a budget option and choose an ad format.
• Upload media, and add copy and a CTA button to the ad for people to easily find your store on the app or visit the website.
• Preview the ad and finish the process by placing your order.

Image Source: Instagram

Like its ad on Facebook, Harvard Business School Online does a great job on Instagram. Notice how keeping with the nature of the platform, the ad is all creative and hardly includes any written text?

The design is intuitive and contains one simple CTA – making it easy for users to access the required information.

Twitter has 192 million monetizable daily users, meaning those many people can see your ads daily. That might not be much compared to giants like Facebook and Instagram, but it’s steadily rising the ladder.

The best thing about Twitter ads is that they do not stand out as promoted content and seamlessly blend into the users’ feeds.

With mixed opinions about where advertisements will stand after the takeover by Elon Musk, it’s still a good idea to consider ad campaigning on the platform to reach new people.

Here’s how you can get started with paid social ads on Twitter:

• Create a new campaign and select an aim for creating promoted content like driving website traffic or conversions.
• Pick a name for your campaign and fix an ad schedule for the time you want it to be active. The options vary between running it immediately or during a specified period.
• Add the main site domain and choose a category to describe your website.
• Select target audience. While Twitter offers similar options to other platforms for pointed advertising, it has one unique option called “Tailored Audience.” It is a curated list of people you want to target through promoted tweets, such as website visitors.
• Set a budget by choosing between a daily and total limit.
• Create tweet text, add a headline, and upload an image with 800 x 320 pixels dimensions.
• Finally, include the website URL to serve as the final destination for users after they click, and publish your tweet.

Take this promoted tweet by Taylor Nieman. It’s a perfect example to wrap up the discussion on Twitter ads. What makes it stand out and highly converting is the harmonious blend of an enticing visual design, laser-sharped copy, and URL for the users to check out Toucan’s website.

It’s neat and resonates with the audience.

Image Source: Twitter

Let us take a few FAQs before wrapping up this post.

The benefits of paid social far outweigh the cons. Regardless, it helps to remain on top of the challenges posed by ad campaigning to devise an optimal paid strategy. As I mentioned before, ads need the backing of organic content to help users see the legitimacy of your brand.

Unless there’s enough organic presence, the quick visibility offered by paid ads will not amount to any tangible results.

What compounds it further is the competition. Social media is highly competitive, where countless brands are constantly vying to capture user attention.

This makes social a densely cluttered space, leading people to either ignore the ads entirely or get frustrated with the number on their feeds.

A strategy that combines the wins of organic and paid social is the way out of the situation.

Budgetary limits are an opportunity to sharpen the ad campaign and test it with a smaller audience before going all in. Do not target a broad user base when working with a small budget and set easy goals like traffic (instead of conversions) to judge the performance of your ads.

Paid social ads let brands get in front of their target audience and score quick wins. But setting them up and figuring out best practices for each social platform can be challenging for business owners who already juggle too many tasks. Contact us to pair a top-notch marketing virtual assistant with you to help with that (and much more!), and ace paid social.