Services > Social Media Marketing > Social Advertising
Social Media Advertising
Paid social campaigns that reach your ideal customers with precision. We manage advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn built around business outcomes, not impressions.
What Is Social Media Advertising?
Social media advertising uses the paid advertising tools built into platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to place your business in front of targeted audiences. Unlike organic social media (the free content you post to your profiles), paid social advertising lets you reach specific groups of people based on their demographics, interests, behaviours, location, and professional attributes, regardless of whether they follow your page.
The platforms offer sophisticated targeting that goes well beyond basic demographics. You can target homeowners within 15 kilometres of your business, parents with children in specific age ranges, people who’ve recently shown interest in home renovation, professionals with specific job titles, or people who’ve visited your website but didn’t make contact. This precision means your advertising budget reaches people likely to become customers.
Social advertising operates differently from Google Ads. Google Ads captures people actively searching for your service. Social advertising reaches people who fit your customer profile but may not be actively searching right now. This makes social advertising particularly effective for building awareness, promoting offers, retargeting website visitors, and reaching audiences that search advertising can’t.
The formats include image ads, video ads, carousel ads (multiple images), stories ads, lead generation forms, and more. Each format serves different objectives and different stages of the customer journey.
Why Social Advertising Matters for Your Business
Organic social media reach has declined steadily over the past several years. The platforms prioritise content from friends and family over business pages, which means your organic posts reach a shrinking percentage of your followers. Paid advertising counteracts this by guaranteeing your content reaches the audience you specify.
For local businesses, social advertising fills a gap that organic social and search advertising can’t. It lets you reach potential customers before they search, building awareness and familiarity so that when they do need your service, your business is already recognised and trusted.
Retargeting is one of the highest-value applications. When someone visits your website but doesn’t make contact, a retargeting ad on Facebook or Instagram keeps your business visible as they browse social media. These warm prospects have already shown interest, and a well-timed ad can bring them back to convert. Retargeting campaigns consistently deliver some of the strongest return on ad spend across all advertising channels.
Social advertising also excels at promoting specific offers, events, and seasonal campaigns. A restaurant can promote a new menu to food enthusiasts in a 10-kilometre radius. A trades business can advertise a seasonal maintenance offer to homeowners in specific suburbs. An accounting firm can promote tax preparation services to small business owners as the end of financial year approaches.
What's Included
- Campaign strategy aligned with your business goals and social media strategy
- Audience research, creation, and segmentation
- Custom and lookalike audience development from your customer data
- Ad creative: copywriting, image selection, and format recommendations
- A/B testing of audiences, creatives, and messaging
- Retargeting campaign setup for website visitors and engagers
- Meta Pixel and LinkedIn Insight Tag installation and verification
- Budget management and bid optimisation across campaigns
- Conversion tracking tied to phone calls, form submissions, bookings, and sales
- Monthly reporting with cost-per-lead, cost-per-acquisition, and return on ad spend
Our Approach to Social Advertising
Social advertising is managed as part of your broader marketing system, not as an isolated campaign. Every paid social campaign connects to your organic social presence, your website, your PPC strategy, and your analytics.
We build campaigns in Meta Ads Manager and LinkedIn Campaign Manager with proper structure: separate campaigns for different objectives (awareness, consideration, conversion), ad sets with targeted audiences, and multiple ad variations for testing. This structure gives us the control to optimise each element independently.
Audience targeting starts with your business data. Your existing customer base informs the initial audience profiles. We build custom audiences from your email lists and website visitors, then create lookalike audiences to find new people who share characteristics with your best customers. Geographic targeting focuses your budget on the areas you actually serve.
Creative development follows platform best practices. Social ads need to stop the scroll within the first second, which means strong visuals and clear, concise messaging. We test multiple creative variations and shift budget toward the combinations that perform best. For trades businesses, project photos and before-and-after comparisons work well. For hospitality, food photography and atmosphere shots perform. For professional services, authority-building content and client outcome framing resonate.
We monitor campaigns continuously and optimise based on performance data. Audiences that convert get more budget. Creatives that underperform get replaced. Targeting that’s too broad gets tightened. The goal is continuous improvement in cost-per-conversion and return on ad spend.
Frequently Asked Questions
Boosting a post promotes existing content to a broader audience with basic targeting. Proper social advertising campaigns are built in Ads Manager with precise audience targeting, multiple ad variations, conversion tracking, and optimisation toward business outcomes. Boosted posts are fine for incremental reach on strong organic content, but they lack the control and sophistication needed to generate consistent business results.
For most local businesses, we recommend starting at $500 to $1,500 per month in ad spend. This provides enough budget for testing and optimisation. The right budget depends on your audience size, competition, and objectives. Retargeting campaigns can be effective at relatively modest budgets because the audience is small and warm. Broader awareness campaigns require more spend. We’ll recommend a starting budget based on your situation.
Absolutely, and in most cases it should. Google Ads captures active search demand, while social advertising builds awareness and retargets interested visitors. The two channels complement each other. Someone might see your Facebook ad, visit your website but not convert, then search for your business on Google later and click your ad or organic listing. The combination covers both ends of the customer journey. Our PPC team coordinates paid search and paid social to avoid overlap and maximise coverage.
We track cost per lead, cost per conversion, and return on ad spend. These are the metrics that tell you whether your advertising budget is generating profitable results. We also monitor intermediate metrics like reach, frequency, click-through rate, and cost per click for diagnostic purposes, but the business outcomes are what we report on and optimise for.
Get Started Today
The Digital Business Snapshot analyses your digital presence and competitive landscape. It’s the starting point for understanding where social advertising fits into your marketing strategy and what results you can realistically expect.
Related Services
- Facebook and Instagram Ads — Detailed Facebook and Instagram campaign management
- LinkedIn Advertising — B2B social advertising for commercial audiences
- Content Creation — Organic content that supports paid campaigns
- Conversion Tracking — Measure what your social ads produce
- Social Media Marketing (main) — Overview of all our social media services