It's All Virtual

Photo source: User TimYang.net on flickr.

Introduction

As a product marketer, you need to generate awareness of your products. Of the many tools in your tool chest, social media has emerged as an effective swiss army knife.

While some have found success driving leads and opportunities via social, I’ve been using it to generate awareness. I’ve found paid social ads to be a necessary complement to my “organic” (non-paid) social marketing.

Let’s consider five reasons to run paid social ads for your product.

1) Our short attention spans are getting shorter.

Across television, the web and print; across devices mounted on walls and in our palms, we’re inundated with more media than ever. How can we pay attention to any one thing? It’s hard and social media adds more food to the media buffet. Paid social ads can provide you with a small boost of attention (with your target buyer).

2) Your posts on social media are bound to be missed.

Let’s face it: unless your product is sold to social media managers, your target audience is not on social media all day long. In addition, social media is breaking news, real-time information, here, now. I like to say that if happened yesterday on social media, it didn’t happen. Paid social ads help combat this.

3) Gets you past social gatekeepers.

You spend years building up the Likes on your Facebook Page. Now, you pay for Promoted Posts to reach your own fans? Yes, that doesn’t seem quite right to me.

But I’m a pragmatist. “It is what it is” and you know what? It works. Spend $10-$15 and get more awareness to your own followers (Likes). You’ll also reach people outside of your network and have the potential to generate new Likes (of the post), shares and Likes (of your page).

4) Extends the life of your social posts.

So you wrote an awesome case study, then crafted a creative tweet to promote it. Chances are 95% of your followers didn’t see the tweet. And of those who missed it, another 95% will never, ever see it (the other 5% may see it because you included a hash tag that they follow).

With paid social ads, you can set a budget and your ads (posts) will be promoted until the budget runs dry. If social media posts suffer from radioactive decay, then social ads double your half-life.

5) New targeting options available.

Twitter recently launched keyword targeting for Twitter Ads. Now, you can target your Twitter ads to users who engage with certain keywords in their timeline or in search.

Let’s say you tweeted about your daily special at your hot dog stand. You can now promote that tweet via these keywords: hot dog, ketchup, mustard, frankfurter, relish. The targeting can help not only with awareness, but also in driving conversions (leads).

Conclusion

The fun thing about social media is the fast pace of change. And while I’ve focused on Facebook and Twitter ads in this post, I’m sure new advertising options will emerge. In addition, there are existing options to explore, such as LinkedIn Ads. So experiment, measure and adjust. And have fun!