Social media advertising

Katie is the owner of Happy Medium LLC.

Brands are increasingly spending more and more money on social media advertising than ever before. In fact, according to Social Media Today, social marketing budgets will double over the next five years. That is a strong statistic that brands cannot continue to ignore.

At Happy Medium, we are dedicated to helping our clients not only use their marketing/advertising budgets efficiently but effectively. We do this by encouraging clients to always have a social strategy. Keep in mind that in order to have a social advertising strategy, you first have to have a social media strategy. While we have used many different social sites to advertise for clients, I am going to focus solely on a Facebook advertising strategy and why every business should have one (small or large budgets alike).

According to Shareaholic, “Facebook is the social network to end all social networks.” While I’m not sure it will end all social networks, Facebook does have an unmatchable ability to reach your target audience. A few facts from our friends at Facebook.

1 billion total monthly active users

58% of people on Facebook visit the site daily

600 million monthly active users on mobile

3.2 billion likes and comments everyday

8x engagements for page posts in news feed

In an analysis of over 60 campaigns on Facebook: 49% had a 5x or greater return on ad spend; 70% had a 3x or greater return on ad spend

On top of that, their targeting capabilities are hard to match. Facebook can target users based on any of the data you put into your profile, instead of using cookies to build a profile around your interests like every other platform on the web. This first hand data is like gold for targeting -- you almost always know you are always going to be hitting your target market.

In a short comparison, Shareaholic put together a chart detailing social media traffic referrals year-over-year from data collected on more than 200,000+ sites. You can see in the below example that Facebook dominates this category with Pinterest and Stumbleupon following pretty far behind in 2nd and 3rd place.  

With all that said, I wanted to be able to share some results from a social media advertising client campaign at Happy Medium. The marketing objective was to highlight the value of some of their in-store offerings and to promote downloads of a new app release. The campaign ran for four months over the summer and all the advertising was done on both Facebook and Twitter (with the majority of the budget on Facebook). Below is the outcome of the campaign:

• App downloads: After the first month, we hit 148 percent of their entire summer goal

• Instant win game to promote in-store offerings: After the first month, we hit 105 percent of their entire summer goal for in-store redemptions, and 135 percent of their entire summer goal for people who played the game

During the campaign, we constantly revised the goals and increased the numbers we wanted to hit. These results were powerful, that not only we were proud of, but the client was as well. When implemented correctly, social media platforms can reach your target audience effectively and efficiently within budget to accomplish your marketing goals.