What Are Paid Social Media Ads?
Clarifying ‘Paid’ in Social Media
To ensure clarity, let’s begin by defining what we mean by paid social media ads. Essentially, paid social refers to the promotion of digital content via advertising on social media platforms. These ads are typically divided into two main categories:
- Display ads (also known as banner ads), which are clearly identifiable as advertisements.
- Native ads (often referred to as sponsored content), which blend more seamlessly into the user’s feed, appearing like organic content.
For policy organisations, we frequently advocate for native ads, which this post will focus on—specifically in relation to Twitter and LinkedIn, as these are among the most utilised platforms by the policy community.
However, it’s important to note that the principles of running paid campaigns apply broadly to display ads and across most other digital platforms.
What are the benefits of running paid social media advertising campaigns?
Whether you’re sceptical about paid social media ads or need to secure buy-in from colleagues, it’s worth considering the significant benefits these campaigns can bring to your organisation.
Guaranteed Reach with Paid Social
Here’s the major advantage: paid social media ads offer guaranteed reach.
We’ve all seen how social media algorithms can behave unpredictably. One day your post is a hit, the next, it barely gets any traction. Regardless of how much you optimise your organic posts, there’s no certainty they’ll reach your intended audience.
With paid social media ads, however, you’re paying for guaranteed exposure. Your audience’s attention is secured, without any reliance on algorithmic whims.
Consider this: 28% of consumers discover new products directly through social media, with this figure skewing even higher among millennials and Gen Z. If nothing else, paid social media ads offer a reliable way to introduce your brand to new customers and re-engage past ones, unhindered by the constraints of organic reach.
Precision Targeting with Paid Social
Building on that point, modern paid social media ads offer highly sophisticated targeting capabilities.
For example, you can configure campaigns to reach users based on their income level, location, or even their behaviour on your website. You can also target specific groups, such as existing followers, previous customers, or those who have interacted with your brand but haven’t yet converted.
By controlling these parameters, paid social media ads ensure your campaigns are shown to the people most likely to engage with them. This level of targeting puts you firmly in control of who sees your ads, driving greater relevance and impact.
The Role of AI in Paid Social Media Ads
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming the landscape of paid social media ads. It’s no longer just about automating repetitive tasks—AI is delivering new levels of personalisation and efficiency that were previously unattainable. As we move further into 2024, the role of AI in data analysis, content creation, and campaign optimisation is only set to grow.
Automating Content Creation
Crafting content that stands out in the crowded social media space is a challenge. Here, AI becomes a valuable ally. Tools like Hunch’s AI-powered background removal enable you to turn ordinary product images into striking, ad-ready visuals with just a few clicks. This level of automation means you can scale your creative output, producing engaging, dynamic paid social media ads that captivate your audience.
Streamlining Ad Production
Time is of the essence in the fast-paced world of paid social media ads. AI tools, such as those provided by Hunch, streamline the production process by automating the creation and delivery of dynamic product ads. These tools can transform static brochure-style images into high-performing, visually compelling ads, saving you hours of manual work while keeping your ads fresh and engaging.
Real-Time Data Synchronisation
Managing your paid social media ads campaigns in real time is crucial. AI-driven platforms synchronise data changes across social media networks like Meta, ensuring your ads are always current. This real-time automation extends to managing Dynamic Product Ad (DPA) campaigns, allowing for seamless updates and ensuring your campaigns remain responsive to market changes.
How to Build Paid Social Media Ads from Scratch: A Step-by-Step Guide
When it comes to creating paid social media ads, selecting the right format is crucial to aligning with your campaign objectives. Below, we break down the most effective ad formats for driving engagement and conversions, tailored to different platforms.
Image Ads
Image ads are highly effective for driving traffic directly to your website. They’re simple to create and can be seamlessly linked to specific pages on your site. Available across nearly every social media platform, they perform exceptionally well on visual-heavy channels like Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Pinterest, where users expect to engage with image-based content.
An important point to remember with image ads is that less is often more. Ads featuring minimal text typically deliver a better user experience, which is why Facebook enforces a guideline ensuring that no more than 20% of an image contains text. Notable exceptions include book covers, album art, and product images, which may feature text as part of the design.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads provide an excellent opportunity to tell a deeper, more engaging story about your brand. These interactive ads allow you to showcase up to 10 images or videos within a single carousel, each with its own unique link and call-to-action (CTA) button. This format is available on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and the Audience Network.
You can also customise the ad experience further by opting to remove the CTA buttons for a more streamlined look. Additionally, Facebook can optimise the order of the carousel images based on each card’s performance. However, if you’re using this ad format to tell a sequential story, it’s best to manually control the order of images to maintain narrative coherence.
Product Ads
If you have a wide range of products or wish to retarget previous visitors dynamically, product ads are an excellent choice. You’ve likely encountered these dynamic product ads (DPAs) yourself after browsing online retailers. Using Facebook Pixel tracking, these ads display products you’ve already viewed, or top-performing items from a business’s catalogue.
On platforms like Instagram, businesses can tag multiple products in a single post, making it easier for users to discover and interact with items. The most effective product ads are visually striking, featuring high-quality imagery and minimal text. Research from AdEspresso, which analysed over 750,000 Facebook ads, suggests that product ads perform best when the ad copy is kept under 20 words, with just 4-5 words in the link headline.
Collection Ads
Collection ads, a subset of product ads, offer an even more immersive experience. Think of them as a virtual storefront: a large banner image or video is displayed at the top, followed by a row of products beneath it. When users tap on a collection ad, they’re taken to an Instant Experience—a fast-loading, full-screen experience—allowing them to browse products without leaving the platform.
This ad format nurtures both interest and intent, making it ideal for showcasing a range of products or different angles of the same product. On Snapchat, each image within a collection ad can link to a separate webpage, with an additional option for users to ‘swipe up’ for more information.
Interactive Ads
Interactive ads utilise the latest digital technologies to engage users more deeply, encouraging them to interact with your content rather than simply clicking an outbound link. These ads are designed to keep audiences on the platform longer, whether through tilting an image for a 360-degree view, responding to a poll, or answering a question.
The beauty of interactive ads lies in their ability to foster stronger connections between your brand and your audience. This interaction not only improves brand recall but also positively influences audience sentiment. Plus, the longer users engage with your ad, the more cost-effective it becomes for you as the advertiser.
Types of Interactive Ads on Social Media:
- Instant Experience (formerly Canvas Ads) – Facebook
- Messenger Ads – Facebook and Instagram
- Stories Ads – Instagram and Snapchat
- Conversational Ads – Twitter
Step-by-Step Methodology for Building Successful Paid Social Media Ads
Creating effective paid social media ads requires a methodical approach, from understanding current trends to optimising through A/B testing. Below is a step-by-step guide to ensure your campaigns stand out and deliver measurable results.
Stay Current with Trends
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, trends evolve rapidly, often driven by global events and cultural moments. To keep your paid social media ads relevant, it’s essential to stay informed about these trends and integrate them into your campaigns. Whether it’s leveraging vertical imagery, incorporating pop culture references, or aligning with viral moments, your content should resonate with your target audience while reflecting what’s happening in the wider world. Just ensure that the message remains authentic and directly connected to your brand’s voice.
Aim for Clarity
When it comes to crafting paid social media ads, clarity is non-negotiable. The message needs to be concise and straightforward so that your audience can quickly grasp the value of what you’re offering. If there’s any ambiguity in your ad, potential customers will lose interest and move on. Focus on making your offer crystal clear, allowing users to easily decide whether to engage or explore further. If the value proposition is complicated or unclear, conversions will suffer.
Plan for Continuous Optimisation
The first version of an ad is rarely the perfect one. Success in paid social media ads comes from ongoing optimisation, which is best achieved through A/B testing. You’ll need to test different elements, such as headlines, imagery, and calls to action, to see which combination yields the highest engagement and conversion rates. Think of this process as a marathon, not a sprint. It requires patience and continuous adjustment as you refine your approach based on the data and feedback gathered.
Choose Strong, Relevant Images
Visuals are a crucial component of any paid social media ad. The right image can grab attention, spark interest, and guide potential customers toward taking action. It’s important to choose imagery that not only aligns with your brand but also resonates with your target audience. Your images need to communicate your message effectively, leading users to engage with your ad. Weak visuals won’t cut through the noise, so ensure your images are powerful and relevant.
Create Engaging, Value-Driven Content
With so much content saturating social media, your paid social media ads need to stand out. The key is to create content that grabs attention and delivers immediate value. You know your target audience (or at least you should), so craft content that speaks directly to their needs and interests before asking for anything in return. Engaging content should entertain, inform, or solve a problem—giving your audience a reason to pay attention before you present your call to action.
What strategies should I use for paid social media advertising?
Launch Multiple Creative Variations
One of the best ways to improve your paid social media ads is by launching multiple variations at the outset. This allows the social media platform’s algorithm to identify which version performs best with your audience. It can be challenging to produce several creatives quickly, but even small variations—such as tweaking the text or adjusting the call to action—can make a significant difference. The goal is to serve different versions to your custom audiences and let the algorithm optimise for engagement.
Rotate Your Creative Often
Creative fatigue can quickly set in with paid social media ads. Ads that initially perform well can lose momentum after being seen too many times by the same audience. That’s why it’s essential to have a calendar of creative rotations planned in advance. Regularly updating your images, headlines, and descriptions will keep your ads fresh and continue to capture attention. This practice will help maintain high conversion rates and prevent your audience from becoming indifferent to your content.
Experiment with Calls to Action (CTAs)
Your call to action is one of the most critical elements in your ad. It needs to be short, direct, and unambiguous. For certain campaigns, particularly those involving considered purchases, a CTA like “Call Now” or “Contact a Live Agent” can be highly effective, as many customers prefer to engage with a human before committing. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different CTAs—whether it’s changing the text, button shape, or even the font colour—to see what resonates most with your audience. Running A/B tests on CTAs can help you pinpoint the exact phrasing and design that drives the highest conversions.
Example CTAs:
- Click to Call Here
- Contact a Live Agent Here
- Click to Purchase Over the Phone
Targeting Broader Interests to Scale Paid Social Media Ads
Once you’ve maximised your budget within your current audience segments, finding new areas for growth can be challenging. A highly effective way to scale your paid social media ads is by targeting interests that aren’t as directly aligned with your products but are still relevant.
Expanding into Broader Interest Categories
Facebook’s targeting capabilities, while powerful, aren’t always precise enough to match your products perfectly with the ideal audience. However, this offers an opportunity. By expanding your reach into “not-as-spot-on” interests—interests that are related but not identical to your primary offering—you can tap into new user segments that may still find your product or service relevant.
For example, these related interests might include complementary products or services, or items within the same industry or field. While these new audiences may not be your core buyers, Facebook’s algorithm can leverage the looser connections between interests to expand your reach and drive incremental gains in engagement. In essence, you’re using Facebook’s capacity for making fuzzy associations to broaden your ad’s visibility without compromising relevance.
Targeting Competitor Brands
Taking a slice of your competitors’ audience is a tried-and-true strategy in paid social media ads. The good news is that Facebook allows you to target competitor brands, especially larger ones. Here’s how to make the most of this approach.
Start by checking if your competitor’s brand name appears as a targeting option. This strategy works best with larger, more recognisable brands that Facebook includes in its targeting database. However, even if your business is smaller, you can still benefit by using this method to reach their audience.
If you operate a local service or offer products on a smaller scale compared to national brands, targeting your larger competitors can attract new customers to your business. By showing up in the same feeds as bigger competitors, you position your offering as an alternative, giving potential customers a reason to choose your local or niche service over the national or global players.
Scaling Budget Effectively
Increasing your budget is the simplest way to scale your paid social media ads, but it’s crucial to do it strategically. While it may seem straightforward to just add more budget, on platforms like Facebook, budget changes can impact how the algorithm serves your ads. Each time you adjust your budget, Facebook’s algorithm needs to recalibrate, potentially resetting what’s known as the Learning Phase. This is Facebook’s way of saying, “We need time to optimise based on the new parameters.”
To avoid disrupting your campaign’s performance, follow the general rule: make budget adjustments incrementally, with each change being no more than 20% of the current budget. If you need to increase your budget by a larger percentage, do so in phases, ensuring no single increase exceeds 20%. This phased approach gives the algorithm time to adjust while maintaining consistent ad performance.
Whether you’re using daily or lifetime budgets, applying this incremental approach allows you to scale without causing the algorithm to lose its effectiveness, ensuring that your paid social media ads continue to deliver optimal results as your investment grows.
Best Platforms for Paid Social Media Ads
Choosing the right platform is critical to the success of your paid social media ads strategy. Each social media platform offers unique advantages, and understanding their strengths can help tailor your campaigns for maximum effectiveness.
1. Facebook
Facebook is the world’s largest social networking platform, boasting over 3 billion monthly active users. It’s a digital space where people connect with friends and family, share photos and videos, and engage with a variety of content. From a marketing perspective, Facebook offers a wide array of tools and audience insights, making it a prime platform for paid social media ads.
The platform’s largest demographic in the United States consists of users aged 25 to 34, a group often balancing their careers and personal lives, with disposable income to spend. This makes Facebook a key player in driving conversions, offering brands a fertile environment to engage users who are ready to purchase.
Facebook’s advanced targeting options allow advertisers to refine their audience based on specific demographics, interests, behaviours, and more. This ensures your paid social media ads reach the right people, helping you optimise your ad spend for better results.
2. YouTube
YouTube, with its nearly 2.5 billion active users, is the second-largest social media platform globally. Known primarily as a video-sharing site, YouTube allows businesses to reach a vast audience through video-based paid social media ads. It offers eight different ad formats, giving brands flexibility in how they engage viewers.
One of the most popular options is the Skippable Video Ad, where viewers can choose to skip after five seconds. For brands looking for guaranteed attention, Non-Skippable Video Ads, typically running between 15 and 20 seconds, are also available. For shorter bursts of content, Bumper Ads—a six-second, non-skippable format—help brands deliver a quick, impactful message before viewers engage with the main content.
At the top of the YouTube homepage, you’ll find Masthead Ads—prime real estate for advertisers. This exclusive ad spot requires booking through a Google sales rep, but it guarantees high visibility, making it ideal for major brand announcements or product launches.
3. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the professional’s social network. With a user base of over 740 million, it’s a platform where professionals connect, seek job opportunities, and foster business relationships. When considering paid social media ads for business-to-business (B2B) audiences, LinkedIn is unmatched.
LinkedIn users typically engage with content in a professional mindset, making them more receptive to B2B ads, professional services, and industry-specific products. Furthermore, LinkedIn’s audience has a significantly higher purchasing power than other platforms, with users spending more on average. This makes LinkedIn especially valuable for reaching decision-makers and business leaders.
Additionally, 60% of LinkedIn’s users fall within the millennial age bracket (28–43), a tech-savvy, upwardly mobile demographic that is crucial for targeting growing businesses and emerging professionals.
4. Snapchat
Snapchat, a platform built around ephemeral content, caters to a younger, dynamic audience. With roughly 750 million daily active users, it’s a playground for filters, lenses, and creative paid social media ads designed to captivate.
Snapchat is particularly effective if your target audience is under 35. The platform’s playful and casual nature encourages authenticity, making it easier for brands to connect with users on a more personal level. Snapchat users engage with the app frequently—opening it nearly 40 times a day on average—providing brands with numerous opportunities to get their ads seen.
For businesses that thrive on building authentic, relatable connections, Snapchat’s quirky and informal environment offers a chance to humanise their brand. With its interactive and visually appealing ad formats, Snapchat enables advertisers to create engaging content that resonates with younger audiences.
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