By now, social media has a firm place in the marketer's toolkit. Social media has proven to be highly effective in spreading brand awareness and building customer relationships. What's more?

Social media advertising continues to occupy more substantial and more significant parts of paid media budgets, which demonstrates the power of targeted messaging on these platforms. Indeed, marketers had spent some $28.9 billion on social ads throughout 2018.

With the way conversations on social media move at lightning speed, it is crucial to hitting the right note with your content. And if you can feed the algorithms with the correct budgeting and targeting parameters, then you can gain astonishing results in a short period.

The challenge, of course, is finding the best way to use your paid social for increasing your organic reach and achieving the maximum ROI. And questions around how to go about unlocking the best returns for our efforts continue to bother the industry. According to data from Social Media Examiner, more than half of social media marketers are either sure that they are incapable of measuring ROI or are unsure if they are capable of measuring ROI on their organic social activity.

Marketers are overwhelmingly curious about:

What are the best ways to achieve engagement on social media?

Which social media tactics are the most effective?

How to maximize organic reach?

What are the best ways to acquire the most customers?

What is the best way to use social ads?

Image Source: Social Media Examiner

Whether your social media marketing budget is large or small, you want to make your dollars count. So here are seven key ways to make the most out of your social media marketing budget.

1. Match with lookalikes

The more relevant your audience, the more click-throughs, and conversions you'll get. But it's hard to reach a broad yet relevant audience if you're still a small business. The best strategy is to create a lookalike audience from your existing loyal customers and target them with a top-of-the-funnel message to start nurturing them.

If you have a large customer base, start by segmenting them according to their lifetime value. Create and export a list of the email addresses associated with the people who have spent the most money with you over the years. Upload this list as a custom audience to Facebook, and you've got an excellent starting point for a lookalikes campaign.

If you don't have enough customers, then upload your entire email list and set the slider to 1% when creating the lookalike audience to cast the net as wide as possible. You can complete this list by including people who visited your site and engaged with Facebook posts, too.

2. Go live, organically

Yes, organic reach is indeed a thing of the past. However, there are still some ways that can draw eyeballs to your posts without paying for it.

The best vehicle for raising your organic reach is live video. It has a much bigger reach than ordinary video posts, and all it needs is a little structure. One experiment found that live video got almost twice the reach of ordinary video.

Image Source: Bitable

If you use ClickMeeting for your webinar content, then you can simultaneously cast it live to both Facebook and YouTube, which allows one webinar to do double or triple service. Plus you can make it available as video on demand after the live broadcast is over. Win-win-win!

3. Capture the leads

Make the most out of your paid social ads by treating them as lead magnets for your email lists. You can do this by preparing an excellent lead magnet offer to promote through paid social.

Target it at top-of-funnel leads by setting your parameters to exclude existing contacts, so that you can gather only new email addresses.

Once you've accumulated those emails, you can continue nurturing leads via email instead of social. This way, you'll save money on ongoing social ads, and position yourself to run a targeted email marketing campaign. Don't forget that as powerful as social media may be; email is still the marketing channel with the highest ROI.

4. Aim for the retarget

Retargeting ads are among the best performing social ads, making them a smart choice for your social budget. Retention is still challenging, and attracting and nurturing new customers costs more than re-attracting previous ones, so use retargeting ads to bring past or potential customers back to your store.

Retargeting ads are more focused and aim at audience segments that are likely to deliver the most revenue and avoid turning off the wrong consumers.

Image Source: AppsFlyer

According to a recent analysis from AppsFlyer, apps running retargeting campaigns in both Q1 2018 and 2019 increased revenue by 63%, i.e., nearly 50% more than apps that did not invest in retargeting.

5. Like the 'like'

When you use paid ads on Facebook, be smart about it. Experiment with setting your ad objective to increasing brand awareness through Page likes, rather than driving traffic directly to your business site or simply boosting posts.

When people like your Page, they'll become more familiar with your business and what you have to offer. It's also a smart way to create a pool of warm leads for your future paid social ads so that you can nurture them further.

If these trickier paid social campaign types are above your pay grade, a knowledgeable PPC agency may be able to help you maximize them.

6. Chat with the bot

Social media trends show that people are more active on messaging apps like Snapchat, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger compared to any other traditional platforms. It means that's where you need to be, too. Ads on messaging apps also have jaw-dropping engagement rates. Facebook Messenger alone possesses open rates of 70-80%.

Image Source: Business Insider

The trouble is that it's challenging to scale engagement on a messaging app – unless you use a chatbot. Placing a chatbot in a messaging app means that you can interact with leads more dynamically, asking and answering questions in a way that encourages leads to engage.

When someone replies to your ad or chatbot in Facebook Messenger, it automatically turns them into a contact. Comparably, standard paid Facebook ad needs the viewer to click on the ad, arrive at your website, and then choose to leave their details in order to become a contact.

7. Get granular

You're paying for every social ad, so it's worth your while to try to show each one to the most relevant viewer possible. The more granular the audience, the more relevant your message, and the more clicks and conversions you'll get.

But there's more to it than that. The broader the audience, the more competition there is to bid for these views, which pushes up your CPC. A narrow, granular audience is both a perfect fit for your business message and has fewer others bidding for it. To make the deal super tempting, Facebook rewards you by dropping the CPC when your message is highly relevant to your audience.

For example, if you want to target people in both Wyoming and Montana with ads. Then you're likely to save considerable spend per click if you set it up as two ads, i.e., one for each state. Rather than setting it up as just one ad that targets people in both states.

The right strategy makes more from your social media budget

Social media can deliver amazing results, but it can also suck your budget dry before you realize it.

By using chatbots, retargeting ads, and other tactics to boost organic reach, you can get the most bang out of your social media buck. Refining your target audience and using the right objectives for your paid ad campaigns is a bonus that will help you to make the most out of your marketing efforts.