It’s a pretty cryptic term to most, but it’s quite simple really: ‘paid social’ ads are a series of sponsored ads on social media platforms that are - you guessed it - paid for.
As opposed to the unpaid, organic posts you create that might not reach the right audience or even perform well, paid social campaigns actively boost chosen pieces of content to the custom target audiences that are likely to resonate with what they see. With more people you actively want to reach seeing the post comes a higher chance of them being converted from viewers to followers and customers.
Now that’s settled, there are a few rumours we need to put to rest.
Assumption 1: Since social media is so ingrained into people’s lifestyles, paid social is only effective if you’re looking to speak to consumers and drive sales as a B2C company.
Assumption 2: Since younger generations are more ‘online’ than the rest of us, paid social campaigns only work if you’re looking to get down with the kids.
What if we told you that none of these things are true - that paid social can speak to everyone and can be used by B2B and B2C companies alike?
It’s time for a myth-busting session. With nearly 77% of B2B marketers using paid social strategies as a core part of their marketing in 2022, here are a few tips on how you can make paid marketing an integral part of your B2B social campaigns - even if you’re not on the hunt for Gen Z customers:
Understand your audience
What do your audience do and where do they live? What are they interested in and what are their pain points? Identifying who you want to be targeting in the greatest of detail is the first step. While Gen Z-focused beauty brands, for example, might be going for ‘teenaged females or young adults in the UK interested in fashion and cosmetics’, B2B brands could be specifically targeting professionals in certain roles within organisations - understand the people you want to be speaking to, and you could be directly reaching those all-important decisions-makers with your paid social efforts.
Choose the right platforms
We’ve decided the ‘who’, and now it’s time for the ‘where’. To have a greater chance of engaging the right people, you need to select platforms where your target B2B audience are most active to go live with your sponsored ads.
Depending on the industry, you might just find yourself in TikTok, Instagram or Twitter territory, the B2C favourites. But let’s not forget about the primary B2B marketing platform due to its professional user base, LinkedIn, with 78% of B2B marketers using it for their paid ads because of its high ROI.
Create standout content that resonates
Your message is going to be hitting the audience you’ve been wanting to reach - so how do you make sure they like what they see enough to engage with you? It’s imperative that you develop a campaign that resonates with their objectives, provides value and showcases the benefits of your services so the right people are invested from beginning to end.
Ticket Tailor, an online ticketing platform, partnered with us for their B2B paid social strategy to boost brand awareness. We created a series called 'Our Event Creators', showcasing Ticket Tailor's diverse customer base as they emphasised why they chose to partner with the platform. By producing credible and relevant narrative-led videos for their targeted audiences online, we garnered 2.28 million impressions and 707.4K+ 100% completion video views - this translated to 14K+ website visits and counting.
Stand out to the audience that’ll be seeing you on their feed by developing content that grips them, and you stand a better chance of converting the curious.
Test and optimise
Data is king, and paid marketing results provide insights to you on a silver platter. You can use these results to refine your messaging, targeting and creative output for better results time after time. Speaking of refinement, the process is getting faster by the year. The growing use of AI within marketing (and, well, every other sector) means your marketing team is able to collect insights about your chosen audience in real time and generate content quickly to match the stats, just in time for your next paid campaign.
So, we’ve converted you into fans of B2B paid social, but you’re not sure where to start. If you want to talk more about how you can leverage performance marketing or need help creating the thumb-stopping content you’ll be using for your sponsored ads, reach out to us for a chat.
