10 Social Media Ads That Can Help Nurture Buyer Decisions by Targeting the Middle of the Funnel

Social media advertising is a big deal. How big? By 2016, it’ll be $9.2 billion big, according to BIA/Kelsey. This would reflect a doubling of the $4.6 billion spent on social media ads in 2012.

Another bit of evidence to show social media advertising’s increasing value comes from research commissioned by Nielsen’s Vizu and conducted by Digiday, which found that 64 percent of advertisers planned to boost their paid social media budgets in 2013. This trend away from just free social media tactics to paid ones makes sense, given the findings of a recent Kenshoo Social study, which found that marketers have to pay to get the best results on social media channels.

In a post for PPC Hero, Christina Hall, account manager at Hanapin Marketing, shares 10 of the most popular social media ad formats that can help businesses target the middle-of-the-funnel stage of the buying cycle. Among them are Facebook Promoted Posts, Facebook Page Post Ads, Facebook Offers, LinkedIn Ads and Yelp Ads.

Hall says that companies should focus on this stage of the buying cycle because it’s where consumers are most likely to define their wants and needs, begin an active search for a solution, and share information via social networks. “Therefore, companies should focus on projecting how consumer needs/wants will be resolved and emphasize why potential buyers should do business with them to do so,” she writes.

It’s worth noting that at the end of 2012, a report from Nielsen shared that 33 percent of people in the U.S. said ads on social networking sites are more annoying than other online ads.