When compared to 2015, social media usage has more than doubled. Back then, there were already 2.07 billion users worldwide, now, that number has skyrocketed to 4.48 billion. With so many people endlessly scrolling through social media feeds, social media marketing is an opportunity you won’t want to miss!
If that isn’t enough to persuade you to advertise online, in this blog post we will be going over the advantages of social media marketing, and how you can grow your business advertising on Facebook & Instagram.
Social Media User Habits
The first advantage of Social Media Marketing is quite simple, it has become part of the daily routine for essentially every age group in Canada. In fact, Canadians between 15 and 34 increased their social usage by 57% post-pandemic, and those over 65 increased their social media usage by 18%. So while your parents may have had trouble navigating Facebook or Instagram just 5 years ago, today, plenty of people of that generation are online every single day.
Still not convinced to advertise online?
Here are some more statistics!
- Out of 4.8 billion internet users worldwide, 93.33% of eligible users are on social media. (Eligible users refer to people over the age of 13)
- More specifically, 77% of Canadians over the age of 13 are on social media
- From 2015 to 2019 social media usage grew by 12.5% annually, with growth only slightly slowing down to 9.2% between 2019 and 2020.
- Canadians spend an average of just over 2 hours using social media per day
So while you could reach an audience this large with traditional marketing, it would be incredibly expensive and unrealistic to do as a small to medium-sized business owner. Launching ads on Facebook and Instagram is significantly cheaper than launching a nationally televised TV commercial!
If you need to reach a tonne of people, take advantage of social media marketing. No other platform can reach Canadians of every age group and demographic!
Your Reach & Targeting Options
With so many people online, you obviously have the potential to reach a massive audience, but one aspect of social media marketing that really sets itself apart from traditional marketing, is the amount of available targeting methods.
So not only do you have the ability to reach almost every Canadian with social media marketing, but you can also narrow down your target audience, giving you the ability to more efficiently spend your marketing budget.
When advertising on Facebook & Instagram, you can target users based on…
- Location
- Age
- Gender
- Demographics, including education, job title, relationship status, and more
- Interests, including almost anything from luxury travel to competitive gaming
Plus, Facebook and Instagram offers 2 more advanced targeting options, custom audience targeting and lookalike targeting. With these targeting options, you can precisely advertise to individuals that have already interacted with your business, and individuals who are extremely likely to purchase your business.
Essentially, custom audience targeting is a more robust version of standard retargeting. While standard retargeting is based on data gathered from your website, custom audience targeting is based on data from multiple sources in addition to your website, including your customer database, mobile app, and engagement on your Facebook or Instagram profiles. By utilizing multiple data sources, Facebook can create and target a larger segment of people who are familiar with you and your business.
As for lookalike targeting, as the name suggests, it creates an audience segment that “looks like” your existing customers. More specifically, with AI machine learning, Facebook analyzes your campaign performance and custom audience characteristics, to create a new audience that exhibits traits and behavior patterns that “look like” your existing customers and others familiar with your business. However, what sets this segment apart, is that this audience does not have any prior experience or exposure to your business. So, while they may be new to your business, they are also significantly more likely to purchase from you.
In comparison to traditional marketing, the options that you have to target your ideal audience are much more limited. At best, direct mail marketing may include demographic targeting, but for the majority of traditional marketing methods targeting is much more restricted. For example, with a radio ad, you can schedule it and choose the station it’s on, but you don’t have control of who listens to it. So, while some targeting options exist, it can be much more challenging, or impossible, to advertise directly to your target audience with traditional marketing.
While traditional marketing has its time and place in a marketing campaign, one of the primary advantages of social media marketing is that it allows you to directly isolate and advertise to your target audience, making your marketing more effective and cost-friendly.
Using Your Analytics & Customer Insights
To accompany the advanced targeting options that come with social media marketing, when you advertise on Facebook & Instagram, you’ll also get advanced campaign performance & customer analytics!
This data is incredibly valuable as the insights you uncover can reveal strengths and weaknesses that you can capitalize on. For example, let’s say you want to promote health supplements and you have 2 primary target markets, but you aren’t sure how you should spend your advertising dollars. In this case, you can launch a general marketing campaign, and use customer analytics to determine which target market is more interested in your products. From here, you can then use the insights you’ve gathered from your analytics to guide your ad optimization.
For this scenario, imagine that the vast majority of your conversions came from a younger audience. If one of your target markets were young fitness enthusiasts looking to boost their health, and the other was a market of older individuals looking to respond to a health issue, the data from your campaign could illustrate several ways that you can optimize your ads moving forward.
For example:
- After confirming your individual target markets, you can split your general campaign to address the specific needs, wants, and worries of each one separately.
- You can maximize your profitability by increasing your budget, and tailoring your ad graphic, copy, and targeting options, to exclusively cater to your younger audience.
- You can address your weakness, and run test campaigns for your older audience. By running test campaigns, you can begin to narrow down how to tweak your graphics, copy, or targeting options, to improve your conversion rate.
Thanks to campaign analytics you can make data-driven decisions like this, and optimize your social media marketing campaigns with confidence.
On the other hand, if you were promoting your health supplements with a radio commercial, it would be much more difficult to determine how to optimize your advertising. This is because many traditional marketing tactics, including the radio, don’t provide in-depth customer data like social media marketing does. So, while you may see a bump in sales after your ads go live on the radio, without specific customer insights, any optimization becomes more of a “guess and check” process… An inaccurate process that can waste your money!
With that being said, in addition to advanced targeting options, another advantage of social media marketing is that it includes optimization guiding analytical data… Data that you won’t be able to get for many traditional marketing methods.
In conclusion, just as social media has exploded over the last decade, so have your opportunities to build your brand or earn a new customer advertising on Facebook or Instagram. And, while traditional marketing can still be a valuable piece of a campaign, with social media marketing, not only can you reach a larger audience but you can also optimize your ads to capture more leads for a lower cost with comprehensive analytics.
If you’re interested in launching social media ads, contact us for a consultation! We would love to teach you more about the process, the services we offer, and how social media marketing can help you grow your business.
