Paid Social Media Ad Budget: How to Test and Scale

Think of the last time that you went on a social media platform. Whether it was Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or other social media, you likely saw ads for relevant products that might’ve sparked your interest.

Social media advertising is a content strategy that allows you to enter the world of your customers and find them where they spend their time. In order to begin advertising on social media platforms, you must first develop a plan and a budget that directly correlates with the results you’re hoping to find.

Setting a social media marketing budget is a great way to increase brand awareness. However, without putting a budget and sticking to it, you can spend more than you originally planned.

You likely already realize the benefits of creating and maintaining social media pages for your business. From increased traffic, to starting conversations about and around your brand, to connecting with visitors, great benefits can be found from simply creating social media accounts for your business. How do those benefits differ from those that you receive through paid social media advertising, though?

Mainly, you’ll be able to amplify the scope of your business’ reach. For example, if you pay to have your new advertisement seen by 500 people, you’ll be guaranteed that at least 500 people will see your advertisement in the allocated time frame. However, with standard social media marketing, there is no guarantee how many people will see your posts.

Paid social media advertising allows you to be far more certain of the impact that your social media presence will have with an audience. While the increased impact might not necessarily lead to more impressions, clicks and traffic to your website, you can be sure that they’ll at least see your brand, increasing its exposure and recognition as well as your company’s brand awareness.

Furthermore, you’ll even be able to target specific audiences that would be more likely to interact with your platform. Want to target a younger audience, around 18 to 25 years old? With a paid social media advertising strategy, you’ll be able to do just that. 

How can you make sure that your social media advertisements are working? In order to find what will create successful social media advertising campaigns, many businesses will opt to perform A/B tests to optimize their conversion rate. With A/B testing, you’ll produce two types of advertisements, both with different content, and send them out on a small scale.

After both types are sent out in limited quantities, you can use the produced data to see which one performed better in the small sample size. You can do this as many times as it takes to ensure that you’re putting out the best possible advertisement.

From there, see what works best for your business! If the advertisement is performing well, you can keep going as you were and continue to test every few days. If it’s not doing as well, consider switching social media channels, altering the amount that you’re spending per day, or go back to a separate advertisement that might benefit your company more.

After you’ve decided which advertisement will produce the greatest benefits, and you’ve tested the effectiveness of the campaign, you can begin to scale the social media budget. If the advertisements are performing well, you could consider spending more from the budget on the existing advertisement to get it in front of more eyes. If it’s performing poorly, maybe scale it back until it begins to perform a bit better.

Truth be told, the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaign can vary day-to-day. Some days, your ad might not do as well, causing you to scale the spending back for the next day or period of time. Other days, it might be performing better than ever, allowing you to pour more money from the budget into the next day’s bucket to get it in front of more people.