Current Situation
Social media advertising is a form of digital marketing in which paid ads are served to a target audience via social media networks. These ads allow marketers to reach desired consumers, promote their brand, and drive sales on popular media channels that house billions of active users.
Social media today is full of advanced technologies, features, and capabilities designed to continuously enhance the user experience. Similarly, the advertising arm of social media has become more advanced than ever, leveraging troves of data that allow marketers to reach hypertargeted audiences with highly engaging content.
Goals and Objectives
Social media advertising is a type of digital marketing that utilizes social networks such as Meta (Facebook), Twitter, and Instagram to deliver paid ads to targeted audiences. Social media ads are a quick and effective way to connect with consumers and boost marketing campaigns. Hence the goal is to maximize product and/or service awareness, understanding, call to action, and conversion.
Technology Deployed
Ad networks to target ads to users based on characteristics — such as their online behavior, physical location, or demographics — and behavioral targeting that shows ads to users based on their online activity, such as past searches or browsing history.
Use Case Summary
Each social media platform offers its own native ad manager where users can launch and measure campaigns. Each ad platform operates slightly differently, but the basics of campaign creation are generally the same. In detail:
The advertiser decides which social media platforms they want to place ads on. This should be a strategic decision based on who the target audience is, what kind of budget is available, what kind of content will be promoted, and so forth.
The advertiser creates a business account on its chosen platform. Here, it will explore campaign options, such as available ad formats (video, image, carousel, etc.) and where they’ll appear in a user’s feed.
The advertiser sets objectives, goals, and budget.
The advertiser defines its target audience. It will select the characteristics of their ideal customer — everything from general demographic info such as age, gender, and household income to specific traits such as interests, job title, and relationship status.
The advertiser creates and uploads its ad. Ad creative can be as simple as a headline and an image or as robust as an interactive video.
The social media platform serves the ad to its users based on the selected parameters. The platform will use cookies and other data sources to ensure that the ad is shown to the right people.
The advertiser tracks the ad’s performance within the platform’s ad manager. Here, it’s able to see how many people viewed, engaged with, or clicked on the ad and then analyze campaign results.
Although basic campaign setup and management is similar to platform to platform, each social media network has nuances and certain guidelines that advertisers should be familiar with.