Social media is an incredible tool for businesses in 2022. There’s dozens of platforms available to choose from and with millions and millions of users on each, there’s endless opportunities to reach the target audience you’re trying to engage with.
Advertising is a big part of these social media platforms and it’s accessible for businesses of all sizes. From small start-ups to big corporate brands, anyone can utilize a platform’s advertising features to further expand their reach and to hopefully gain more followers.
How can social media ads help with increasing your brand awareness? There are lots of ways to approach social media and with advertising, it can help thrust your business profile into the spotlight. As these platforms grow, so does the competition. Standing out is a lot more difficult and organic content isn’t always enough.
In this article, you’ll understand how social media advertising is thriving in 2022 and how social media ads can help improve your brand awareness online.
Social media advertising in 2022
Social media advertising has grown year in year out, with ad spending set to reach $173 million in 2022. These platforms have become a great way to help brands get their business out there and for customers to have their desired products or brands they’d shop with, pop up on their feeds.
From grid posts, advertisements in between story-formatted content to in-video ads, these platforms are increasing the opportunities to advertise. More brands are moving towards social commerce to help convert leads to customers. For customers, advertising online helps 50% of them to them discover products and services online.
With social media advertising, it also brings trust to consumers who may not yet be so used to spending their money online. For so long, many have bought their products and services in-person, so it takes some convincing to shift over to a digital commerce.
A report by eMarketer found that 52% of social media users say if a platform protects their privacy and data, then they’re more likely to be influenced by ads or sponsored content on the channel. With that being said, picking the right platforms to advertise on, is important.
How can social media ads help with brand awareness?
Building brand awareness is important because without it, all the effort going on in the background to make a business successful, can go unnoticed. Especially when it comes to new businesses, focusing on a brand awareness strategy from day one is going to help boost online and offline presence.
In the case of social media ads, there are many ways that it can help with brand awareness for your business.
Acts as a brand tracker for your business
Understanding how well your business is performing is useful when it comes to brand awareness. You may feel as a brand that you’re making progress but do you have data to prove that to be so?
It might be that you’ve checked to see whose talking about your brand, or perhaps how your social media platforms have performed over time in engagement and follower count. If those results are pretty poor in comparison to what you’d hoped, then more needs to be done to track your progress.
Social media advertising can act as a brand tracker to help you see how impactful your business is on consumers that you’re reaching. Discovering your brand perception and acknowledging where improvements could be made is handy to build on that awareness.
Pushes the right content to the right people
Social media advertising, if done correctly, can help get your content in front of the right people. For some businesses, creating social media advertising campaigns can be a little tricky to master. Depending on the platform, you might find one easier than the other but through trial and error, you’ll soon be promoting the content to the intended audiences. These social predictions of what content to show to which audience are made based on high-quality training data.
Even for those social media ads that didn’t do quite as well, you can still learn a lot from the data they provide. Perhaps, you’ve missed a key demographic that you’ll include next time to better your results. Or it might be that the content you promoted, wasn’t engaging enough for your target audience.
Social media ads can be highly effective for brand awareness but they can also be a major learning curve for all businesses navigating the digital world.
Improves brand visibility to new leads
There are more people on the internet now than ever before and over half of the world – 58.4% to be exact – now use social media. That’s 4.62 billion people on the planet with access to a social media profile.
As a brand, that seems like an easy route to the spotlight but alas, you’ve got hundreds of thousands of businesses and individual profiles to compete with. Not to mention the platform’s algorithm that’s harder to crack than the Da Vinci Code.
With social media ads, whilst it’s influenced by financial wealth, you’ve got a better chance of your content being seen through paid promotion than you would organic. Even the bigger profiles will struggle to get on the main feed of it’s followers sometimes.
It helps businesses understand it’s customers more
Understanding your customers is critical for your company to find it’s success. Knowing what your customers want when they’re logging onto their social media is going to help you generate the right content. Without the right content, your ROI for your social media ads isn’t going to be worthwhile.
Ad spending can be affordable and accessible to most, but it soon adds up and so you want to make every dollar you invest, count. With every social media ad, you’re likely to learn something new about your consumers through the analytics provided.
Builds trust and creates strong relationships
Talking of customers, building trust and creating strong relationships is meaningful for many consumers nowadays. This also benefits a business, as a 5% rise in customer retention, can lead to a 75% increase in company profitability.
If you’re impressing your customers with engaging social media ads, then they’re more likely to come back or make that first purchase if they’re new. Nurturing your leads is a useful practice to boost conversions but maintaining that relationship is more challenging.
However, if you manage to create good content, promoting this content through advertising is going to help build that trust and loyalty within your customers.
Tips for creating the best social media ads this year
Whether you’re new to creating social media ads or not, there are some useful tips that you might find provide more success to your social media ads in the future.
Do your research
A lot of the decisions made online can heavily rely on data. Data is an integral part to a lot of social media platforms nowadays and we’re fortunate to have a lot of it free of charge to access and analyze.
With that said, do your market research. Understand what your content needs to look like and who will engage with it. Know who your target audience are, where you can find them and what they enjoy engaging with. Assess your competitors actions and what they’re doing to build their own brand awareness.
Create advertisements that draw the eye instantly
Your social media ads needs to be interesting, otherwise your target audience are likely to just scroll past and ignore anything you post. You want advertisement design that draw the eye instantly, especially as our attention span has shortened considerably since the digital world came in to prominence. Luckily, you can use the help of an online ad maker to create engaging ads and get your audience interested in your product or service.
Think about colour and composition of imagery, considering carefully about what you want the user to feel or think as they see the ad.
Be consistent
Consistency is key, especially when you’re a small business starting out. With consistency, you’re likely to stay in the minds of those leads you’re trying to convert into customers. It’s also going to remind your existing customer base to check in with your brand more often.
There are plenty of tools out there that can help with scheduling your organic content and most social media platforms will allow you automate your paid advertisements. Creating a content calendar for your social media is an effwective way of staying consistent, even when your employees aren’t around the hit publish.
Utilize social media ads to build your brand awareness online
There’s no point in shying away from social media ads, whether you’ve tried your luck with them or not, they’re an essential ingredient to advertising online.
Social media advertising is great for businesses of all sizes and it’s a lot more accessible than some traditional media outlets are financially. Utilizer social media ads for your business and in time, you’ll likely see some great return on your investment in this area of your brand development.
