Paid Promotion on Facebook and Instagram in 2024

As the world collectively goes digital, businesses need to reinvent their models to keep up with this generation’s demands. While Social Media has contributed to developing brand awareness and leads, we see an increase in revenue and sales with the advent of e-commerce and digital advertising. The technology will feature prominently in marketing strategies. 

At Social Sherpa, we are passionate about working with clients belonging to various domains and developing bespoke advertising campaigns that leverage the immense potential of Social Media. 

If you want to know why you must invest in digital networks, here are a few reasons:

Why Business Should Invest in Social Media Channels?

No Geographical barriers

With users from all over the world, you can easily reach out to them and develop a consumer base that is not necessarily local.

Gives better ROI

As paid campaigns on Facebook and Instagram are much cheaper than conventional marketing mediums, they are more likely to provide a better return on your investment.

Customer engagement

With various options to interact directly with your customers, this is one of Social Media’s distinct advantages. It enables direct customer engagement, and you can interact with them in real time.

Laser-focused campaigns

With various parameters to target potential customers, social networking platforms have established themselves as indispensable!

Easy to Evaluate

For conventional mediums, it is difficult to identify their effectiveness. When it comes to digital platforms, they provide advertisers with cutting-edge analytics that show exactly what worked for a campaign and what didn’t. This enables advertisers to improve their strategies and achieve even better results.

While social media offers various platforms, the most popular remain Facebook and Instagram due to their sheer global presence! Why should a business invest in these platforms? Let’s find out:

Facebook: #1 Ultimate Social Media Channel in 2024

Let’s take a look at Facebook, arguably the first platform that has led to Social Media as a marketing phenomenon:

• Facebook has over 2.7 billion monthly active users across the world.
• 74% of Facebook Users visit their profiles daily.
• Facebook Stories garner over 500 million views every single day.
• Even if you target 1% of Facebook’s massive advertising reach, you would be reaching out to tens of millions of potential customers.
• With Facebook offering ads for as low as $1 a day, even small-scale businesses can leverage the medium’s potential very easily. Due to this reason, local businesses that may not be able to afford conventional means of marketing can benefit massively from Facebook.

Why Paid Promotion on Facebook?

What can you do on Facebook through paid promotions and campaigns?

The Facebook Business Manager is a comprehensive module developed for advertisers to create targeted campaigns leading to the desired results. For starters, they offer various potential objectives that one might have for an ad campaign. Divided across Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion here’s what Facebook has to offer.

Awareness

The first step that the Social Networking Giant offers is to develop robust brand awareness and ensure that your name is established. 

There are two kinds of campaigns that you can consider: Awareness and Reach. While the former is self-explanatory, through the latter, Facebook improves your page’s reach to many potential customers, depending on the budget you decide to spend.

Consideration

Once there is enough brand awareness and reach on the platform, advertisers can leverage the “consideration” aspect of a campaign. 

The objective of such a campaign is to generate interest in a brand’s offerings. To achieve this, Facebook offers many advertisements targeted for several actions, such as:

• Generating web traffic
• App Downloads
• Video Views
• Engagement (Comment, like, share)
• Lead Generation
• Messages (Can be linked to WhatsApp also)

Conversion

The eventual objective for any business, conversion, is an integral aspect of marketing strategies. 

Advertisers can provide product catalogs and generate ads based on potential customers’ geographical locations around a brand’s brick-and-mortar presence.

Facebook Campaign Manager

The platform developed for advertisers is very user-friendly and can help anyone develop cutting-edge campaigns. 

Facebook also offers the option of using A/B testing for ads and enables advertisers to build an even more vigorous and more successful campaign that leads to the marketing objective. 

They offer various parameters that help advertisers laser-focus their campaigns and can modify them based on their objectives. These include

Location

Why advertise to millions of people when you just need to grab the attention of thousands at a particular place?

Behaviour

Are you looking for your consumer’s specific behaviour, such as whether they have purchased anything online before or not.

Demographics

Have you defined a particular set of people who might benefit the most from your products? Advertise only to them.

Connections

Retarget people who have engaged with you before through your website and Facebook Page.

Interests

Target those people who would be interested in ancillary products or pages

How Brands Like Nike & Airbnb Leveraged Facebook:

Let’s look at how a few famous brands leverage Facebook as a platform:

Nike

They have specialized pages for various sports like basketball, football, running, tennis, etc. Also, Nike has some pages for activities like the Nike+ Run Club. 

By dividing their products and offerings, Nike can target their audience much better. They can provide more value to people. The sports channels give you news from your favorite sports, making campaigns more targeted and relevant. 

The primary objective of using social media should be to be a way to find your customers and solve any needs or problems they may have.

Airbnb

Being active and responsive on the Facebook page can lead to increased trust. For example, Airbnb is extraordinarily prompt and active on its Facebook page; it solves customer issues and posts fantastic pictures of its homestays.

Belonging to the Facebook Family is another revolutionizing application, Instagram. With a cult status in today’s times, Instagram is rapidly evolving into an advertising giant. Developed with a vision to promote visual content through images and videos, Instagram is arguably the best platform to showcase your products.

Further, with Reels already available in specific locations, Instagram offers avenues to generate 30-second advertisements that would be ideal for today’s fast-paced generation. 

Instagram has also made a massive market for Influencers, popularly referred to as “Instagram Influencers”. Brands can collaborate with them for brand endorsements which can lead to increased conversions and revenue generation.

Instagram: #2 Ultimate Social Media Channels in 2024

Let us look explore (Instagram pun intended) some impressive statistics that show why investing in Instagram is a prudent course of action:

• 1 Billion people use Instagram every day with at least half of them using Instagram Stories in the same period.
• With a Male to Female ratio of 52:48, the gender mix on Instagram is nearly even.
• 63% of Instagram users log in every day.
• 11% of US Social Media Users shop on Instagram.
• It has a potential advertising reach of ~ 850 million users.
• Brands pay Instagram Influencers anywhere between $100 to $2000 per post.

How to advertise on Instagram?

With various engagement tools that use images or videos, here are the features that you can use to market your offerings.

• Image Posts
• Stories
• Instagram TV (IGTV)
• Reels (Not available across the world but only in a few markets such as Brazil and India)

In the last couple of years, Instagram has been rolling out bundles of features to help businesses utilize its massive reach. 

These include a plethora of new promotional ad features, analytics, and quality-of-life improvements. Instagram Promotions are usual, non-advertisement posts that you can convert to sponsored posts with elevated reach.

They can appear in the same spot with the same ‘Sponsored’ tag, but Instagram treats them differently in their algorithm.

This is because there is a nuance in each of their purposes. While each post is there to increase visibility and engagement, an Ad has many more preferences for targeting and customization because the supreme objective is to convert.

Instagram promotions’ most significant use case is creating brand awareness. By boosting a post, you can kickstart the snowball effect and get posts the traction they deserve, which helps skyrocket reach and is very useful if your primary goal is high visibility.

Like other social media platforms, Instagram’s algorithms operate off of an acceleration/virality factor. The quicker your posts get off to the right start, the higher the ranking algorithms will put you in the feed.

Instagram offers various ad options depending on your needs and target audience. They offer Post ads, Video ads, Carousel ads, Ads in Explore, and Stories ads.  

For promoting your company or brand effectively, Instagram allows you to choose up to 10 interests that you think accurately represent your intended audience which is where you can make the magic happen and maximize your audience targeting capabilities. Interests range anywhere from hobbies, movies, and events, to people.

Once you have solidified your age, gender, location, and interests, you now have a working demographic of people to promote. 

Apart from defining your target audience, Instagram also offers the feature of Insights where you can track things like:

• Impressions
• Profile visits
• Follows
• Shares
• Website clicks
• Comments
• Number of people who got directions
• Number of people who contacted you
• How many people discovered you

Instagram promotions are a great way to get that boost in reach that your posts need. But if the content is unrefined, its message will fall on deaf ears.

Insights and other forms of analytics will help guide your content and highlight pain points. However, creating content that will resonate with your audience is a different beast and will need a more holistic approach. The content you put out needs to be compelling, engaging, memorable, and actionable.

How Brands Like Gatorade & Mercedes Benz Leveraged Instagram:

Let’s look at a few companies that used this platform to boost their marketing.

Gatorade

They revived its 23-year-old campaign #BELIKEMIKE on Instagram. They came up with this when the iconic basketball player Micheal Jordan was the brand ambassador for the sports energy drink. 

They decided to spark up the old extinguished flame by posting amazing pictures of Micheal Jordan from the time he was still playing, and they got very vigorous with the use of hashtags in all their stories and posts. 

And Instagram was the perfect platform as it is a more visual-driven platform compared to the others.

Mercedes Benz

Another example is the car giant Mercedes Benz.  

Mercedes Benz seems to win every time with their social media campaigns. The one that stands out is the one back in 2013 when they created what is still believed to be one of the best Instagram marketing campaigns to date.

Mercedes wanted to reach out to the younger audience, so they hired five top Instagram photographers to click a picture for the new Mercedes CLA. Whoever got the most likes got to keep the car – so they all worked at it! By the end of the campaign, Mercedes has received:

• 87,000,000 organic Instagram impressions
• 2,000,000 Instagram likes
• 150 new marketing assets (stunning photos)

With the ever-changing marketing tactics, Instagram has proved to be of great aid in launching or promoting one’s company, products, or services to users of all demographics across the world.

While this is a relatively comprehensive post, we are still really scratching the surface of the world of Facebook and Instagram advertising.