I can’t imagine any company today experiencing substantial growth without proper social media advertising.

Advertising is how businesses promote themselves and what they sell to their audience members. With billions of people on social media, it’s clear why businesses choose to advertise and promote themselves through this medium.

Social media advertising is a powerful marketing tactic that can drive leads, boost revenue, increase brand awareness, and more. In this guide, we‘ll discuss why it’s so effective, explain how to create a strategy for your business, and provide inspiration to help you get started.

Table of Contents

• How effective is social media advertising?
• How to Create a Social Media Ad
• How to Run a Social Media Ad: Examples

How effective is social media advertising?

Did you know that Facebook is the most used social network worldwide, with over 3 billion monthly active users? Or that there are over 2 billion monthly active Instagram users?

And did you know 83% of marketers report that social media has increased business exposure?

These are just some of the many stats related to social media advertising that prove its impact and importance among all types of businesses.

In addition to stats supporting the effectiveness and impressive reach of social media advertising, this marketing tactic allows you to nurture your leads in real time. You can directly communicate and engage with your followers and audience on the platform to nurture and build relationships with them.

The cherry on top? Social media advertising is more cost-effective than traditional advertising. With social media ads, you can easily set a budget and add to or remove from that set amount within your social platform.

Now that you understand the power of social media ads, let’s discuss the steps involved in advertising your business on social media.

And, if you need some extra assistance afterward, I suggest looking into HubSpot’s AI-powered Campaign Assistant, which can scale your campaign and generate high-quality copy to help your social media ads stand out.

How to Create a Social Media Ad

Here are the major steps for how to run social media ads.

Pro tip: Use CRM and web analytics data to inform your ad campaigns and discover which ads convert the most visitors into customers.

1. Think about your budget.

One of the most daunting aspects of social media advertising is determining your budget. That’s because there are so many unique and flexible options for running social media ads.

For example, if you want to run a social campaign on Facebook with the Facebook Ad Campaign tool, start by setting a budget.

Then, Facebook will run your campaign for you and spend your budget as evenly as possible throughout your selected period (or until your budget has been completely used). You can then leave your Facebook ad campaign as is or add more money to your budget to continue.

Align your marketing objectives with your social media advertising strategy to help you plan your budget. Consider the amount you’re comfortable with taking out of the larger marketing strategy to put towards your social ads.

Pro tip: Use one of these paid advertising budget templates to map out your costs before you launch your ads.

2. Choose which type of social media advertisement you’ll run.

The landscape of paid social advertising is constantly changing; new technologies, channels, formats, and trends emerge daily.

That means there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to which social media channels you should advertise on. Ultimately, testing different channels is the best way to determine what works best for your business and audience as you figure out how to run social media ads.

Here are some of the most common types of social media platforms you can advertise through and which demographic of people you’ll want to target through each:

Facebook

About 68% of adults use Facebook. Although 25-34-year-olds make up the most significant number of users on the platform, Facebook still has the widest age range of active users of any other platform.

Since Facebook ads allow you to reach audience members who haven’t liked your page, you can see why the platform is so popular to advertise through — you get the largest population of audience members compared to other platforms by a landslide.

Instagram

Instagram is ideal for targeting younger generations. Nearly a third of 18-24-year-olds and 25-29-year-olds globally use the platform, while only 8% of people over 65 are on it.

X (formerly Twitter)

X is a good option for targeting young to middle-aged adults with your social media ads. That’s because 37% of adults in the U.S.

LinkedIn

It’s no secret that LinkedIn is a professional network, meaning you‘ll likely want to stick with more formal, business, and career-related advertisements on the platform. This also means the demographic on LinkedIn you’ll want to target includes current or soon-to-be workforce members.

LinkedIn has over 1.2 billion members, and 47% of LinkedIn users are between ages 25 and 34.

Snapchat

Snapchat is a platform you‘ll want to advertise through if you’re looking to target a young crowd. The platform has around 453 million daily active users. In over 20 countries, Snapchat reaches 75% of the 13-24-year-old population.

3. Make your ad relevant.

Your ads should be relevant to your target audience and customers. There are a few ways to ensure this.

• Use your buyer personas to target the interests and needs of your audience and customers.
• Conduct customer feedback surveys and focus groups to fulfill the needs of your target audience even when they aren’t actively searching for a solution.
• Search engine optimize (SEO) your social content so it’s more likely to organically appear when specific keywords and phrases are being searched (and use image alt text when you can)

Pro tip: Download free templates to organize your audience segments into buyer personas easily.

4. Design a beautiful, eye-catching ad.

On social media, it seems as though there’s a never-ending amount of new visual content. So, how do you make your social media ads stand out?

Your ads must be engaging, beautifully designed, and eye-catching. They should make someone scrolling through their feed stop in their tracks and want to take a closer look at your content.

You also want your ad to look on-brand so your audience members can easily associate the ad with your business. (This will help you continue to build brand recognition, too.)

Here are some of the elements you’ll want to think about when designing an effective social media ad that grabs the attention of your target audience:

• Images
• Videos
• Font
• Colors
• Written content and messaging
• CTA buttons

5. Write copy that converts.

Every word and character you include in your advertisements counts. This is especially true of social media ads with word count and text limitations.

So, to ensure your copy converts all while being straightforward, direct, and short, you should:

• Be compelling
• Communicate your value proposition clearly
• Be actionable

Once you‘ve created your social media ad, you’ll want to ensure its success among your audience members—here’s how to measure its success.

6. Measure your ad’s success.

Social media advertising comes with many metrics you should monitor to determine the success of your work. When doing this, you must focus on the social media metrics that matter most to your campaigns and business.

To help get you started, here are three of the most commonly-monitored metrics related to social media advertising you might consider keeping a close eye on:

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the number of clicks your ad has received divided by the number of impressions it received (clicks/ impressions). This metric indicates the relevance of your content to your audience and the quality of that traffic.

Cost Per Conversion (CPC)

Every campaign should have one core conversion goal (signups, app installs, downloads, visits to blog posts). To calculate CPC, divide the amount of money you have spent by the number of conversions that resulted. This gives you insight into whether your ads are profitable and helps you project your future ad spending.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate of the number of visits to your landing page that result from your social media ads provides a good idea of the quality of the clicks you’re receiving as well as the performance of your landing page. You can also benchmark your social ad traffic against the traffic conversion rate from other sources.

And if you’re still unsure how to create paid media ads after all these tips, no worries! You can always download our free paid media template to get started.

How to Run a Social Media Ad: Examples

Now let’s review some examples of successful social media ads for a little inspiration.

1. Dollar Shave Club Facebook Ad

Dollar Shave Club is a company that values minimalism, efficiency, and ease, which is why this Facebook ad is straightforward and simplistic, making it on-brand. The images provide a clear look into what customers can expect from a membership and their products.

Pro Tip: Facebook is an ideal platform for sharing a generic ad like this one because of the wide pool of active people on the platform. After all, most adults — both male and female — shave and are therefore part of their target audience.

2. Dick’s Sporting Goods Instagram Ad

Dick’s Sporting Goods’ Instagram ad is promoting a pair of Adidas sneakers. The ad includes photos of the shoes and athletes wearing them before, after, and during the workouts.

The ad is well-planned because it doesn’t feel like an ad — the visually-pleasing post looks like one that a friend of yours would post on the platform. In other words, this ad doesn’t feel like a disruptive ad, yet it still grabs your attention.

3. Pokerist’s X Ad

Pokerist‘s ad on X is excellent because it mentions consumers’ shared dislikes about mobile games—constant notifications and in-app purchases. I can‘t tell you how many times I’ve become frustrated with a mobile game that promises to be free but actually pushes me to make a purchase to have the best experience.

In short, plain sentences, Pokerist advertises that users will not have those same problems. Instead, they’ll play “Just. Good. Old. Poker.”

The ad also includes a short video of a digital avatar playing poker and a call-to-action saying “Play now’ in the corner of the screen.

Pro Tip: Your audience is likely already inundated with countless ads daily, and a good way for yours to stand out would be to highlight a common frustration they face with other products or services in your niche.

4. Workhuman LinkedIn Ad

Workhuman, a human resources company, advertises its business on LinkedIn. Due to its professional nature and networking capabilities, LinkedIn is ideal for an HR firm to advertise its services, job openings, and more.

The company created a sponsored ad on LinkedIn to promote their marketing job openings. The easy-to-understand ad caption, image, and CTA don’t feel disruptive or out of place on the professional network. And considering the frequency with which people log onto LinkedIn to identify job opportunities, it’s an ideal location for this type of advertisement.

Pro Tip: Make sure your ad is interesting, engaging, and paints a clear, enticing picture of what consumers can expect. However, like this LinkedIn ad, avoid being too disruptive and out of place to the point that your audience is too jarred to click.

I suggest scrolling through your chosen platform to understand its audience’s vibe and feel.

5. Hopper Snapchat Ad

Hopper has a Snapchat ad that appears when users look through their newsfeeds. The ad is a multi-part Snapchat video that includes a woman describing how the airline flight price checking and booking site works.

She speaks directly to the camera on her phone in a conversational tone that makes it feel like you’re simply watching one of your friends’ Snapchat videos.

At the end of her casual Snap video, there is a CTA that provides users with the opportunity to head to the Hopper website or continue working their way through their newsfeed, disruption-free.

Get Started With Social Media Advertising

The paid social advertising landscape is always evolving, to be a superstar paid marketer, you need to be reactive to new channels, tactics, and formats on an ongoing basis. Start by planning your strategy to create your next social media ad.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in May 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.