Have you been scrolling on social media and stopped on an ad that really caught your eye? Every social media user is familiar with the ads placed on their feed. But have you ever wondered who is behind those ads and how they were created?
What Is Social Media Buying?
Social media buying is the process of buying social media ads for clients. A media buying agency identifies the social media channels best suited to place ads for the customer’s target audience.
Social media ad campaigns may have different content, but the structure remains the same. Ads campaigns are ran on Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, etc.
The primary goal for any social media buying is to find the right place, time, and context to deliver relevant ads to a target audience and increase conversion rates, sales, or brand awareness. These ads, when successful, can drive traffic and bring new customers to your business.
Executing a Social Media Buying Plan
Some successful ways that media agencies use to buy social media ads include:
Manual Bidding
A media agency bids for ad space on social media and manually manages the ads to reach the target customer base.
Programmatic Buys
AI and algorithms control these bids to enable real-time bidding on ad space that matches consumer profiles from a pool of media ad space.
Direct Buys
This is a process where a media buyer has an opportunity to negotiate ad rates and run times with a specific advertiser on digital media, e.g., advertising websites or other high-traffic websites.
The Stages of Social Media Buying
The process involved in successful digital media buying fall under the following stages.
Pre Ad Launch
This stage involves all the behind-the-scenes work done before a creative ad is launched on social media. A media buyer agency must ensure that they do thorough research and plan and develop a strategy that will supersede their client’s expectations and be relevant to the target audience. This stage is very time-consuming since it consists of going back and forth with the client to ensure that the selected media platform aligns with advertising objectives.
Important factors to promote a quick pre-launch process includes:
- Identify your target market – With your client’s help, define who your target customer is and where they can be found.
- Identify competitors – After identifying your target audience, look at who your competitors are targeting ads towards. Look at what has worked for them and what hasn’t, and learn from their experiences.
- Choose your strategy – Create a strategy that corresponds with your audience and goals for the ad campaign.
- Choose a platform – Social media has many platforms where your ad could be placed—identifying which social channel will work best for your audience. You can choose to either run Facebook ads, Instagram ads, youtube ads, or both to increase your reach.
After carefully planning the pre-launch, you can now start designing and executing your launch campaign.
Launching an Ad
This is the stage where you launch your paid social media ad. This is not a one-day or few hours task. Several things are involved before customers can see the advertisement.
First, a media buyer must ensure they create great content that has been approved by the client. Second, a proper plan must be in place for content delivery and keeping an eye on campaigns’ performance to understand what is working and what doesn’t to make further adjustments if needed.
Post Ad Launch
This stage calls for reflection from the activity of your social media campaign. First, look at how effective the campaign was to overall performance. Next, collect all the data and insights from the campaign and look for the trends that made it successful or a failure. Numbers do not lie, and as a marketer, this data will show you exactly what methods and tools give the best results and where to put more effort to ensure you reach your target audience and get results.
Social Media Content Planning
The backbone of social media advertising is great content. Without engaging content, the audience will quickly lose interest in your brand and business. Therefore, a media agency needs to have a strong content plan to ensure the customers engage with their clients.
You can use many types of content, including videos, images, blog posts, infographics, etc. These content ideas form the basis of your high-quality content that will fuel your social media advertising campaigns.
Some of the tips you can use to plan for your content marketing are as follows:
- Identify the best content for your platform – You want to create content that speaks to your target audience. Depending on your audiences’ needs, you can create informative, entertaining, or uplifting content that will engage them.
- Be consistent – whether it’s blog posts, videos, or regular posts, you have to send them out regularly and consistently. So, consider designating a set schedule to publish your content.
- Avoid oversharing – Avoid the oversharing trap. Try to say clear of exhausting your audience with too much content that will take a lot of their time and energy and thus urge them to avoid your content altogether.
Looking for a Media Buying Agency?
If you are a business looking to venture into digital media buying, you can reach out to experts that will work with you to plan, develop, and implement your first successful social media ad campaign.
Content First Marketing is a digital agency that has years of experience successfully bringing business online. Schedule a free business review to find out how we help companies just like yours grow. Then, you can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.