Social Media Advertising: Driving Sales with Facebook and Instagram

Traditional advertising, while still effective, doesn’t allow for the customization and personalization that social media ads offer. With paid social media advertising, a business is able to target specific demographics and reach its target audience more effectively. Social media marketing also allows you to track the effectiveness of your advertising in real-time so that you can make adjustments as needed. 

Setting Up Your Social Media Accounts

Your first step to social media marketing is to set up your business’s social media accounts. You can create both a Facebook and Instagram business account, and link the two together to make managing them easier. In addition to being able to run advertisements, a business account gives you a social media presence and the ability to engage with your audience.  

Set Up Facebook Business Manager

While a business’s Facebook page has some basic advertising capabilities, Facebook Business Manager has more advanced features, such as multi-account management, Instagram integration, managing budgets, audience targeting, and in-depth analytics. Facebook Business Manager can give you the tools you need to create and distribute effective ad campaigns that a regular business page is unable to do. 

Set Up Facebook Pixel 

Facebook Pixel is a piece of code that you’ll place on your ecommerce website. This code tracks customer behavior. These analytics can optimize current campaigns and can track conversions from those campaigns. It can also track customer behavior on your website to give insight into future campaigns and target markets. 

How to Sell on Social Media

Not all social media advertisements are right for your business strategy. Knowing which will help drive sales is key to advertising on social media. Here are a few of the most common strategies. 

Image Ads

A simple link-click ad can go a long way. With such visual social media platforms, an eye-catching image with a quick caption and a link is an effective and easy way to drive traffic to your ecommerce website. 

Video Ads

Similar to an image ad, a video ad is a single video with a caption and a link to bring a customer to your website or to a specific product. Video ads also have the advantage of the ability to feel more organic than a static image. 

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads are perhaps the most personalized ads for customers. Based on a consumer’s behavior as they browse the internet, a dynamic ad shows them relevant products based on their specific interests. 

Carousels Ads

A carousel features multiple images or videos and can be used to showcase similar products or to tell a story using sequential images/videos. Users can swipe sequentially through the advertisement for a more engaging experience. 

Stories Ads

Both Facebook and Instagram have full-screen stories where users and businesses can create more immersive experiences that can include images, videos, or both. Stories have a shorter time span than other ads but can be more engaging.   

Shopping Ads

Shopping ads allow you to sell specific products by tagging them directly in your posts, similar to tagging an account. This tag allows customers to take a closer look at the product, see details including price, and even make a purchase through Instagram or Facebook.

Integrating Social Media Onto Your Ecommerce Website

You can use social media to your advantage in more than paid advertising You can use social media to your advantage, beyond just paid advertising. Integrating it onto your ecommerce site can include:

• Allow customers to log in with Facebook rather than creating a new profile
• Make Facebook Messenger a customer service tool that customers can interact with
• Embed your social media feed onto your website to increase engagement
• Invite customers to share products on their social media accounts to attract new customers

Integrating paid social media advertising with your ecommerce site allows you to more efficiently target a specific audience, track the effectiveness of your advertisements, and engage with your customers in a way that other forms of advertising can’t offer.