Author: Misha Sahota, Performance Marketing Manager at MindArc, July 09, 2025
What is Paid Social and Why Should You Care?
Paid social refers to advertising across social media platforms using targeted, data-driven strategies to reach specific demographics. Unlike organic content, social media advertising leverages platform algorithms to promote your brand to users beyond your current audience. While pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has its benefits, paid social offers unique advantages through its visual formats, advanced targeting, and engagement-driven approach.
Precision Audience Targeting
Paid social platforms allow for incredibly granular targeting, from interests and behaviours to demographic data and lookalike audiences. This means your ads don't just reach more people, they reach the right people. Whether you're launching a new product or scaling an existing one, this level of targeting ensures your message resonates with those most likely to engage.
Higher Engagement Through Storytelling
Social media is inherently interactive and visual. Formats like Stories, Reels, Pins, and Carousels offer brands the opportunity to connect through visual storytelling and social sharing. These ad formats both grab attention and drive meaningful interactions such as likes, shares, and comments, which help your brand stay top-of-mind.
Cost-Efficient Growth
In many industries, paid social delivers a more cost-effective return than pay per click advertising. With the ability to control ad spend tightly and optimise in real time, businesses can stretch their marketing budgets further while still achieving their goals.
Perfect for a Full-Funnel Approach
While search engine marketing captures demand, social media advertising excels at generating it. It's especially effective for upper and mid-funnel strategies such as brand awareness campaigns, seasonal promotions, or launching new product lines, but it also performs strongly at the bottom of the funnel by driving conversions.
The combination of search engine optimisation and paid social allows for a truly integrated digital marketing strategy that builds both visibility and engagement over time.
Paid Social: Where It Wins
While search engine marketing tools like Google Search Ads are great for capturing existing demand, paid social plays a key role in generating that demand. When used together, they work in harmony: Paid social builds awareness and interest, while paid search captures that intent and drives conversions.
Here's where paid social shines:
- Visual-first formats like Stories, Reels, and Pins boost product discovery
- Broader top-of-funnel reach to new audiences
- Creative flexibility that encourages experimentation and storytelling
- Strong performance for retargeting campaigns, especially on Meta
MindArc can help you strategically shift spend from paid search to paid social, ensuring your dollars go further and work smarter.
Discover how MindArc helped luxury watch brand Bulova expand into the Australian market through strategic Pinterest marketing, achieving increased impressions and driving eCommerce growth:
Certified Expertise That Drives Results
MindArc holds official partner and certification badges across Meta, Pinterest & Google, giving our clients a competitive edge.
Holding these certifications means we're given access to exclusive beta tools, platform updates, and advanced support channels, privileges reserved for top-performing agencies. This gives our clients a unique advantage in faster adoption of new features, early insight into changing algorithms, and priority resolution of issues. In a space where milliseconds and micro-moments can make the difference between a scroll and a sale, access matters.
More importantly, these certifications affirm that we meet the platforms' standards for compliance, creative excellence, and performance efficiency. We're not guessing at what works, we're constantly learning directly from the source, aligning our strategies with the latest best practices, and optimising campaigns using insights that others don't have.
Whether it's scaling your ROAS on Facebook, enhancing your search engine optimisation campaigns, or launching a visual-first campaign on Pinterest, we bring the platform-backed expertise to deliver.
Real Results From Clicks to Conversions
Across verticals, our paid social clients have seen:
- Increased ROAS across clients running paid social campaigns
- Increased brand awareness and engagement rates
- Higher conversion rates from dynamic retargeting strategies
We build multi-platform ecosystems that connect, engage, and convert. Combining the power of search engine optimisation, SEM marketing, and social media advertising, we create cohesive strategies that perform at every stage of the funnel.
With years of experience in eCommerce, digital strategy, and full-funnel marketing, MindArc is uniquely positioned to help brands amplify their performance across channels.
We don't do cookie-cutter. We:
- Tailor strategy to your business goals
- Design scroll-stopping creative
- Continuously optimise for ROI
- Provide transparent, data-backed reporting
Ready to Explore Paid Social? Let's Talk.
Whether you're curious about combining your SEM and paid social efforts, or looking to optimise your existing social media advertising strategy, MindArc is here to help. Let's work together to turn your social presence into a performance engine.
Contact us for a tailored strategy that makes your ad spend work smarter.