By Kira Ollila: Client Relations Intern
There are approximately 318.9 million people living in the United States and nearly two-thirds of those people are using social media sites. According to Pew Research Center, 90% of those ages 18-29 and 77% of those ages 30-49 use social media. Additionally, it is estimated that people in the U.S. check their social media accounts an average of 17 times a day, which is at least once every hour they’re awake. These stats illustrate the sheer magnitude and variety of people on social media who spend a ton of their time online. With all those people on social media platforms, it makes advertising for your business on social media extremely important. Here are a few advantages that advertising on social media can provide:
Advanced Targeting
Social media networks have the ability to collect a plethora of information about their users and this allows social media advertising to target an audience in a wider variety of ways. All this information also allows the social media advertisements a user sees to be more relevant to their life and interests, which is extremely important in an online world where advertising is everywhere you look. Here are a few of social media’s advanced targeting options:
- Interest targeting is the ability to reach a specific audience based off things such as the pages or users they have engaged with and their self-reported interest, activities, and skills. When targeting these interests you can be as general or as specific as you’d like.
- Behavioral and connection targeting is reaching someone based on purchase behaviors and intents, device usage and/or their specific connection to your page, app, group, or events. This type of targeting takes a user’s past behaviors into account.
- Lookalike targeting is exactly what it sounds like. It targets people who are similar to the audience a business already cares about and wants to target. This allows businesses to reach new but similar users and is a wonderful way to gain new customers through social media.
Ease of Tracking
After figuring out who you’re targeting and placing your social media ad, it’s important to take a look back at how well it’s doing and learn from the results. Within the world of social media advertising analytics you can find information on everything from clicks, impressions, frequency, engagement, and more. This allows you to see how a particular advertisement campaign has benefited your business and if you need to make any changes to the campaign to maximize its success.
Affordability
Social media is one of the more cost-effective platforms to advertise on compared to traditional forms of advertising and other online forms of advertising. Not only does social media have the ability to reach a larger number of people for a lower dollar amount, these platforms also provide an affordable avenue for customer communication/relationship management and increased brand loyalty.
Final Thoughts
The benefits from utilizing an affordable social media campaign will help you reach your target audience more effectively and help you reach new relevant audiences. When social media advertising is done right it can lead to decreased marketing costs, increased brand recognition, increased traffic, more conversions, and so much more. If nothing else convinces you about the importance of advertising on social media, just remember that your consumers expect you to be online and your competitors are already online.
If you need help establishing or growing your business’s social media presence, please give us a call at 701-478-1111 or visit absolutemg.com/contact.