Social advertising is a valuable component of social media marketing strategy. While everyone has heard of advertising on a social network, for a B2B social media campaign, we mean something different. To us, social advertising is a way to extend your top performing organic posts and thought leadership content to larger audiences. Essentially, we put advertising budgets behind proven successful posts to drive more visibility and engagement.
While this effort can also support your paid media programs, our social advertising goal goes beyond typical advertising. We do social advertising to drive traffic to your blog. To raise the visibility of your thought leadership content to a broader audience. And to drive net-new traffic to your website so that they can be recognized and retargeted later.
This kind of social advertising is very different from large demand generation advertising campaigns. Putting paid advertising dollars behind content that has already been successful organically is not a large budget commitment, because it works with the platform algorithms. As a result, social advertising in this manner is very cost effective and very cheap – typically just pennies per click – so small budgets that make a big impact.
Measuring the success of social advertising aligns to the goals for the media buy. To measure activity, we ask how many pieces of content are we running paid advertising against. When considering audience goals, we measure how many new visitors come to designated pages. Engagement is measured with “likes”, “shares”, “retweets”, “comments”, and “clicks” – how many of those have we had? Campaign success is determined by the growth of all those interactions. Overall, the return on this social advertising investment is calculated by the cost per click, the cost per view (in the case of video advertising), and the cost of new users who are added into retargeting efforts. Social advertising is a very effective way to amplify original content and to get a big bang without a ton of marketing expense.