Paid advertising can be a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes with the right strategy! 

Paid advertising allows small businesses to reach a targeted audience, increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to their website or brick-and-mortar location! 

In this blog post, we’ll explore the key benefits of paid advertising and the reasons you’d want to include it as a part of your marketing strategy.

Targeted Reach 

One of the biggest advantages of paid advertising is the ability to target specific demographics, locations, and interests. This means that you can reach the people most likely to be interested in your products or services, rather than wasting ad spend on an untargeted audience, ya know like a park bench. 

Understanding your ideal client plays a vital role in determining who you choose to target. You’ll be looking at demographics as well as psychographics. 

It’s important to note Meta™ has a set of Advertising Standards which protect people from discriminatory practices, fraud, and scams and promotes a positive experience while consumers are using their products. 

An important piece of targeted reach is utilizing retargeting! 

Retargeting is a form of paid advertising that allows businesses to target people who have previously interacted with their website or have shown interest in their products. 

Retargeting ads are fairly cost-effective, allow you to increase your brand awareness, and can increase your conversions! 

Measurable Results

With the correct tracking in place paid advertising provides the ability to track the effectiveness of your campaigns. 

Meta™ offers detailed reporting that tells you:

• How many people see your ad
• How many people click on your ad
• The average number of times someone sees your ad
• How many people click to the landing page from your ad

While Meta’s™ detailed reporting will provide an accurate report of what happens on both Facebook™ and Instagram™ you’ll also want to install and use tracking inside of your landing page software or website. 

Due to iOS14 limitations, you’ll often need to piece together multiple sources of information to get the clearest picture of where your conversions are coming from. 

By measuring your results, you can learn what works and what doesn’t so that you can iterate quickly! 

Increased Brand Awareness

A paid advertising strategy will increase your reach, which can lead to increased brand recognition and awareness.

Think: advertisements on park benches, grocery carts, and community buses — but digitally!

Brand awareness is crucial for small businesses because it helps to establish trust and credibility with potential customers. Low cost Facebook™ and Instagram™ ads are an excellent way to do this!

When people feel connected with your brand they are more likely to choose you over a competitor.

Cost-Effectiveness

While it’s true that paid advertising does require an upfront investment, it can be a cost-effective way to reach a large number of potential customers. 

With the right paid advertising strategy, businesses can capitalize on their paid advertising budgets!

By utilizing paid advertising, you can reach a much larger audience than traditional marketing methods, such as print or radio ads, at a fraction of the cost. 

Did you know that with brand awareness ads you can reach 1,000 people for an average cost of $6-$10 and that the average cost for a billboard is between $550-$4,000 per month in an area with a population of 200,000 people?

You could create a ton of growth for your business with a paid advertising budget of $4,000 per month! 

Additionally, with paid advertising, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, which means you’re not wasting money on people who aren’t interested in your products or services, remember that park bench we talked about earlier?

Dial in your Messaging more quickly

Paid advertising can be used to dial in your messaging by testing different hooks and angles, as well as targeting options quickly!

In order to do this, you must set up a standardized way to test, a way to ensure you receive measurable results. 

Compare apples to apples. 

Once you begin to glean information from your results you can begin to refine your overall marketing strategy with your learnings. 

Iterate until you get it right.

Paid advertising can be a valuable tool for businesses looking to reach a targeted audience, increase brand awareness, establish your messaging, and drive sales!

It’s important to choose the right strategy and plan to carefully track your campaigns to ensure the best return on investment