What Are The Best Social Media Advertising Platforms For Your Business?

Picking the best social media platform for your marketing is tough. If you make an uninformed decision, you will experience 2 things:

1. You don’t get the best results you could get with your marketing

2. You lose money on advertising to an audience who is never going to buy from you

Luckily, this 5-minute article was made to help you not fall into that trap. 

Let’s pick the right platform for you and start getting you a wave of new clients!

Option 1 - Facebook Ads For Local Businesses

If you’re a local business, this should be your bread and butter.

Here are 3 reasons why Facebook is by far the best starting option for local businesses:

Reason 1 is Wide Reach.

Facebook has about 3 billion active users. Not only is that absolutely insane, but it means your chances of finding customers are pretty high.

Of those 3 billion users, obviously not all of them will be customers. A local business in Bedfordshire shouldn’t sell to a village in a country 99% of people can’t find on a map. That transitions into Reason 2 - Specific Audience Targeting.

With Facebook’s targeting, you can have your ads only be shown to a specific age group or gender to only people in a specific area who only have a specific interest.

That means you can have your ads only be shown to 30-40 year-old men in Bedfordshire who are homeowners. You can specifically target those most likely to buy from you!

And it’s not at a Hollywood budget - Reason 3 is Low Startup Costs.

You can run a Facebook ad for as little as £5 a day!

Quick word of warning though - the more you spend, the more people you reach and the quicker you get results to inform future advertising campaigns. For us, we advise clients to spend at least £500 a month on ads to get fair data.

But if your ads are successful, you should be getting at least £2 back for every £1 you spend. So £500 a month means you generate an extra £1000, meaning you’d be happy to spend more to get more.

Lastly, Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp, meaning you can have your ads reach all 3 of these platforms even at a low price!

So if you’re a local business starting with social media marketing, Facebook should be your choice.

And if you want more results as a local business… the next one is for you.

Option 2 - YouTube Ads For Local Businesses

Out of everyone you know, there’s probably very few people who don’t use YouTube.

And also, what’s the last time you saw an ad that made you want to press the ‘skip’ button on YouTube? If you can create a good ad, you’ll stand out like a candle in the dark.

So, what is the best way to stand out?

Simple. Make it clear in your ad that you are local.

All of the ads you see on YouTube are from either online businesses or massive companies. But if you’re a local company running ads and local people see your ad, they will immediately think “Oh, they’ve made this exactly for me!”

You can use similar targeting explained in Option 1, Facebook Ads, for YouTube. You can have your YouTube Ads only be shown to local people!

The reason that this is option 2 for local businesses is that you want to do this after you’ve had success with Facebook Ads.

This is because it will cost you more money to run ads on YouTube, especially when considering the cost to make a good video ad.

But if you make it clear in your ad that you offer local solutions to people’s problems, then the local people who see your ad will immediately know this is for them.

When you’ve had success with Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads are your go-to.

(P.S. A small tip: If your audience is below 30, don’t make a video ad longer than 1 minute. Just to make the ad more likely to work with their shorter attention spans.)

But what if you want to sell to a wider and/or younger audience? That’s where Option 3 comes in.

Option 3 - TikTok Ads For Local Businesses

If your audience is young (less than 34 years old) and you have a product you can sell nationally or internationally, choose TikTok. 

69% of TikTok’s 1.8 billion active users are between 18-34. This means if most of your customers are young, you can reach those people most likely to buy from you.

And the reason you should pick TikTok if you have a product you can sell on a wider scale is because their local targeting is much worse than Facebook’s or YouTube’s.

So if you’re a local business, avoid TikTok like the plague.

Otherwise, you can have your ads only be shown to people of a certain age bracket or gender. If you’re selling nationally or internationally, you get the best of both worlds - you reach a lot of people and you reach those most likely to buy.

That’s why lots of modern e-commerce stores use TikTok for their advertising.

If you’re selling a product on a wider scale to a younger audience, choose TikTok.

Lastly, what if you want to sell a more expensive product to people who are ready to pay more? Option 4.

Option 4 - LinkedIn Ads For Local Businesses

Surprisingly, LinkedIn isn’t just great for B2B businesses. It’s also great for selling to customers directly.

The truth is that the average user on LinkedIn typically has more disposable income than the average person on TikTok. If you sell using premium pricing, these people are willing to pay your price without breaking a sweat.

The best way to catch these people’s attention is to do 2 things:

1. Make the buying process simple. These people are busier, so they don’t have time to fill out 57 forms and call around 85 times.

2. Focus on your quality. These people don’t want a cheap service, they want a high-quality one.

If you want to reach people of a higher income class, LinkedIn is your best friend.

So now we’ve been through 4 different scenarios, and which method of social media marketing you should use for each. You know how to pick your platform, and now it’s about creating the ads.

If you need help with creating social media ads that attract clients on autopilot, click here and go to the bottom of the page for a free marketing analysis. No obligations, just a well-thought-out expert plan to get the most out of your advertising budget.