Now that you've learned why paid social media can be such a useful component of social media marketing, it's time to plan your paid strategy and learn how to set up an ad campaign. In this video, we'll show you how to set up a campaign for an ad on Twitter, but most social media platforms will guide you through setting up a campaign in a similar way. Start with your objective. In order to get the results you'd like, it's important to clearly define the purpose of your paid campaign. Do you want to gain more followers? Get more engagement with your posts? Generate more brand awareness? Encourage your customers to sign up for something or make a purchase based on a particular offer? Setting the objective for your paid social media strategy helps guide your users to your end goal, such as an offer on your website, an email subscription form, or your social media profile itself. Goal-setting also ensures that you're tracking the right metrics and KPIs associated with your campaign. When you begin setting up your ad on a platform, select your objective. Then you can build your campaign around this objective. Next, determine who your audience will be. Your paid social media campaign should be built around reaching one of your customer personas on social media. As a reminder, a customer persona represents a group of similar people in a desirable audience. Unlike with organic social media, it can get expensive to reach a wide audience with ads. Narrowing down your target audience can help you allocate your budget more effectively. You can use filters and other criteria to narrow down your audience when you're setting up your ad. You can target people by gender, age, and physical location. You can even target people according to things like keywords, interests, and events. Once you've defined your objective and audience, consider what social media platforms would best serve your campaign. You should invest in social platforms that you're familiar with and have an established audience on. If this is your first paid social media campaign, you may just want to focus on the social media platform that is currently your biggest source of leads. We'll discuss how to choose platforms for your ads later in this section. Then, define the length of your campaign. Do you want your campaign to last one week, two weeks, or a month? Set specific start and end dates for your campaign. You'll also have to set a budget for your campaign. You can start by researching the average advertising cost on that platform. Some platforms require that you spend a minimum ad budget for each ad group. If you spend a certain amount on some platforms, you may also have access to special features and the opportunity to work with platform managers to optimize your campaign and even refine your creative content and messaging. You pay for ads on social media through an auction-style format, bidding for an optimal advertising position on each platform. If you win the auction, you then pay the agreed upon amount for things like each click, view, like, or impression on that platform for your ad. We'll get into how to budget for and bid on social media ads a little later in the section. And of course, you'll need to develop and upload your campaign content, or creatives. Creatives are any content that can be promoted in a campaign, such as text, images, GIFs, or videos. To develop your creatives, first familiarize yourself with the required ad specs—including dimensions, sizes, and formats—for different platforms. Carefully craft your call to action phrases and marketing messaging so that your ads land with your target audience. And as we've discussed previously, you may want to perform some organic testing to ensure your assets are optimized. Once your creatives are ready, upload them to the social media platform. And finally, after your ad has been approved by the platform, you can launch your campaign. Once it's launched, your ads will automatically post at the campaign start date and time you set. Just like with organic content, you can use a social media calendar to plan and publish your ads. And as you go through the initial stages of any campaign, you will likely need to do some fine-tuning to your ads to optimize their performance. We'll talk more about how best to target your paid social media in the next section.