If you’re diving into the world of paid advertising, you need to understand the difference between promoted posts and paid social ads. For beginners, these two phrases often seem synonymous; however, in reality, they’re very different.
Paid social ads are exactly what they sound like: advertisements you pay for each time someone clicks on your messages. Promoted posts, on the other hand, are published through organic social media. When it comes to promoting, you pay the platforms to make this organic content more visible. Essentially, Instagram promoted posts amplify your outreach to new users by putting media dollars behind your organic social media efforts.
With Instagram’s new algorithm, organic content that used to be seen by all of your followers is now much less visible on users’ feeds – unless, of course, it’s being promoted with paid media dollars. The importance of running a promoted layer within your marketing funnel is two-fold: First, it keeps your brand top of mind with your current followers. Second, it allows you to create retargeting and lookalike audiences by using data from existing users who are already engaging with your content (e.g., liking, saving, and sharing).
Advertisers can even get granular by creating audiences based not only on engagement but also on people who have saved an ad or post within a certain timeframe. By saving an ad, these users have demonstrated intent to revisit a product or service at a later date and time.
With promoted posts on Instagram, not only are you building up your top-of-funnel audiences by promoting organic content, but you’re also driving users to your site with the use of calls to action (CTAs). CTAs help to fill the retargeting bucket with users who clicked through to a brand’s site after seeing one of their promoted posts within their feeds.
As you build up your top-of-funnel audiences, you create efficiencies within your bottom-funnel campaigns, as well. This means you’re introducing new audiences to your brand by exposing them to organic, amplified content that comes at a low cost per engagement. From there, you can retarget those users in your middle- to bottom-funnel campaigns at a far more affordable cost per acquisition.
As the marketing industry continues to evolve, having heavy first-party audiences will be extremely important to the success of your efforts. For instance, with the new iOS14 updates, we’ve seen many clients experience significant drops in their retargeting pools due to users opting out for privacy reasons. Nurturing your audiences in your top-of-funnel campaigns will put your brand in a good place as marketing goes cookieless.
If the goal of your marketing efforts is to attract current and future audiences, you need to insert your brand into the social sphere. Paid ads are great, but they can’t stand alone. You also need to generate engaging content on organic social media that you can promote to new audiences.
Need help creating content that readers are more likely to click on, share, like, and save? Zero Gravity Marketing can help! Reach out to our team to learn how our marketing experts can make the most of your paid advertising efforts today!