Can you believe the very first television commercial in the United States aired in 1941? More than eighty years later, advertisements have drastically evolved into digital ads on search engines and paid campaigns on social media platforms. With so many avenues to increase brand visibility, getting your brand name out into the world is easier than ever.
Paid social ads are one of the most popular ways to promote a business online, and they’re often more cost-effective than traditional forms of advertising. For new companies with a lean budget, paid social ads can prove particularly accessible.
Ahead, learn how your brand can incorporate paid ads across various social media platforms into your marketing strategy and how two entrepreneurs—Selom Agbitor and Oliver Zak, the founders of tattoo brand Mad Rabbit—mastered paid social marketing to scale their ecommerce business quickly.
What is paid social?
Paid social is a digital marketing strategy in which companies promote their products by paying social media platforms to publish ads on users’ feeds.
Creating a paid ad allows your business to establish parameters for your target audience. Targeting capabilities vary by platform, but standard features may include targeting users based on their interests, age, location, and other identifying factors. Some platforms let you specifically target new audiences or users who have already engaged with your brand through retargeting.
The payment model for paid social ads also depends on the platform. Meta, for example, charges businesses based on cost-per-mille (CPM), meaning it charges for every one thousand impressions an ad receives. TikTok uses this payment model and the cost-per-click (CPC) model, which charges for every click an ad gets.
While the visibility of unpaid, organic social posts is at the mercy of the algorithm, paid social posts are guaranteed to appear in your target audience’s feeds. For this reason, paid social ads can help you reach new customers, drive traffic to your online store, and increase sales.
Organic vs. paid social media
While paid social media advertising allows brands to pay for placement in user feeds, organic social media marketing revolves around posts brands publish without paying the platform to promote them.
While organic social media posts still aim to increase brand awareness, their success depends on the social media platform’s algorithm, the quality of the content, the timing of publication, user engagement, and a host of other factors. That said, clever organic social content can generate buzz without ad spend, making it a high return-on-investment tactic if successful.
Your brand doesn’t have to choose between one strategy and the other. Instead, you can use both organic and paid social campaigns to create a comprehensive social media marketing strategy.
Top platforms for paid social
Below are the most popular social media platforms you can use to run paid social ads.
Meta Ads Manager allows you to select an audience for Facebook ads. You can choose a broad group based on demographics, location, or interests. Alternatively, you can select a custom audience of people who have already interacted with your brand (via Facebook page engagement, lead forms on your website, past purchases, and more).
Facebook also allows you to target a lookalike audience—that is, users the platform’s algorithms have determined are likely to behave similarly to one of your existing audiences.
Because Instagram shares the same parent company as Facebook, advertising on both platforms is integrated, making it easy to run campaigns across both. With Instagram marketing, you can either run a paid ad directly through Ads Manager or boost an existing post by converting it into an ad. If you have Instagram Shopping set up, you can also boost posts with product tags, turning them into shoppable ads that let users purchase directly from the post.
Since LinkedIn is a career-focused platform, LinkedIn ads might be best suited for B2B businesses. That said, LinkedIn is still a social media platform where users engage over shared interests and look for job opportunities. With this in mind, a business-casual clothing brand could capitalize on the site’s culture to run B2C ads.
LinkedIn offers three brand objectives: brand awareness, consideration, and conversion. You can choose from a variety of ad formats, such as a carousel, single image, text, video, or message.
With LinkedIn’s targeting feature, you can market your ad to specific companies, professional roles, or your existing contacts. The platform also offers a retargeting tool that allows your business to tailor content based on your audience’s previous actions with your brand.
TikTok
TikTok has quickly become a powerful platform for brands, especially those looking to tap into a younger, highly engaged audience. Craft your target audience based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and devices. You can specify broad locations such as countries or specific locations like ZIP codes. Note: Some targeting options are not available in select countries.
TikTok ads offer a variety of formats. You may use a video, an image, a carousel of images, or the Global App Bundle that supports both image and video ads. There are in-feed ads that appear as users scroll, branded hashtag challenges to encourage user participation, and TopView ads that dominate the screen when the app opens. It’s the perfect venue for a clever, captivating social campaign.
X
If X is your preferred advertising platform, you’ll also find its targeting capabilities allow for demographic targeting based on location, age, gender, language, and device. You may also choose parameters based on audience type. This will enable you to market ads based on conversations, events, interests, keywords, follower look-alikes, and engagement.
With X marketing, you can pay to promote individual posts or run full-scale ad campaigns with objectives like website clicks, follower growth, or app installs. For businesses looking for maximum visibility, X offers Trend Takeovers, which allow your content to appear in one of the platform’s most coveted locations: the explore tab. This ensures your ad is the only one that reaches users over a 24-hour period; only one client per day per country can hold a Trend Takeover.
Tips for an effective paid social strategy
Don’t worry if you’re unsure where to begin paid ads. Many entrepreneurs start this journey with no previous experience. Despite not having a background in paid marketing, Selom Agbitor and Oliver Zak took it upon themselves to learn how to use paid ads for their brand Mad Rabbit, a tattoo aftercare company they launched while still in college.
“We taught ourselves Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads,” Selom says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. “It would be expensive to pay an agency or pay someone a percentage of ad spend to run those ads for you. Most of our learning came from Google and YouTube.”
Thanks to their initiative and success with paid marketing, Mad Rabbit is now worth more than $56 million.
Consider implementing these tips to create and run a paid social media strategy.
Deeply understand your target audience
Knowing the demographics of the customers you want to reach—like age, occupation, gender, and location—is just the starting point. To dig deeper, leverage tools like Facebook Audience Insights to understand your audience’s behaviors, interests, and pain points. With these insights, you can create better ads that are tailored to your audience’s interests. You can also learn from studying your competitors. This is precisely what Selom did before he entered the tattoo aftercare industry.
“I spent my time researching the tattoo aftercare market. There were a few other companies in this space that had big social media channels,” he says.
But seeing these established companies didn’t discourage him. Instead, Salam saw where improvements could be made in their marketing.
“I knew exactly what customers would want to click on and what would make customers convert. I knew exactly how to run the Instagram page to make sure it was aesthetically pleasing for people to want to come follow, consume content, reshare, repost, and comment,” he explains.
Get creative within your means
With a little ingenuity, you can pull off an effective social media ad campaign on a shoestring budget. For example, Selom and Oliver initially found imagery they could use for free when testing a wide range of social ads.
“We used a website called Unsplash to post royalty-free pictures because we didn't have access to money to pay a photographer,” Selom says.
This allows them to gauge product-market fit and assess demand, and it can also help you find the type of ad images that appeal to your audience before spending on photography.
🌟 Looking for free stock photos for your brand? Explore this list of the 36 best free stock photo sites and find the perfect fit.
Create variations for each ad
Social media users scroll past a staggering amount of content each day. Predicting which ads will catch the attention of your target audience can be tricky. Therefore, creating variations of the same ad broadens the chances of one of those variations landing with consumers. This can be as simple as changing a video’s cover image, creating versions with different music, or switching up the ad copy. Use A/B testing to identify high-performing ads, and then serve the best variations to a wider audience pool.
This is the approach that allowed Mad Rabbit to grow its brand.
“We made sure that we were testing a lot of different things to find what was working,” Selom says. “The key to being successful was testing and making sure whatever you're putting out, your audience can resonate and engage with it to end up purchasing from you.”
Paid social FAQ
What is the difference between paid search and paid social?
A paid social media campaign is a set of ads that appears on a social media platform, while paid search ads appear on search engine results pages. For example, an ad on Google is a paid search ad.
Paid search ads will populate after someone has input a specific keyword in their search. Search ads appear in response to information the user is intentionally looking for. In comparison, paid social ads appear based on a user’s demographics or perceived interests.
What is considered paid social?
Paid social ads are social media posts your business pays to be pushed to user feeds.
When should you consider using paid social?
If you run a business, you’ll almost certainly want to use paid social ads—after all, social media is the leading digital marketing channel. Consider using paid social when your target audience is engaged online, and choose the platforms based on their demographics.
