Engage your audience with precision through social media ads
Expand your brand’s reach, recognition, and loyalty by hyper-targeting potential customers and driving ROI in a highly engaging environment.
What is Social Media advertising?
Social Media Advertising leverages popular platforms to promote products or services through diverse ad formats, from static posts and videos to reels. With Australians spending an average of two hours per day on social media, these platforms capture a wealth of user data that enables precise targeting. Social media advertising spans the entire marketing funnel—from brand awareness to purchase. It’s a highly effective channel, with 55% of people surveyed saying they’ve bought or considered buying a product after seeing a social media ad.
Meta (Facebook, Instagram)
Meta, encompassing Facebook and Instagram, is a social media giant that enables advertisers to reach vast audiences worldwide with targeted precision. Meta supports campaigns tailored to various objectives—from awareness to conversions—and offers robust targeting options, including demographics, behaviours, interests, location, and first-party data (from CRM/CDP systems and/or website traffic). Advertisers can even create lookalike audiences to expand reach effectively.
Meta provides a range of ad formats and placements (news feeds, stories, Messenger, etc.) for customisation and optimisation, along with integrated tools to enhance images across all formats. It’s especially powerful for eCommerce and retail brands, offering product feed integrations, Catalogue ads, and in-app shops where users can browse and purchase seamlessly within the Meta environment. Additionally, Meta offers solutions that bridge the gap between online ads and in-store purchases.
TikTok
Once known for quirky lip-sync videos, TikTok has evolved into a powerful platform for brand campaigns. While its audience originally skewed younger, TikTok now attracts a diverse user base—63.7% of users are 25+, with 31.6% aged 35+.
TikTok boasts the highest daily user engagement among social media platforms, with users spending an average of 95 minutes per day (compared to 49 minutes on Facebook and 51 on Instagram). This high activity level enables advanced audience targeting and makes TikTok a strong platform for engagement. Users are three times more likely to interact with a TikTok ad compared to an Instagram ad, and nearly half report making a purchase after viewing a TikTok ad.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn stands as the leading social media platform tailored for business professionals, fostering meaningful interactions between individuals and companies. It offers a unique opportunity to connect with decision-makers and executives across organisations. Backed by data from 57 million companies and over 1 billion members worldwide, LinkedIn is widely regarded as one of the most powerful B2B advertising platforms.
With campaign options designed to align with your goals—ranging from awareness and engagement to lead generation and website conversions—LinkedIn provides the tools to drive measurable results. Its innovative ad formats include sponsored posts, inbox messages, video ads, and document ads. The latter allows users to preview a document and exchange their contact information to access the full version, creating a seamless value exchange for both advertisers and users.
Snapchat
Snapchat might not be the first platform you think of for business promotion, but it’s a valuable addition to a well-rounded media strategy.
With 347 million active users worldwide, Snapchat reaches 75% of Millennials and Gen Z, including some audiences not active on other social apps. It’s a go-to platform for shoppers to share their purchases and offers robust targeting options, including location, interests, demographics, first-party data, external data segments, and lookalike audiences.
As a highly visual and interactive platform, Snapchat’s ad formats seamlessly align with its user experience. Brands can leverage engaging tools like Filters, AR Lenses, and Story ads, alongside action-driven formats such as Collection ads, Dynamic ads, and Video ads to showcase products and drive conversions.
Pinterest
Pinterest is a hub for people seeking inspiration, creative ideas, and discovering new products. While it may not be the first platform that comes to mind for business promotion, it offers compelling opportunities for the right strategy.
With over 518 million active users worldwide and a growing audience, Pinterest is especially attractive to users prioritising quality over bargains. This can result in stronger ROI compared to other platforms. Pinterest harbours people from all ages though its audience skews younger, with 38% aged 25–34 and 22% aged 18–24.
Pinterest provides robust targeting options, including interests, keywords, demographics, audience segments, and lookalike audiences. Its versatile ad formats—Standard Pins, Video Pins, Carousels, Quiz Pins, Collections, and Shopping Pins—make it an effective platform for every stage of the marketing funnel, from product discovery to engagement and purchase.
Reddit
Reddit thrives as a social platform built around communities, known as subreddits, where users engage on virtually any topic imaginable. These hyper-focused and highly engaged groups make Reddit a powerful platform for targeted advertising, particularly since many Reddit users don’t actively participate in other social media platforms.
Reddit’s audience skews young, high-earning, and values authenticity. It’s widely regarded as the go-to platform for honest reviews and genuine recommendations, with users being 46% more likely to trust a review on Reddit compared to other platforms. This makes building a brand presence on Reddit incredibly valuable.
Reddit offers robust targeting options, including interests, communities, keywords, and custom audience segments to connect or re-engage with relevant users based on their past behaviours. Its ad formats range from promoted posts, image and video ads, and conversation ads to product ads and high-impact formats, allowing brands to tailor their approach for maximum effectiveness.
X (formerly Twitter)
Although now surrounded by controversy, X (formerly Twitter) remains a major social media platform, boasting 535 million active monthly users—including many influential individuals—who rely on it as the fastest source for updates, discovery, and trending conversations.
Much like Reddit, X fosters discussions and engagement across an expansive range of topics, including niche interests like cryptocurrency.
Advertisers on X can target audiences based on demographics such as location, language, device, age, and gender. Additionally, targeting options include audience segments defined by conversations, interests, engagement, keywords, follower lookalikes, and custom audiences using both first- and third-party data.
X supports a variety of ad formats, including text, image, video, carousel, collection, and dynamic product ads. High-impact takeover opportunities are also available for brands seeking maximum visibility.
How to use Social Media Advertising in a media campaign?
Social media plays a central role in people’s digital lives, making it an essential component of most media campaigns. With a wide variety of platforms available, brands have unparalleled opportunities to connect with their target audiences through social media advertising.
Choosing the right platform(s) is crucial and should align with your campaign strategy and audience. Some platforms excel at driving conversions and activating the lower end of the marketing funnel, while others are better suited for product discovery, engaging niche communities, long-term brand reputation or building influence.
Each social media platform attracts distinct audiences, though overlaps exist to various degrees. To maximise impact, it’s important to consider the customer journey across different platforms and integrate social media into your broader media strategy. This helps avoid ad fatigue and ensures your messaging remains fresh and relevant, safeguarding your brand’s reputation while effectively re-engaging your audience.
Case study
Cook Islands Tourism drives awareness and bookings
Cook Islands Tourism leveraged the power of social media advertising, targeting audiences using interest segments (luxury, family or tropical travel), lookalikes and retargeting to drive interest in travel to the Cook Islands in the post-COVID era as borders were reopening. The campaign resulted in a surge in bookings, a 49% increase in site traffic and a 184% increase in social engagement.
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