How to Build a Paid Social Ad Strategy that Works: Insights from Agency Experts

Want to know how to build a paid social ad strategy that works? You’re not alone. Organic social media campaigns are a great way to boost brand awareness and build stronger relationships with your audience, but they struggle to deliver consistent results – particularly in today’s world. 

Organic reach across all social media channels is diminishing, as platforms prioritize influencers and creators over brands, making it harder to reach new customers. To make matters worse, even if you have a huge follower base, organic social posts may only reach up to 3% of your followers.

That’s why more companies are shifting their focus to paid social campaigns. Around three-fourths of all marketers use paid social marketing methods to boost growth. 

Paid social strategies help you reach more customers, target prospects more effectively, and increase conversion rates at scale. The only problem? Without behind-the-scenes knowledge and expertise, it can be difficult to build a paid social ad strategy that works, and delivers a good ROI.

We’re here to help. Based on our years of experience helping companies unlock the full potential of paid social strategies, we’re sharing our expert tips for effective social advertising.

Why You Need a Paid Social Ad Strategy that Works

First, let’s discuss why you need to learn how to build a paid social ad strategy that works. As mentioned above, interest in paid social advertising strategies is growing, as organic reach on social channels drops, and competition continues to rise. 

In the past, many companies with limited budgets focused almost entirely on organic (or free) social media marketing to keep costs low. However, free strategies can only take you so far. 

The top paid social media statistics show that paying for ads and sponsored posts on social channels increases your reach, and helps companies to achieve their goals faster. Paid social delivers:

• Guaranteed reach: Achieving and maintaining reach with organic social media is notoriously tricky. No matter how excellent your posts might be, reach is never guaranteed. With paid social media, you can rest assured that the right people will see your content, when it matters most, boosting brand awareness and conversions. 
• Enhanced targeting: Paid social strategies don’t just ensure you reach more customers; they help you connect with the right people. You can target customers based on their income, location, behavioral traits, preferences and more. This means you’re more likely to get a significant return on investment from your campaigns. 
• Advanced insights: The data you’ll gather from paid social media campaigns will teach you everything you need to know about your target audience, their needs and preferences, and how to build future marketing campaigns. They’ll help you take a more data-driven approach to growth, that enhances how you use your marketing budget.

How to Build a Paid Social Ad Strategy that Works

By far, the best way to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your paid social ad strategy, is to work with an agency that can research, create, manage, and implement a plan for you. However, even if you’re partnering with the experts, there are still some best practices you should be following as you develop, run, and build on your campaigns.

Step 1: Set Clear Goals and Campaign Objectives

Goals are valuable for any paid media strategy. They help you to structure your campaigns around specific targets and priorities, and determine which metrics you should be monitoring. If you’re an established business with an existing social presence, your goals might be based on the gaps and issues you’ve discovered by auditing your current campaigns. 

If you haven’t set specific goals for your campaigns yet, you may focus on some of the following, popular targets: 

• Increasing brand awareness: Exposing your brand, its products, and your core values or mission to a wider audience of potential customers. 
• Driving traffic: Boosting the number of visitors you drive towards landing pages, your website, app download sites, and even physical stores. 
• Generating leads: Encouraging potential customers to connect with your company and share information, like their contact details (email addresses and phone numbers). 
• Boosting sales: Persuading customers to make purchases, buy more of your products, or even recommend your company to members of their network.
• Increasing engagement: Inspiring interactivity from audience members, such as encouraging them to comment on posts, share content, click on links, and view videos.

Step 2: Get to Know Your Audience

Ask any top paid media agency how you can optimize the potential of your paid ads, and they’re likely to tell you to learn more about your target audience. Learning how to build a paid social strategy that works means finding out who exactly you want to reach, what customers need from your company, and why they choose you over the competition.

If you don’t know who you’re connecting with, you can’t excel with your targeting strategy, or create powerful, impactful messages. There are a few ways to gather insights about your target audience. You can distribute surveys, conduct polls, dive into platforms like Google Analytics and more.

There are even intelligent tools out there, like SEMRush’s Audience Intelligence platform, that can help you access more in-depth insights and create customer profiles. Working with an agency can be helpful too, as they can conduct market research and gather data on your behalf. 

The key to success is collecting as much, in-depth information as possible, and making sure you regularly update your customer profiles with new insights. 

Step 3: Choose your Social Platforms

Next, decide on which social platforms you’re going to be using. Notably, you may want to expand your reach across multiple channels, particularly if you’re investing in a full funnel paid media strategy and want to connect with customers at each stage of the buying journey.

You may also decide to alter your platform mix over time, as you learn more about different channels and how they support your target audience. Generally, we advise most companies to start with the “big hitters” in the social space, such as Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram). 

However, there are various other social channels you may want to include in the mix depending on your target audience. TikTok, for instance, is excellent for engaging younger audiences, and boosting the authenticity and credibility of your company.

Pinterest is great for connecting with high-income shoppers, and YouTube is fantastic for reaching millions of customers fast. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is one of the best platforms for B2B paid promotion. Identify your ideal platforms, and do your research to ensure you know how the advertising options on these channels actually work.

Step 4: Dive into Extensive Research

It’s easy to underestimate how much legwork is actually involved in building a powerful paid social ad strategy. You don’t just need a deep knowledge of your target audience, and how different platforms work, or which advertising options they offer. 

You’ll need gather data from previous marketing campaigns, and competitor insights too. Even if you’ve never run any social media campaigns before, you can get some great behind-the-scenes looks at ad strategies that have delivered results for similar businesses. For instance, you can check out previous campaigns from other brands on Facebook’s ad library. Or you can check out the case studies and customer success stories published by social platforms.

Another great strategy is to take a look at your competitors directly. Visit the social profiles of companies in your industry that offer similar products and services, or target similar customers. 

Find out which of their ad campaigns and strategies typically deliver the most engagement or the highest conversion rates. While campaigns that work for competitors aren’t guaranteed to work for you, at least you’ll have a good starting point to work with. 

Step 5: Consider Your Paid Social Ad Formats

Now it’s time to start really thinking about how you’re going to build a paid social ad strategy that works, with the right content mix. All leading social media platforms will allow you to create ad campaigns – but each channel offers different formats and options to choose from.

For instance:

• Instagram: Video and photo ads, Story ads, carousel ads, collection ads, Reel ads, Shopping ads, and “Explore” ads, etc. 
• Facebook: Photo and video ads, carousel ads, collection ads, slideshow ads, Stories ads, instant experience ads, etc. 
• Twitter (X): Promoted tweets, trends, and accounts, video and image ads, carousel ads, hashtag ads and text ads. 
• LinkedIn ads: Sponsored updates, image and text ads, carousel ads, headline video ads, conversation ads, message ads, lead gen forms, follower ads, event ads, etc. 
• TikTok: In-feed ads, TopView ads, Brand takeover ads, branded hashtags, branded effects, etc. 

Step 6: Set Up Your Audience Targeting Strategy

Once you’ve considered all of your ad options, you’ll want to set up your targeting strategy before you begin creating and experimenting with content. Again, it’s worth remembering that every social platform has it’s own “targeting” options. 

Facebook and Instagram offer some of the best targeting options around, allowing companies to target customers based on gender, interests, relationship status, education status, age, location and language. You can even create lookalike audiences based on the customers you’re already connecting with.

LinkedIn has some great targeting options too, specifically suited to B2B brands. For instance, you can target customers based on industries, company sizes, continents and countries, employee function or role, and so on. 

Work with your paid social agency to create a comprehensive ad targeting strategy that ensures you’re spending your time and money on connecting with the right customers. 

Step 7: Establish your Ad Budget

This is the part of learning how to build a paid social ad strategy that works that most companies struggle with. It’s not always easy to figure out how much you should be investing into a paid ad strategy, particularly if you’re taking a full-funnel approach. 

How much money you’re going to allocate to your campaigns will vary drastically depending on the channels you use, how competitive they are, the duration of your campaign, and even how platforms charge for advertising efforts.

In general, when you’re planning your budget for paid social ads, you’ll need to pay attention to two core things: your cost per action (CPA) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM). With CPA, you only pay when a customer clicks on an ad and completes an action, like visiting your website. 

It’s worth focusing more on CPA costs when you’re running retargeting campaigns, and want to boost conversions among consumers who are already interested in your business and products. 

With CPM, you focus on how many times your ad is “shown” to customers, regardless of how many people interact with it. Concentrating on CPM is important when you want to improve brand reach and awareness. 

Step 8: Create your Ad Content

Creating eye-catching and compelling content for your paid campaigns is when you can start making the most of your creativity, and your relationship with a reputable paid ad agency. It’s important to take a multi-faceted approach to capturing your customer’s attention. 

First, you’ll need marketing messages (text or copy), that speaks your customer’s languages, draws attention to the benefits and solutions you offer, and drives engagement. Next, you need high-quality images and visual content, to increase the impact of your ad campaigns.

While you don’t have to include visuals in every type of social media ad campaign, high-quality images and videos are great at disrupting customer scrolling patterns, and pushing them to take action. Think of it this way, a video on your feed is far more likely to stand out than a simple message, hidden among countless other updates.

When building your “performance creative,” think carefully about your overall brand image. Use consistent colors, and branded elements, like your logo. Remember to focus on quality. Even on authenticity-first channels like TikTok, high-quality videos are better at capturing attention and conveying information to your target audience.

Step 9: Set Your Retargeting Strategy

Don’t just give yourself one chance to reach and convert your target audience. Most social media platforms support retargeting campaigns, giving you the opportunity to showcase specific, dynamic ads to people who have already visited your website or interacted with your brand. 

To take advantage of these ads, and therefore reduce cart abandonment rates and increase conversions, you’ll need to set up a “pixel.” That’s a tool you can place on your website which gathers information to run retargeting campaigns on social platforms. 

Setting up your retargeting strategy in advance should help you to make the most out of your ad strategies, and boost your return on ad spend in the months to come. 

Step 10: Measure and Learn from Your Results

Last, but not least, make sure you’re ready to monitor the results of each campaign, and optimize your strategy in the future. Understanding how well your ads actually perform will show you whether you need to decrease, increase, or maintain the amount of budget you’re spending on each strategy. 

Most social platforms come with built-in analytics that allow you to measure and assess the impact of your campaigns. However, you can also take advantage of third-party tools for more in-depth cross channel insights. You can even use tools like Google Analytics for more information on how your social strategies are boosting your online traffic and conversions. 

Again, a professional social media ad agency will be a helpful resource here. They’ll help you to identify metrics from critical campaigns, translate data into actionable insights, and even run A/B tests for a more intelligent approach to ad optimization.

How to Build a Paid Social Ad Strategy that Works: Expert Tips

The steps above will show you how to build a paid social ad strategy that works. But, with this article, we wanted to go beyond the basics of just “paid social 101”. We promised you some expert insights, from specialists with years of experience, so here they are:

• Go full funnel: Stop focusing exclusively on just building brand awareness or increasing conversions with paid social media. Take a full funnel approach to enhance your connections with customers through every stage of the buyer funnel, from the initial “awareness” stage, through to consideration, conversion, retention, and advocacy. Remember, Google found full funnel strategies deliver up to 45% higher ROI for advertising campaigns.
• Combine organic and paid media: Paid social media strategies don’t have to replace organic campaigns. In fact, the best thing you can do is combine both efforts. Aligning your paid and organic social media strategies can help you boost the visibility of your best posts, increase the impact of your social presence, and strengthen relationships with customers. 
• Be experimental: Social platforms and customer behaviors are constantly changing. If you want to get the best results from paid social, you need to be experimental. Explore different ad formats and strategies. A/B test campaigns to find out what kind of copy, images, and CTAs deliver the right results. Continue branching out into new social channels as your customers experiment with different platforms.
• Use incrementality testing: Conversions can happen regardless of whether customers see a paid social ad or not. Just because you run a paid campaign, doesn’t mean its directly driving sales. Incrementality testing is a more effective way to measure the specific impact a certain marketing activity has on your sales or business growth. 

Accomplish More with Paid Social Ads

Paid social advertising campaigns are a powerful tool for businesses. They can help to turbocharge your reach, strengthen your chances of conversions, increase profits, and even improve your brand’s reputation. However, the key to success revolves around building the right strategy. 

Use the steps above to build a paid social strategy that works, but don’t forget that agility and innovation is key. Once you develop a strategy, keep learning from your results, building on your campaigns, and exploring new opportunities. 

An agency like The Graygency can help you not only design the perfect paid social ad strategy, but optimize and improve it over time. We provide companies with access to cutting-edge technology, tools, and expertise, helping them to improve marketing ROI and return on ad spend.

Whether you’re building a new strategy from scratch, or you want to enhance the results of your current campaigns, reach out to The Graygency today. 

We’ll give you a paid social strategy that constantly delivers results.