Have you noticed your organic social media reach isn’t as high as it used to be? Maybe you aren’t seeing as much engagement with your posts. A big reason for this is the constant social media algorithm update. The goal of algorithm updates is making the user experience better so people continue to use social media.
While these updates encourage people to continue using social media, they also require marketers to adjust their social media strategies.
Outsmarting the Social Algorithm Updates
How do you continue leveraging social media to reach your target audiences? Through paid digital advertising. As social media platforms continue to update their algorithms, ‘pay-to-play’ is the rule of the game. Paid digital advertising is important because it allows marketers to gain additional reach (unique users), customized targeting, new customers, and A/B testing.
Digital Reach
In 2018, business pages were reaching about 3 percent of fans with organic posts due to Facebook algorithm updates. This makes a strong case for investing in paid digital advertising—Facebook advertising specifically. According to a Wordstream study, companies that advertise on Facebook reach 90 percent more fans and 111 percent more of their page fans’ friends.
Customized Targeting
Digital advertising platforms offer many ways to target users. For example, targeting options include education level, income, life events, relationship status, interests, behaviors, job titles, years of work experience, and more. It’s best to test a few different audiences at first to learn what types of content work best with each audience. Additionally, it’s important to create custom content for each digital platform.
New Customers
Paid advertising gives you the ability to boost posts and serve ads to people based on their location, interests, age, etc. It also allows you to choose who sees your content. If you have personas created for groups of target customers, you should align your personas with corresponding digital audiences as part of your comprehensive marketing strategy. This aligns your paid digital advertising strategy with the rest of your marketing efforts. It also ensures you reach your target customers on multiple platforms in a variety of ways.
A/B Testing
Paid digital advertising allows you to test different versions of messaging and creative with the same audiences to determine what they respond to best. After you learn what messaging and creative works best, you can create ads that reflect what the data has proven through testing. When testing, it’s best to run the advertising campaigns for one to three months before making major changes. This will give you enough time to make data-informed decisions when creating your ads moving forward.
Looking for more ways to use paid digital advertising? Check out our recent blog post on what makes a good Google Search campaign, or for more on social media marketing, read our blog post on how to choose the right channels for your content.
Ready to get started with paid digital advertising? Save yourself some time by letting us help guide you in the right direction. Let’s chat!