Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising may be a better return on your time than traditional social media tactics like posting articles and answering questions. 

Like all online advertising, the response rates for social media advertising tend to be low, but you are generally paying on a CPC (cost per click) basis so you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. 

• Typical Advertising Response Rates
  

There's a benefit of all the other people who may see your ad but not click it that you don't have to pay for.  Think of it this way.  Buying ads on social media sites is like buying outdoor billboards on the freeway if you only had to pay when someone called the number listed in your ad.  With social media advertising, most people won't click on your ad but your ad may work well to build brand awareness and to remind them to buy your products/services just like how advertising works on outdoor billboards and on TV and the radio. 

You can also now buy display ads (larger sized ads) on many of the social media sites.  Those ads tend to perform better, perhaps because they are more noticeable than the text-based search ads on social media sites. They cost quite a bit more money so they're generally purchased by larger companies with bigger advertising budgets. 

Before you pay to advertise on social media sites, you should learn everything you can for free to market your company, products and services on those sites. 

• How to Market Yourself & Your Company on LinkedIn - Learn all the ways to promote and market yourself and your company on LinkedIn.

• Social Media Marketing - Social media marketing is free but is it a good return on your time as a small business? Learn about the pros, cons, cautions and realities of social media marketing for small business. 

• Facebook Marketing How-to Guide - Learn how to create company and product pages on Facebook, how to attract fans, and how to deal with complaints.

 

These how-to guides on social media will help you understand not only how to do this type of advertising but also the cautions, cons and tips to be most successful. 

• Facebook Advertising - this how-to guide explains what you need to know about advertising on Facebook

 

• LinkedIn® Advertising - this how-to guide explains the options for advertising on LinkedIn, a popular business-to-business social media site

Other options to consider:

• Best Free and Low Cost Marketing Ideas Hundreds of ideas to help small businesses save money on marketing.

 

• Groupon Pros and Cons for Small Business - Groupon is the social buying site and service that offers it's members a deal a day by email.  They take a huge cut.  But they can help you attract a lot of new business. 

 

 

Direct Mail Coupon Mailers. Some people call this advertising so we've included it in this list.  This is a type of direct mail where a coupon company mails an envelope or book of coupons, and companies pay to have their offer included in the mailing.  It's less expensive than mailing yourself but you must make an offer (coupon) which may attract prospects who are not the most profitable to serve long-term as customers.  And your competitors may also be included in the mailing (you can ask for and pay more for an exclusive).

• Learn more about Direct mail coupon mailers.

 

Social media advertising requires a mindset of a scientist to test and learn. Here's evidence of that.  Here's a job description from Amazon.com on what they're looking for in hiring a Head of Social Media Advertising. 

Amazon's Global Marketing Team is looking for a seasoned leader who understands what it takes to build high performance teams that deliver world class Social Media Marketing programs. As a business leader in our Social Media Advertising group, you will need to be a pragmatic visionary who can identify business requirements and lead the team to translate them into workable, scalable technology solutions. You must be comfortable working with complex challenges, appreciate white space, and understand the value of rapid test and learn approaches. You'll need a global mindset, and should be equally comfortable working with engineering, product, finance, analytics, and other stakeholders. You should also be an expert in building teams-we're growing fast! The successful candidate is an enthusiastic problem solver and hands-on leader who combines an entrepreneurial mindset with the ability to lead the team to the finish line.

Responsibilities outlined by Amazon for their Head of Social Media Advertising

1. Partner with engineering to establish the design, delivery, and successful operation of an automated social media advertising platform to be deployed against Social Media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter
2. Create requirements and rapidly iterate releases against them in an agile environment in which decisions are made through a smart balance of creative thinking and hard data
3. Build a scalable and extensible platform that supports robust and creative experimentation across global businesses in the growing and dynamic social media advertising channel
4. Establish the social media advertising charter, success metrics, processes and deliverables
5. Develop the long-term strategy and achievable roadmap for automated advertising systems
6. Deliver against project plans and deliverables on time and on budget
7. Partner with Amazon category leaders, global businesses, subsidiaries and other key internal stakeholders on their social media advertising requirements

We're sharing this to help small businesses realize what's required to be successful at social media advertising. 

 

 

Search Advertising. This is the most popular type of advertising for small businesses, so we're listing it first.  These are the ads that appear on Google and other search engines on the right-hand side and top of the search results.  Advertisers pay only when someone clicks on the ad to go to the advertisers' website.  Search advertising is much faster and easier to implement than direct mail or other types of advertising, but you are limited to just a few lines of text which makes it hard to convey much information. It's so popular because it's inexpensive, measurable, a controllable cost (you can limit exactly how much you spend) and it intersects people who are researching to buy or learn something.  Most ad agencies don't do search advertising.  You'll want to find specialists in search advertising or do it yourself with an attitude of "try-learn-adapt".  Think of search advertising like a science experiment.  You make a hypothesis about what words and offers will attract people and then you learn immediately what works and what doesn't.  The challenge is not in attracting people but in converting people who click on a search ad.

• Learn more about Search advertising.

Mobile Cell Phone Advertising.  These ads can be very effective for reaching younger people and people out and about if ads are targeted to particular GPS coordinates.  This is an emerging and growing area of advertising.

• Learn more about Mobile cell phone ads.
  

 

Online Advertising. These are display ads that many websites accept where people can view the ad and click to "learn more" and go to the company or retailer website for more information.  Online advertising is popular because it can be targeted in what the ad industry calls "narrow casting" to reach particular people.  It can also be bought inexpensively and placed on "remnant space" (ad space that hasn't sold).  It's measurable.  Click through rates are about the same as direct mail.  The ads are small compared to half page or page ads in newspapers and magazines.  Online ads can also work like outdoor billboard ads on websites to remind people about a brand or product message. Most are direct response ads.

• Learn more about Online ads, often called banner ads.