Paid Social Media Advertising for Jewelry Retailers
Everything you need to know to start advertising on social media.
What is Paid Social Advertising?
Paid social advertising is paying for ad placements on different social media platforms. If you learn how to do this correctly, it can be a great use of advertising dollars without being too much work. You may already have some experience with paid social advertising if you boost on Facebook/Instagram. However, you can get more value out of each dollar spent on advertising with some tips through this blog.
Before we learn how to advertise your business on social media, let’s go over some important terms that you may come across in this article.
Paid Social Media Advertising Terms
- Audience — the group of people that you pay for your ad to be shown to
- Impression — a metric that is used to count how many times your ad is seen (a person can have more than one impression)
- Reach — the number of people that have seen your ad from your audience; this is different than impression because each person in the audience can only be counted once
- Engagement — a term used to describe whenever someone interacts with the post; this includes likes, shares, comment and clicks
- Platform — the digital channel or site that the ad will be displayed on
- Organic posts — posts that have not been paid to be displayed to the audience; these are normal posts on your page/stories
What Does Paid Social Media Advertising Cost?
There are a few ways you can get charged for ads, depending on your objective and the platform that you are paying to display your ads. The most common one is “pay per impression” (remember, every time it is shown). Another example would be “pay per click” which is when, you guessed it, you pay each time someone clicks your ad.
To answer this question, it’s simply whatever you want it to cost. You can pay $20 dollars boosting a single post on Facebook or you can pay a few hundred dollars to show your ad across different platforms and placements.
There are 3 things I will focus on in this article to help you keep advertising costs down while driving results: Audience, Content, and Objective.
Audience
The biggest mistake that I see amongst digital advertisers is not defining the audience. Have you ever been on social media and received an ad that’s irrelevant to you? Maybe the content isn’t something that you have ever expressed interest in or maybe the business that is advertising to you is across the country. You wouldn’t likely make a purchase at a jewelry store across the country, yet they continue to spend their advertising money on you and others just like you. Their mistake was they did not define their audience.
Most platforms have audience options which can help stretch your advertising dollars by just using a few options. Whenever posting, consider what audience you want this to reach. If this is for a local event for your business, restrict your advertisements to the geographic location around your business. If this is an online sale, target an audience that has expressed interest in jewelry. If you are advertising gifts for Valentine’s Day, try creating unique content and targeting your typical gift giver.
Defining your audience is one of the best ways to add a bit of strategy to your social media ads. It will decrease costs and lead to better results rather than just casting a wide net and spending unnecessary money.
Content
Content is likely the most important part of all social media. If you don’t have good content, no amount of paid ads can make it worth it for your business. Content must be relevant, high quality, and interesting enough to get a consumer to engage with the post.
Relevant content is where the content ties into your audience. You wouldn’t want to show men’s wedding bands to an audience of women looking for engagement rings. Instead, you want to create an audience that targets that segment of customers to show that content to. When creating content, it is highly important to think about who is going to be seeing it.
Quality content can be easily done these days with the miracle that is your cell phone. Most modern phones have the capability of taking high-quality images and videos. The rest of the content just comes from the little details and effort put into each photoshoot. Taking a few extra minutes to set up a nice background for your next photo or video can change the quality instantly. Ensuring there is proper lighting to make the diamonds sparkle is a simple but great touch for videos. Another tip would be to include your logo somewhere in the image, assuming it might be on any packaging or displays that you have. Lastly, do not forget about the caption that you put on your ad. After catching their attention with the main content, the caption is what will determine if the customer continues their journey with your ad. Keep it light, short, and convincing.
Interesting content is probably the hardest to achieve due to the competition for your customers’ attention. The biggest tip I have for this is to not forget about videos. Videos work great on paid social advertising. A simple video of a ring being shown off and shining is much more impactful than an image of the ring on a table. Be sure to keep it short and sweet if you do make a video though! When creating videos, keep in mind that most users are watching with the sound off, so make sure to add captions or text overlays.
With these tips in mind, creating good content is a great way to increase the impact of your ads.
Objective
One of the biggest things you should consider when running paid social ads is what your objective is. This objective defines what strategy you should take when posting. This can be leading someone to your website to make a purchase (conversion) or can also be as simple as getting someone to engage with your unpaid organic posts. These objectives typically define who your audience is, what platform you will be using for these posts, and ultimately what creative content you use.
The objective is aligned with what you want to get out of the ad itself. If you want more people to see your ad, you likely want to choose an awareness campaign objective. This objective is chosen whenever you are releasing something new and want to gain exposure.
If you want people to interact with your post and like the post, share it, or leave a comment, you should choose the engagement objective. This is something that you choose for contests or whenever you want to interact with your audience.
There are several other objectives that you can choose if you have other goals that you want out of your campaign.
With these main tips in mind to define your audience, increase your content quality, and think more about the objective, you can begin thinking more strategically about your paid social advertising.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tony Vega
Digital Marketing Specialist
Tony achieved his degree in Marketing from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He also holds certifications in Digital Advertising and is a Meta Certified Digital Marketing Associate. His Digital Marketing Specialist position at Stuller allows him to give hands-on experience working on digital advertising to the jewelry industry.