Social media advertising is a powerful tool for businesses looking to reach their target audience. The ability to reach specific audiences that you wouldn’t usually through traditional advertising makes social media the ideal platform for getting your prospects. Whether you sell products, offer services, or have a personal brand, it is great for you to run adverts on social media. While it may seem overwhelming, its importance cannot be overstated. According to Vanguard Nigeria, 96% of brands in Nigeria leverage social media advertising as part of their online marketing strategy.

Although, you may find that not all small business owners in Nigeria are aware of the importance of social media advertising. Some business owners don’t see the need as long as they make sales offline.  However, truth is, if you believe this, you are missing out on the benefits which I will discuss in this article.

As much as running adverts on social platforms can be a great way to build awareness and engagement for your brand, you need to make sure your content is great before publishing it.  Your content can come in form of videos, pictures, or graphics and it should be creative, engaging, and concise. With the right content strategy, your adverts or the content you publish will significantly improve. Here are 20 benefits of social media advertising to grow your business in Nigeria.

1. It is Cost Effective

Social media advertising is less expensive in comparison to traditional advertising. You can use it to supplement your traditional marketing efforts and get immediate results on a limited budget, as long as you target the right audience. Nearly all social networking platforms allow you to create a profile and publish posts organically for free. Also, the cost to promote posts is relatively low. As a business owner trying to run adverts on social media for the first time, you should start on a small budget and be sure to monitor your ads. This helps you understand your target audience and the best campaign for you to focus on in the long run.

2. Increases Brand Awareness

Thanks to the number of users on social media, advertising helps users get familiar with your brand.  As a business owner, you want the ability to reach out to a large audience. They need to know what your business has to offer. Also learn about any new products or services that may be available for purchase. Unlike an advert placed on a television channel, users familiar with your brand are able to share your paid adverts and this can significantly reach more people beyond your paid advert.

3. Ability to Reach your Target Audience

Whether you are selling products or services, running adverts on social media enables you to reach audiences with specific geographies, demographics, psychographics, or interests. You can target people who are likely to be interested in what you offer, and provide competitive prices or elements that are better than your competitors. Different social networking platforms have various ways to target your audience. For example, on Twitter, you can target people based on the type of conversations they engage in. On Facebook, you can target people by their occupations and interests.  As a Social Media Management Agency in Abuja, our target audience ranges from small business owners to large-scale enterprises.

4. Ability to Retarget your Audience

As I have explained targeting your audience, it is possible to retarget people who did not engage or make a purchase. Retargeting is simply showing your adverts to prospective customers who have previously clicked on your advert. These people have already shown interest in your product or service based on their previous interactions with your page or website but did perform an action.  So, continuously showing them your adverts after they leave your social media page to remind them to come back and take an action will be a win. When they come across your advert again, they’re less likely to ignore it. People want to feel familiar with your brand before they purchase from you.

5. It Improves your Brand Loyalty

Every business owner wants returning customers. A customer who identifies with your advert is more likely to become loyal to your brand. It is important to note the long-term benefit of building loyalty in your business. You need to build trust around your brand to make prospective lifelong customers of your brand.  A loyal customer who is satisfied with the benefit of using your products or services is more likely to tell people about your business. People love freebies and the fear of missing out (FOMO). This makes social media advertising one of the best ways to reward your loyal customers. You get to offer them discounts, giveaways, etc. By doing this, your customers are sure to keep coming back.

6. It Increases Sales

The end goal of every business owner is to make more sales. With an effective social media strategy that includes advertising on different social channels best suited for your business, you get to experience an increase in sales. Similarly, the more people your content is shown to, the higher your chance of creating more engagement and eventually making more sales.

7. To Drive Traffic To your Website

Owning a website for your business is essential, if you want to know the reasons why this is important, click here. Social media advertising is one of the easy ways to drive traffic to your website. You set up your adverts such that if customers click on them, they will be directed to your website. Although, you need to make sure your content is valuable, solves your audiences’ needs and the website you send traffic to is functional. This is because no one wants to click your advert and it takes them to a page without enough information to make an informed decision.

8. To Grow an Online Community

Having a consistent voice is essential when advertising on social media. This builds authority around your brand. If you have created an online community on social media platforms organically, advertising can help you reach more people who are interested in your content.

9. It Improves Search Engine Ranking

While social media advertising does not directly affect search engine ranking, it can improve your ranking on search engines. With millions of active users on social media, advertising reaches a wider audience and allows people to click on the link and visit your website. This signals search engines regarding the audience that visits your site and improves your ranking.

10. To Monitor Your Competitors

As much as every business in Nigeria wants to stand out online, social media advertising helps you gain insights into your competitor’s audience. You get to understand their content strategy which you can use to improve your own strategies and creative choices for your promotions.

11. Provides In-depth Analytics

You can easily measure the success of your ad campaign and make adjustments as required based on data analysis reports generated by the social media channels you choose. These reports also provide key performance indicators which allow you to judge whether your ads are effective enough based on the specific metric you set up to drive desired results. You can easily measure the success of your campaign and make adjustments as required. This is based on data analysis reports generated by Facebook Ads Manager. These reports also provide key performance indicators such as CTR, ROI, etc., which allow us to judge if your ads were effective enough based on specific KPIs we set up beforehand.

12. Allows you to Promote Reviews

One of the ways you can promote content on social media is through advertising. Usually, most users do their research on their options before purchasing a product or service. By promoting your reviews and testimonials from old customers, you will be building more credibility around your Brand. Also, this helps interested buyers make a decision faster.

13. To Generate Leads and Improve Conversion

With millions of users on the internet, you will need to run ads regularly to help the information about your brand get to potential customers. This information can come in form of an ‘About Us’ page, a phone number to call, and an email address to send a message. When customers click on your ads or visit your online pages to know more about your business, they are called “Leads”. Different social media platform have different lead generation methods. As a business owner, you need to research on various tips to generate leads for different social media advertising platforms. If you implement marketing strategies to nurture these leads, you can convert them to clients. Hence, improve your conversion rate.

14. It Improves Customer Interaction

As a business owner in Nigeria, you need to understand your customer’s interests to create content that will meet their needs or solve their problems effectively. Using social media advertising as an investigative tool helps you understand your customer’s interests through feedback and messages. What better way to know the thoughts and needs of your consumers than by directly talking to them? By monitoring the activity on your social media profiles, you can analyze customers’ interests and opinions. This will aid in understanding your industry hence improving interaction with your customers.

15. It Improves Content Performance

Most times, organic engagement isn’t enough performance for your content. Take for instance, on Instagram, your content is shown to less than 10% of your followers. This is not enough reach, promoting your content to garner a wider reach naturally improves your engagement hence, the performance of your content.

16. Ability to Run Different Campaigns

With advertising on social media, you get to run different campaigns at the same time to know what works. You have the flexibility of setting different marketing goals too. For example, if I have an event and a new product to launch, I would need to run different Ad campaigns and I can do this simultaneously. If done right, all or at least one would bring the results you need. You can easily measure the success of your campaign and make adjustments as required based on data analysis reports generated by Facebook Ads Manager. This will help you improve results further down the line if needed

17. It is Time Efficient

Unlike traditional advertising which could take weeks or months to plan, book, or publish. It takes a few minutes to hours to publish a campaign or ads on social media. If you want to print flyers, you would definitely have to wait for the release time. This can be out of your control.  Also, considering the fact that the world is more digital now, advertising on social media gives you an edge over competitors who are not leveraging this mode of advertising.

18. To Build Trust

Trust is essential in building a strong and unique brand on social media. Your business or brand needs to be in People’s faces. The more you promote your content, the more people get familiar with your brand. When people keep choosing your product or service as a need, the intention of identifying with your business or purchasing from you becomes easy.

19. To Boost Engagement

People use social media for different reasons which include staying connected with friends. With increased engagement, your business gains more opportunities for conversion. Comments, shares, saves, and likes are all engagement metrics that help your page gain more visibility. Advertising on social media can help you increase your engagement rate and this in turn builds credibility for your Business.

20. To Test Different Ad Formats

Sometimes, you will need to test different Ad formats to understand which performs better. Also, to know what your customers like better. This can help you improve customer experience. Different social media platforms require different ad formats to perform better. For instance, a video advert will most likely do better on Instagram compared to if it were published on Twitter. Similarly, on Facebook Ad manager, different campaigns perform better with videos.

Social media advertising has become a powerful tool for businesses to reach out to their audience. It is very essential for businesses to take advantage of its value. It is a user-friendly, cost-effective, and effective way to promote your products and services to millions of people at once. Both in and out of your region. Every business has different goals and objectives. Therefore, you need to identify your business goal first. Then understand how you can move forward with implementing social media advertising.