Today, social media has a very large audience that ranges from Facebook to TikTok. It is becoming a necessary part of our daily lives and billions of people use various social media accounts and apps every day. With this amount of active users, many organisations are seeing the benefits of advertising across social media platforms, making it harder and harder for brands to compete for ad space- According to a report, 83% of B2B marketers use social media for marketing (Content Marketing Institute). By combining social media and PPC, you can increase your brand awareness, and drive conversions simultaneously.
PPC and social media advertising differ in that social media ads are commonly used to target users earlier on in their buying journey. Social media ads appear in social network new feeds, as people are browsing the platforms, whereas PPC ads are shown to users as they actively search a query. Social media ads used in this way are more similar to display ad marketing, rather than search marketing. Social media platforms offer several options to reach the right audience at the right time. Similarly to PPC, you can use their targeting options to target an audience you feel will be interested in your products and services. You can also boost your posts to reach a unique and larger audience for generating more new leads (FaroTech, 2020).
An optimised strategy would involve implementing PPC search ads to gather data on your audience, such as who converts most, their location, the buying habits and their interests. You can then create your social media ads based on this valuable information, making them highly personalised and targeted, increasing the likelihood of conversions. This strategy is also effective when applied contrarily. With social media advertising, you can learn from your audience. By analysing how your audience engage with your ads, and the comments they leave, you can learn what they think about your brand and your messaging (Tanya). Based on this data, you can optimise your PPC ads so that they are more in line with what your target audience want, and even respond to users, asking for valuable information.
Re-targeted social media ads are another popular tactic that brands use to increase sales. You can use tags on different social media platforms, such as Facebook. These tags use Pixels to collect your audience data for re-targeting. E-commerce websites are a good example of how to use social media and PPC together for a mixed channel approach; users that visit an e-commerce site can be retargeted on social media with personalised ads encouraging them to buy the items they viewed, or added to their basked but didn’t purchase.
Marketing on social media can bring huge profit for your business if used wisely.
It can be hard to know which marketing channels and approaches work for you, but with social media marketing, you can freely test your ideas and gather data to help you understand your audience (Sunarjo, 2019). If you are not using this data to optimise your customer journey, then is it worth capturing? The advancement social media’s targeting and analytics features, coupled with the fact your audience can engage with your brand has created a means of distributing marketing communications that are increasingly personalised. The data you collect from social media can be applied to your PPC ads and your wider marketing strategy.
