Paid Social Media Basics

Paid social media campaigns need to strategically target potential customers along various stages of the buyer journey, typically referred to as Top of Funnel (TOFU), Middle of Funnel (MOFU) and Bottom of Funnel (BOFU).

If you always thought TOFU was something vegetarians eat, you're not alone. Let’s break down some of this marketing jargon together.
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Top of Funnel (TOFU):

We call these thumb stoppers. This is the first time you will attempt to capture your audience’s attention, and the most common type of TOFU advert your brand campaign uses employs a ‘hook’ technique. They’re effective because people make emotional decisions a split second before the logic part of their brain kicks in.

The best way to land an emotional hook is to create a pain points matrix for the various segments of your audience, and then to create a campaign around the most pertinent topic.
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Types of TOFU campaign:

• Emotive brand campaigns - eg Dove’s campaign for real beauty

• Lead products - eg Guide to surviving XYZ, playlist for XYZ, meditation for sleep guide etc. If you can create a give away that people will be happy to share their emails in exchange for (“gated content”), you’re on to a winner. Lead products also work in organic social media campaigns and need to be followed with an email nurture flow campaign to convert customers at the point of their inbox.

• Cultural or calendar events - for ideas see our Marketing Calendar 2026. Marketing calendar 2026

• Quizzes - eg Discover your style of XYZ - you can gate the results or gate something like a discount at the end to get people’s email addresses.

• Clever hooks - eg “5 Reasons Not to Try [Your brand / niche]” (trust me, spinning a negative really works), phone ‘takeovers’, diagrams, a ridiculous opening that turns into brand storytelling, or even doing the opposite of what everyone else is in your category is doing.

• Viral / Spoof / Funny ads. These may be original ideas or playing off a viral social media trend. Curry’s TikTok account does this brilliantly. Not an impossible type of ad for every category, but, depending on your audience, brands should be cautious and established before reaching for the funny bone.

You need to run more, varied TOFU adverts to win engagement so that you can retarget people.
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Middle of Funnel (MOFU):

This is where you retarget people with more benefit driven messages, typically backed up with facts and statistics. This appeals to the logical side of the brain. And of course, always with a call to action to do something.
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Bottom of Funnel (BOFU):

This is where you retarget once more and hit your audience with social proof, ie testimonials from delighted customers. If they can be linked to a trusted rating authority like Trustpilot or similar, even better.

BOFU Ads also typically throw a too good to miss offer on the table such as a free trial period, free gift, or discount if applicable.
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Social Media (SoMe) Paid Campaigns and Budgets

How much you put behind your paid campaigns will come down to budget.

Best practice is to run a few different campaigns, or to take one campaign and tweak the content to make two versions and A/B test them to figure out which aspects land the strongest with your audience.

Brands with big budgets might simply change the colour of a button or the hero image and A/B test them. Some change the headlines but keep everything else the same. A smart way to create alternative versions of the same ad is to reframe the content according to the 4 Buyer Personas - see our blog article.
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Next steps

Meta can feel like a shady realm, and the algorithm is both merciless and opaque, but applying a full-funnel creative strategy will reap higher rewards than randomly assigning budget and crossing your fingers that something will go viral.

It's also worth keeping a bank of inspiration from the best campaigns out there; and fortunately for you, Katie is a hoarder of ideas. Scroll to the bottom for a few of her recent saves.

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Need help building a Social Media campaign that actually lands?

We’ve spent the past few years helping organisations create Paid Social Media campaigns that slap.

If you want to create something that connects and stands up to scrutiny, we can help with
• brand/campaign strategy
• creative design and production
• and implementation

‍Get in touch to start a conversation

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