Social Media Ads 101: Harnessing Paid Social to Grow Your Brand and Attract More Customers

Did you know that 96% of businesses in the United States are on social media? But only 41% use it to drive revenue. That means 55% overlook the massive potential of a powerful paid social media strategy.

If your business falls into that group, there’s no better time to take action. 

Enter paid social—social media advertising that goes beyond organic posts. Paid social media advertising is sponsored content. It is designed to get your brand front and center on the platforms your audience uses daily. It’s a must-have piece of any winning digital marketing strategy. 

Unlike paid search, where businesses bid for top spots on search engine results, or SEO, which boosts a website’s ranking through content and technical enhancements, paid social focuses exclusively on connecting with your target audience via social media platforms.

What makes paid social even more effective? 

Social media’s incredible ability to target precisely. Their data lets you pinpoint who’s most likely to engage with your brand and convert them into customers. 

So, are you eager to know how paid social media can transform your business? Keep reading to discover how you can tap into its full potential.

Unlocking Your Target Audience & Their Social Preferences

Successful use of paid social media begins with defining your target audience, which is most likely interested in your product or service. Typically, members of this group share similar interests or common traits. A brand usually doesn’t have just one target audience; it has several, divided based on shared characteristics. 

Target audiences can be segmented into several different categories, including the following:

• Demographics: Segmented based on marital status, gender, ethnicity or age
• Existing Customers: Segmented based on how long they’ve been buying your brand.
• Purchase Intent: Segmented based on how likely they are to buy a product
• Location: Segmented based on neighborhoods, school zones, cities, countries, or continents.
• Subculture: Segmented based on a shared experience, such as a love for a particular type of music or food. 
• Interest: Segmented based on hobbies or activities, such as a love for basketball or crocheting.

It is crucial to understand potential customers’ psychology, including their motivations, values, and beliefs. The more you know what drives them, the more you can significantly influence how they relate to your product. 

As former The Digital Marketing Mentor podcast guest Sarah Presch says, it’s important to understand a target audience’s cognitive biases when developing any social marketing strategy. These specific thinking patterns motivate people to seek information confirming their pre-existing beliefs, making it crucial for brands to understand these biases to market to them. 

Exploring Platform-Specific Paid Social Options

With social media platforms expanding rather than shrinking, brands must make the important decision of selecting which one is right for them.

Remember, in the eyes of the consumer, all social platforms are not created equal. That’s why once your brand has identified its target audience or audiences, it’s time to learn about their preferred social media platforms and patterns. 

Meta Ads

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has solidified its role in digital advertising by providing advanced, multi-channel advertising solutions. 

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads are a cornerstone of Meta’s advertising ecosystem, allowing businesses of all sizes to reach over 3 billion monthly users. The platform’s sophisticated targeting capabilities enable brands to reach specific audience segments based on interests, behaviors, and life events, ensuring ads are served to users most likely interested in their products or services. Facebook’s integration with Instagram allows advertisers to run cross-platform campaigns, maximizing visibility and engagement and creating a unified brand presence across Meta’s ecosystem. 

Advanced analytics also enable companies to measure and optimize campaign performance, adjusting real-time strategies for better results. Facebook’s dominance in the digital space and its robust advertising tools make it an indispensable platform for any brand looking to enhance brand awareness, generate leads, and drive conversions.

Instagram Ads

Instagram ads complement Facebook Ads by catering specifically to visually driven content in industries such as travel, beauty, fashion, health, and fitness. With over a billion active users and eight diverse ad formats—Stories, Reels, and Carousel Ads—Instagram allows companies to reach an engaged audience with visually compelling content.

One of Instagram Ads’ standout features is its seamless shopping experience. Users can purchase directly from Shoppable Posts, driving quick conversions, boosting e-commerce sales, and reaching customers during high-intent moments. Instagram’s Direct Messages (DMs) also enable real-time customer service, allowing brands to provide real-time feedback and answer inquiries promptly. By leveraging Instagram for paid social offers, companies have a uniquely interactive way to drive sales and strengthen customer relationships. 

Together, Facebook and Instagram Ads form a powerful advertising suite that allows brands to have extensive reach, engage audiences, and nurture them through targeted, visually appealing, and interactive content. Metas advertising solutions offer brands a strategic advantage, providing the tools to drive awareness, engagement, and conversions across a unified digital ecosystem.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn is more than a social platform for jobseekers-it’s a professional powerhouse. It’s THE space where people network, explore job opportunities and forge business connections. However, according to SproutSocial, with over 1 billion users, it’s a perfect opportunity for B2B outreach and professional services or products.  

LinkedIn’s objective-based advertising framework enables businesses to structure ad campaigns around specific goals at different sales funnel stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. This approach allows companies to strategically place ads aligned with their goals, guiding users effectively from awareness to conversion. 

TikTok Ads

With a format centered around short-form videos, TikTok is an extremely popular social media platform for Gen Z (1997-2012) users and has over 1.5 billion users. TikTok thrives on raw, playful content, inviting brands to remove their polished exteriors and reveal their ‘human’ side to customers.  With behind-the-scenes peeks, lots of user-generated content, and quirky challenges, TikTok encourages brands to let loose and have fun! 

As resident TikTok expert Noah Frydberg says, this platform rewards engaging and relatable advertising over highly polished corporate messaging. By using TikTok for paid social, companies can create memorable content that resonates with younger audiences, leveraging the platform’s unique style to drive brand awareness and engagement. 

X (formerly Twitter) Ads

X, formerly known as Twitter, is a platform for sharing text messages, images, and videos through posts. Though it has over 600 million users, its audience size is modest compared to other social media giants like Facebook or TikTok, but its focused reach can be a strategic advantage. This platform is ideal for real-time interactions and staying connected with trending conversations, which is especially valuable for brands aiming to build immediacy and relevance. Additionally, X has a predominantly male user base, with 60.9% male users, making it a targeted channel for brands looking to reach this demographic. For companies focused on quick updates, customer interactions, and engaging in timely topics, X offers a unique environment for paid social advertising.

The Paid Social Recipe

Sure, paid social media can be an extremely powerful tool for growing your brand and reaching customers, but it ultimately depends on the strategy behind it. At Optidge, businesses often miss their goals because they do the proper groundwork or lack a detailed execution plan. 

While each agency or marketing team should find the most effective “recipe” that works for them when taking on paid social ads, consider the below process that Optidge adheres to and the included “ingredients” involved: 

Strategy

Developing and launching a paid social media advertising campaign begins with a solid and detailed strategy. The first ingredient of any paid social recipe is a comprehensive blueprint that connects your team’s goals to the overarching business objectives. 

At Optidge, our paid social process begins with gathering detailed information about your brand, target market, and audience. This foundational step lets us understand your brand identity, market position, and audience needs. 

Next, we will work with you to define specific campaign goals. In this case, the goal is to raise brand awareness and attract more customers. Our team needs to ensure that the strategy we’re creating for you is laser-focused on achieving your objectives. Based on these insights, we will create a well-defined customer persona representing your ideal audience. This person will include their preferences, key motivators, and behaviors. 

Having created a clear persona, the team designs a multi-funnel campaign structure tailored to engage your audience at each stage of their journey. Take, for example, a recent case study of our client, The Lovie Awards.  This client needed to increase entries and optimize ad spend across three distinct deadline groups. Getting to know the client and their audience and gaining insight into each audience’s channel preferences and uses allowed us to outline the best way and where to target each group. By taking this approach with this client and others, clients can be assured that the strategy is aligned with their goals and all-encompassing.  

Creative

At Optidge, we provide end-to-end creative support, covering every aspect of your campaign. Our team creates compelling ad copy, designs visually captivating graphics, and produces high-quality video content tailored to your brand’s unique voice and identity. This is the second component of our successful paid strategy. 

By collaborating around a unified strategy, we can seamlessly incorporate your existing content strategy or co-create new materials that leverage both teams’ strengths. 

Launch

With your content planned and scheduled, it’s time to launch your product, respond to questions, monitor engagement, and interact with your community. As the third ingredient in your paid social recipe, we encourage clients to actively interact, respond, and answer follower questions across all platforms to maximize engagement.

Tracking

At Optidge, we closely monitor and analyze a lead’s journey from beginning to end – reporting on the source that brought it to us, noting the engagement with our content and outreach, and track the time spent to make a decision, purchase, or take action. Prioritizing lead generation from paid social channels allows us to provide insights into engagement, conversions, and lead quality over time. If you don’t have a CRM, we’ll establish one tailored to your needs. This will allow us to track the complete lifecycle of each lead, from the initial contact through conversion, helping you understand lead quality, diversify and optimize follow-up strategies, and gauge long-term value.

For example, when working with Brian Gavin Diamonds, we leveraged Meta’s revamped website conversion event type, optimizing for the purchase event to ensure efficiency and precision in targeting uses likely to convert. This attention to detail and tracking data allowed us to help the client prioritize high-intent audiences, emphasize the appropriate products in the messaging, and create incentives to align promotions with the customer’s purchase patterns.”

Nurturing

Brands that nurture leads (developing and maintaining relationships with potential customers at every stage of the sales funnel) receive 50% more sales at 33% lower costs than those without lead nurturing. Effective lead nurturing can be accomplished through a structured nurture campaign of automated emails that provide valuable content, increase trust, and guide prospects through the buyer’s journey. 

Optimization

A good paid social campaign should never be left on cruise control, leaving it to run indefinitely with fingers crossed. Instead, as soon as our team at Optidge gathers sufficient data, we begin our detailed analysis to enhance and refine your campaign’s strategy. This enables us to test target audiences and adjust the messaging to ensure continuous improvement. 

Harness the Full Potential of Paid Social Media with Optidge

Utilizing social media’s power is crucial for any brand seeking to grow its reach and increase its customer base. Paid social campaigns have the power of precise targeting and scalable reach, allowing brands to interact with audiences on their preferred platform.   

At Optidge, we have developed a strategic, data-driven recipe in our paid social department. Working alongside clients, we build a tailored strategy that provides measurable results. From developing an in-depth understanding of your target audience and creating a meaningful content strategy to actively monitoring, nurturing, and optimizing your campaign, we are dedicated to ensuring every ingredient in your recipe works together to achieve your goals.  

 If you’re ready to upgrade your social media strategy, contact Optidge. Together, we’ll harness the full potential of paid social media and foster brand growth.