Paid social media is one of the most powerful tools available to brands today, offering unmatched targeting, real-time optimisation, and the ability to meet customers exactly where they spend their time. Yet, many premium brands struggle to make it work.
The problem isn’t that paid social “doesn’t work” for high-end products, it’s that premium brands often approach it with the wrong mindset, strategies, and expectations. These are just a few of the ways brands can approach their paid social strategy with a clearer mindset, and achieve better results.
Treating Paid Social Like Traditional Advertising
Luxury and premium brands often try to apply their traditional media approach directly to social.
They focus heavily on glossy creative, perfect brand visuals, and top-down messaging, but forget that social media audiences are colder, and require more nurturing, often with creatives that decrease the stop-gap and less “salesy” messaging.
Solution:
Test different types of creatives including user generated static and video creatives that will decrease the stop-gap and engage users.
If using branded creatives, keep your brand guidelines, but test multiple ad variations, with varied messaging angles, and media formats. Deploying a more flexible mix of media creatives will result in better testing, and a clearer understanding of what does and doesn’t work creatively.
Targeting Paid Social Ads Too Narrowly
Premium UK brands often employ overly narrow interest based targeting, assuming their audience is a smaller niche. While exclusivity is important for the brand’s positioning, being too restrictive early on limits reach, drives up costs, and makes it harder to scale.
Solution:
Start broader as needed, then use the data to find patterns in who engages and converts. You can always refine campaign audiences to higher-value lookalikes and retargeting audiences once you’ve built enough data, driving down cost per result over time.
Focusing On 1 Part Of The Marketing Funnel
A common mistake premium brands often make is that their strategy only focuses on targeting bottom of funnel conversions or broad awareness, totally alienating users in the consideration phase. Premium customers usually need multiple touchpoints before they’re activated and ready to buy, especially for high-ticket items.
Solution:
Invest in consideration-stage content, such as storytelling videos, product deep-dives, behind-the-scenes looks, or customer testimonials that nurture leads before hitting them with a hard selling creative for the bottom of funnel push.
Overestimating Organic Reach
Many premium brands rely too heavily on organic social media to build awareness, assuming their existing followers will spread the word. The reality is organic reach has been shrinking for years and paid awareness and engagement campaigns are now essential to cut through the noise.
Solution
Always nurture potential UK customers from the original awareness and engagement stage, with an always on engagement campaign. Guiding them along the funnel, all the way through to the final purchase. By utilising engagement and awareness campaigns in your paid social strategy, you can amplify your best organic content and extend it to audiences who don’t yet know you.
Fearing Discounts & Special Offers
Some premium brands avoid discounts and special offers because they think it will “cheapen” their image.
While discount-heavy ads can undermine brand perception if overused, there are smart ways to drive action without sacrificing positioning.
Solution
Undertaking smaller, timely seasonal special offers can often lead to an uplift in sales. By avoiding overly glossy sales creatives, sales that are positioned as limited time % off are often more well received than money off or cost saving special offers outside pre-determined sales periods.
Summary
When done right, paid social can be a premium UK brand’s secret weapon for both growth and brand-building, nurturing users at every step of the funnel from original brand engagement to becoming a lifelong customer.
The key is to treat it as a performance-driven, insight-led channel that requires a high degree of testing, measuring and learning at every stage to find the winning formula.
Premium brands who are willing to adapt, test, and think outside the box with paid social can easily build and scale up a loyal, highly engaged customer base.
Want To Know More?
Looking to learn more about how you can build successful paid social campaigns for your premium brand? Get in touch with our PPC team and request a Free PPC proposal.