Social media advertising allows your business to reach potential customers based on their interests, behaviours, location, and other useful audience signals. Instead of waiting for people to discover your account naturally through organic social posts, you can pay to place targeted adverts in front of the people most likely to be interested in your products or services.
Learning how to advertise your business on social media begins with a clear goal. You then need to choose the right platform, understand your audience, create an effective advert, and measure what happens after someone sees or clicks it.
This guide explains how social media advertising works, how to build your first campaign, and when professional support could help you make more of your budget.
How Can Companies Use Social Media to Advertise?
Companies, big and small, can use social media to advertise by creating targeted campaigns through platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Each campaign combines an objective, audience, budget, advert, and destination, such as a website page or lead form. Common steps for most campaigns are:
- Choose a business goal.
- Select the most suitable social media platform.
- Define the target audience.
- Set a budget and campaign duration.
- Create the advert.
- Choose where users will go after clicking.
- Track and improve the results.
Businesses can use paid social advertising at any stage in the customer journey. For example, a brand awareness campaign can introduce your company to new audiences, while a retargeting campaign can encourage previous website visitors to return and make an enquiry or purchase. The latter is especially useful for e-commerce businesses that want to reach people with abandoned online baskets.
TIP: Create campaigns for a specific purpose rather than simply paying to increase the reach of an ordinary post – known as “Boosting”.
Setting a Clear Social Media Advertising Goal
Before you create your advert, you should decide what success should look like to your business. This is because a campaign designed to increase awareness needs a different message and measurement approach from one intended to generate sales.
Below we’ve listed some common social media goals to help you understand which might be the best for you.
Building Brand Awareness
With a brand awareness campaign, you can introduce your business to people who may not already know it exists. These campaigns often use eye-catching videos, images, or short messages to explain who you are and why someone should remember you.
Useful performance measures may include reach, impressions, video views, and engagement. ThruPlays (only available on Meta) can also be used when you want to pay only for ads that are played to completion for videos shorter than 15 seconds.
Driving Website Traffic
Use traffic campaigns to encourage people to visit a specific page on your website. Ensure that the destination is directly relevant to the advert and give visitors a clear next step.
You mustn’t send every campaign to your homepage. A dedicated service, product, category, or landing page will often provide a more focused experience.
Generating Leads
If you want to collect enquiries, contact details, quote requests, or bookings, then a lead generation campaign would be what you need. Users may complete a form directly on the social media platform or click through to a form on your website.
The form should only request information that is genuinely needed. Longer forms, with unnecessary questions, can discourage people from completing them, particularly on mobile devices.
Increasing Sales
If you’re an e-commerce business, you can use social advertising to promote individual products, collections, or special offers. Some platforms also allow businesses to create product catalogues and automatically show users items based on their browsing behaviour.
For sales campaigns, focus on revenue, return on advertising spend, and cost per acquisition rather than likes or comments alone. Likes and comments are great, but they don’t increase your revenue.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platform
You don’t need to advertise on every social media platform. Instead, you should focus your budget on the channels your target customers use and where your advertising format suits the platform.
Facebook and Instagram
Facebook and Instagram offer a broad audience and a wide range of formats through Meta’s advertising platform. Businesses can run image, video, carousel, Stories, Reels, and lead-generation adverts across both channels simultaneously.
These platforms can work particularly well for:
- Consumer products
- Local businesses
- Visual services
- Ecommerce brands
- Companies with clearly defined customer audiences
LinkedIn advertising is designed around professional audiences. Targeting can include job titles, industries, company sizes, and professional interests, making it useful for business-to-business services and specialist recruitment campaigns.
Advertising costs may be higher than on some consumer platforms, but reaching a smaller and more relevant professional audience can still deliver value.
TikTok
TikTok is built around fast, entertaining, and informative video content. Advertising tends to work best when it feels natural to the platform rather than looking like a traditional corporate advert.
Businesses that use TikTok to advertise should aim to capture attention quickly, communicate one clear idea, and design videos primarily for vertical mobile viewing.
Pinterest can be effective for products and services connected to planning, inspiration, and visual discovery, such as fashion, interiors, weddings, food, travel, crafts, and lifestyle products.
Users often visit Pinterest while researching future purchases, giving businesses opportunities to reach people during the consideration stage.
YouTube
YouTube allows businesses to reach viewers through video advertising. Campaigns may appear before or during videos, in search results, or alongside recommended content.
It can be useful for:
- Demonstrations/How-to videos
- Tutorials
- Customer stories
- Services that need more explanation than a single image can provide
Reddit advertising is the best for businesses that want to capture customers with high intent. Users who are on Reddit are more than likely there because they’re in the research phase, meaning they have active intent, and are more likely to convert into a sale than someone who is passively scrolling on other social media platforms such as Instagram or TikTok.
Understand the Audience You Want to Reach
Successful social media advertising depends on relevance. Showing an advert to a large audience is not useful if most of those people are unlikely to become customers.
Start by considering:
- Where your customers live
- Their approximate age range
- Their interests or needs
- Their job roles or industries
- The problems they want to solve
- What may stop them from buying
- Whether they already know your business
- Which stage of the buying journey they are in
Avoid making your audience unnecessarily narrow. Restricting too many targeting options can limit delivery and make it harder for the platform to identify users who are likely to respond.
It can also be useful to separate audiences into different groups. For example, a new customer should not necessarily see the same advert as someone who has already viewed a product or started completing an enquiry form.
Create Social Media Adverts That Earn Attention
People do not usually open social media because they want to see adverts. Your creatives therefore need to earn their attention without misleading them or interrupting their experience, or without being too ‘salesy’.
An effective advert should quickly communicate:
- Who the offer is for
- What problem it solves
- What makes the business or product different
- What the user should do next
TIP: Keep the main message easy to understand. Trying to explain several services or offers in one advert can weaken its impact.
Write a Strong Call to Action
A call to action tells the user what to do next. The most suitable wording depends on the campaign objective and the level of commitment you are asking for.
Examples include:
- Learn more
- Request a quote
- Book a consultation
- Shop now
- Download the guide
- Register today
- Contact our team
The advert, call to action, and landing page should all make the same promise. For example, if an advert promotes a free consultation, the landing page should immediately explain how to arrange that consultation.
Set a Realistic Advertising Budget
Most social media advertising platforms allow you to set a daily budget or a total campaign budget. However, even though you can launch an advert for a small amount, it doesn’t mean every budget will produce meaningful results.
Your budget should reflect:
- The size of your audience
- How competitive the market is
- The value of a lead or sale
- The length of the buying process
- The amount of data needed to assess performance
- The number of adverts or audiences being tested
Avoid spreading a limited budget across too many platforms, audiences, and ad variations, as each part of the campaign needs enough activity to provide useful information.
Use Retargeting to Reconnect With Potential Customers
Not everyone will enquire or buy the first time they encounter your business. With retargeting, you can advertise to people who have already shown some interest.
Depending on your tracking setup, this could include users who have:
- Visited your website
- Viewed a product or service page
- Watched one of your videos
- Engaged with your social media account
- Added a product to their basket
- Started but not completed an enquiry
Because these users already recognise your business, retargeting adverts can address common objections, provide more information, or remind them to complete their next step.
Test and Improve Your Campaigns
Don’t treat social media advertising as a one-off task. Campaign performance can change as audiences, competition, and platform behaviour develop.
Testing helps you understand what genuinely influences results. You might compare:
- Two different headlines
- An image against a video
- Different audience groups
- Short and long advert copy
- Different offers
- Two landing page layouts
- Alternative calls to action
Try to only change one major element at a time. If you alter the audience, creatives, and landing page simultaneously, it becomes difficult to identify what caused the performance improvements or decline.
Measure Results That Matter to Your Business
Likes, shares, and comments can indicate that an advert is attracting attention, but they do not always represent commercial success.
The most useful metrics depend on your objective. They may include:
- Reach
- Impressions
- Click-through rate
- Cost per click
- Landing page views
- Conversion rate
- Cost per lead
- Cost per sale
- Revenue
- Return on advertising spend
Your website tracking should also be checked before launching campaigns. Without reliable conversion data, it may be impossible to tell which adverts are creating valuable enquiries or sales.
When Should Companies Consider Hiring Social Media Advertising Services?
Companies should consider hiring social media advertising services when they lack the time, skills, data, or internal resources required to manage campaigns effectively. Professional support may also be valuable when advertising spend is increasing, but results are not improving.
It may be time to work with a paid social agency if:
- You are unsure which platforms or audiences to target
- Campaigns are generating clicks but few enquiries or sales
- Your cost per result continues to rise
- Tracking is incomplete or unreliable
- You do not have time to monitor campaigns regularly
- You need professional creatives and campaign testing
- You want to scale an existing successful campaign
- You need clearer reporting on leads, revenue, and return on investment
- Your internal marketing team needs specialist support
An experienced agency should do more than launch adverts. It should connect campaign objectives with your wider marketing strategy, test different approaches, monitor spending and provide transparent reporting.
Start Advertising Your Business on Social Media
Knowing how to advertise your business on social media is about more than choosing an image and setting a budget. Successful campaigns combine clear commercial goals, relevant audience targeting, strong creatives, suitable landing pages, and reliable performance tracking.
Start with one objective and a well-defined audience. Test your approach, measure the results that matter, and use the data to make informed improvements. As your campaigns become more complex, specialist support can help you manage your budget and identify opportunities for sustainable growth.
Wildcat Digital helps ambitious businesses punch above their weight online through commercially focused paid social advertising. Whether you are planning your first campaign or want to improve an existing account, our team can build a strategy around your audience, objectives and budget.
Arrange a free consultation to discuss how paid social could support your business.
Paul Pennington
SEO Account Director
