Social Media Ads in a Post Covid-19 World

Despite Australian states starting to come out of their COVID-19 lockdowns, many consumers are still happy to stay with online shopping, meaning business owners need to look at how their advertising spend is best utilised on the platforms their potential customers are browsing and shopping on.

Two of the largest social media advertising platforms in Australia are Facebook and Instagram with 13 million daily Facebook users and over 14 million active Instagram accounts. But, as with any marketing, there will be one platform that is better for advertising than the other for your business, and it’s important to determine which one this is before you go allocating your marketing budget.

We look at four main factors that can get you the most from your marketing budget, as well as how you can determine whether Facebook or Instagram advertising is best for your business.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

As a business owner, you should have a good idea of who your target audience is – within a digital marketing strategy you will have at least one profile of your intended and ideal customer. This is the person you need to be advertising towards. Both Facebook and Instagram offer options to boost your advertisements towards your ideal audience, but Facebook has a slightly better system, where you can drill your options right down to age group and personal interests, including pages liked, interests and friends of those already interested in your product or your content.

You can easily build strategies to ensure your message or product is seen by your ideal audience, which maximises the possibility of growing your customer base.

Engaging Your Audience

There’s no doubt that one of the biggest benefits of advertising on Instagram is their placement of ads in Stories. Over 400 million people globally watch Instagram Stories on a daily basis, which means that by having your advertising place in Stories, you maximise the audience reach on one of the highest engaged platforms. Facebook also has quite a wide audience reach that can be easily engaged by ensuring you use specific targeting strategies.

Both platforms can be used when it comes to engaging your audience – Instagram is perfect for live interactions, Q&A’s and fantastic photos, while Facebook is well suited for text-based posts that naturally blend into your target audience’s news feed.

Costs of Doing Business on Social Media

Unsurprisingly, being in isolation or working from home has brought about a significant increase across both Facebook Live and Instagram Live, particularly as celebrities, musicians and other high profiles people use the platforms more to keep connected with their fans and followers. Interestingly perhaps is that Facebook had a significant drop in advertising delivery costs due to businesses reducing their advertising spend. This has led to cost-per-click (CPC) dropping by over 35% across Australia and New Zealand. What this does mean for businesses who are ready to go is that they have an opportunity to reach a wider audience for lower costs. This is a unique opportunity as prices will rise again once business starts to get back to normal levels.

Advertising Spend

Working out where to spend your advertising dollars is a process most businesses go through, however, with the decreased cost-per-click, businesses have the opportunity to pay less than normal for every 1000 views or clicks on their advertising. This means that you can allocate your normal spending amount, but potentially reach double the audience – essentially, your business advertising spend is going further than normal.

COVID-19 was really an eye-opener for many businesses, particularly in how well they could spin their business model to focus more on online purchasing than face to face purchasing. As we start to come out of the bubble, it’s important to keep that connection with your online audience, especially as more and more people are now aware of how easy and quick it is to order a product online and have it delivered to their door.

Facebook and Instagram are great ways to advertise to your target market, but it is important to first know which platform suits your business best, as well as continuously evaluating your campaigns to ensure they are working.