3 Types of Social Media Advertising You Should Start Now

At this moment in internet and social media history, I probably don't need to spend time in this introduction pushing the "importance of social media." 

You know social media is mature and it's where people hang out. But, if you need a few statistics to help convince less enlightened persons, here you go.

According to Edison Research:

• 56% of Americans have a social media profile
• 55% of Americans 45-54 have a social media profile
• 22% of Americans use social media several times/day
• 64% of American say social media influences purchase behavior

If you've been holding the standard line of social media tactics, perhaps you feel like your efforts have sputtered out.

"Post a few times a week!"

"Post images for engagement!"

"Start conversations!"

"Social media is free!"

All of this if fine and good on the organic side of things. You need to be present, establish your personality, engage with your followers.

But, are you seeing business results from it? If not, its time to do something about it.

If you're running a marketing program and answering to your CEO, you need tactics that drive revenue. We need to approach social media from a business-centric strategy. What does that mean? You should be doing the following:

• understand how to target the right people
• tie campaigns to an inbound marketing system
• integrate social media with your website traffic
• track results and lead acquisition cost.

Here are 3 kinds of social media advertising you should be doing right now to drive revenue:

1. Amplified Blog Posts

The purpose of this is to get traffic to your website. Not just traffic, but the right audience to your website. You can boost posts on LinkedIN, Facebook, and Twitter. Take the time to dial in your message to a particular audience rather than boosting a blog post to everyone.

LinkedIN is one of the simplest and best ways to target the right people. It's really good for B2B companies who want to boost articles, blog posts, or videos to industry professionals or folks with a particular job title.

If you want to dive into setting up Facebook Business Manager, watch this webinar for a walk through [Secrets of Advanced Social Media Advertising].

2. Amplified Offers

The purpose of this is to get leads. Just like with sponsored blog posts, you can set up your ads to only show up in the feeds of a target audience. You can select demographics, job titles, locations and interests for users of that particular channel.

Sponsored content on LinkedIn or Facebook can be used to promote a new guide, webinar, or report. These are lead generating offers, so ideally you will link the ad to a landing page on your website that has a lead gen form.

On Facebook, you can A/B test the images you use on your ad, so take advantage of that feature! Another tip for Facebook sponsored content is to skip the wasteland of sidebar ads, and only promote within the news feed area.

3. Re-marketing to Custom Audiences

The purpose of this is to bring back the folks who are already exposed to your brand and website. Time to engage and get them to return for more of what they're interested in! 

I love the sophisticated re-marketing features of Facebook Business Manager.

Here's how it works. First you set up a tracking pixel to plug into your website. This lets you track someone who visits a page on your website. When they hop on Facebook, you can set up a highly relevant ad to show up in their news feed as Sponsored Content.

You can get very detailed here. For example, say I want to target an audience of people who are interested in SEO. We can track visitors who have been on our SEO-related  web pages or blog posts, and serve up an ad on Facebook for our SEO Guide.

Personalizing these messages makes it 1000% more likely that you're giving people the kind of useful, meaningful content that they want rather than a generic, sales-y ad.

I'm curious about the kinds of paid advertising you're doing on social media. Drop me a line in the comments to start a conversation.