How SMEs can take advantage of social media advertising for scalability

By Emmanuel Otori

For every company out there, there is an in depth goal to increase her market share in both the local and global market space. The profit margin of a company is largely dependent on the audience at her disposal. Before now, companies have used various forms of advertising to promote their product inorder to reach their target audience, including traditional forms like newspaper publication and radio broadcasts. These ads methods delivered effective results until the masses moved to social media. Currently with over 3.7 billion people on different social media platforms engaging their times in ways that makes them happy, every business should definitely have a cut of this mass audience as their potential customers.

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With people of different demography, gender, age and behaviors all on the social media space, there is absolutely a guarantee that every company’s audience is represented on this space. Amongst the various forms of advertising, social media ads have in recent times dominated the advertising sector. Companies have multiple options in the form of platforms which deliver massive results through the audience at their disposal. With Facebook alone having 2.9 billion active users on monthly intervals. Also there are over 10 social media platforms for individuals and organizations to choose from, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc when choosing to promote their brands.

Social media advertising is very effective because of its conversion rate. On average over 28% of users on the internet have agreed to make choices of brands and products when they saw them as ads on the internet. Over 80% of the United State’s Population is using one or more social media platforms. This has worked for both sellers and buyers. For the buyer, it has created awareness of new products to choose from and updates on existing ones. The Promoter or organization gets the most of it, as they get to increase sales conversion, grow  audience reach, help to understudy competitors and boost brand image. However this result is tied to how engaging the content is, using the right keywords for written contents and clarity for video ads.

Also, deciding the type of content type to create for your ads is a key factor to be considered. Different ads types work differently for different niches and purposes. You could either use ad copy (written text) or use visual contents.

Here are a few tips to consider when deciding which content type to go for: Consider what you’re trying to promote and then determine where on which platform your audience are more likely to be represented; What is the conversion rate of such a platform and then decide which content type would work better there between visuals and ad copy.

How to increase your conversion rate, consider this factors:

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• Study and categorize your audience based on their demographics, age, location and psychological factors influencing their behaviors towards brands.
• Decide the type of ads that would deliver the result you seek.
• Create compelling content that targets your desired audience using keywords that users can relate with. Place your ads in positions where they’re seen clearly.
•  Create an appealing landing page with a brief description and a call to action icon, to help your visitors make quick decisions. Link this landing page to your ad and once people visit, swiftly collect their data and follow them as they are your prospective customers.

In conclusion, the result from an ad may not deliver the desired outcome the first time. But certainly it will leave you with clues to help you improve on subsequent ones. Always track your ad performance and measure conversion rate by dividing conversion by number of impressions and then multiply it by 100. Formula is = Conversion/no of Impression * 100. This will help you know the ad or platform that delivered the most results.

Emmanuel Otori has over 9 years of experience working with 100 start-ups and SMEs across Nigeria. He has worked on the Growth and Employment (GEM) Project of the World Bank, GiZ, Consulted for businesses at the Abuja Enterprise Agency, Novustack, Splitspot and NITDA. He is the Chief Executive Officer at Abuja Data School.