If you are a marketer who has yet to nail down a paid social media strategy, you need to read this post.

With more than 2 billion users across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, social media has seen an explosion in growth the last few years. And yet though many call it the channel with the most potential, just 60% of social media marketers are incorporating paid advertising into their social media strategy.

This is a giant missed opportunity. “If you aren't using paid tactics, then your social media presence will most likely be ineffective,” Sean Standberry, CEO of LYFE Marketing, told PR Newswire,

So if social media advertising is such a huge opportunity, why aren’t more marketers taking advantage of it?

For one, brands can feel overwhelmed by all the options available and don’t know where to begin. Social Media Examiner recently found in their 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report that 40% of marketers feel social media marketing has become more difficult in the last year thanks to algorithm changes, a decline in organic traffic, and the growth of emerging platforms.

Second, it can be hard for marketers to measure the results of campaigns. According to Simply Measured’s 2016 State of Social Report, nearly two-thirds of marketers have a hard time measuring ROI. Without the proper technical support to properly track their engagement metrics, it is difficult for social marketers to tie their efforts to revenue growth and thus makes it difficult to measure their success.

While these concerns have valid points, they shouldn’t stop you from being a part of the 61% of marketers who have seen success with social media ads.  

Use these four simple tips to get started and you’ll be on your way to social media advertising success!

1. Start with Facebook. Facebook continues to be the highest performing social media platform for most businesses. And since it represents 75% of all social media users, it is the logical first step in exploring a paid social strategy. Facebook has done a great job providing resources and step-by-step directions on how to get a campaign set up. Once you start experimenting with Facebook ads, you will also have a better idea of how social media ads perform for your brand so you can begin to incorporate other platforms like Twitter and Instagram.

2. Know your goal. Are you looking to increase brand awareness? See a spike in clicks? Grow your email list? You may be surprised to learn that with Facebook advertising, all of the above are objectives you can use for campaigns. And as other social media platforms continue to improve their advertising options, this list of objectives is only going to get better. After collaborating with your team on what the goal of your ads will be, there are numerous great resources you can read to find the campaign objective that will work best for you.

3. Make sure your goal can be measured. Once you have decided the objective, it’s important to make sure you have the right tools in place to track your ROI. The good news with Facebook is they have a native tool to help track your goals; make sure to install it before your campaign begins. With the Facebook pixel, you can monitor actions users take after viewing your ad and easily measure ROI. However, if you find the pixel cannot measure what you need it to, you may want to invest in tracking software. As Simply Measured also found, 43% of marketers feel they need more tools and that analytics software allows them to do their best work. Whether an outside tool is necessary or not, it’s important for marketers to be able to prove value and be able to optimize future campaigns.

4. Find the best ad management solution. As you measure the success of your social media campaigns and analyze your advertising spend, you may find your brand size or ad budget has grown too large for the native advertising platforms on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. When that’s the case, it’s time to step up to something like a CRM-powered tool. For those that have reached this point and want to see a 47% higher CTR website conversion ads, enterprise social media advertising tools like Marketing Cloud’s Advertising Studio are the answer to what you’re looking for.

There is so much more to social media advertising than simply “boosting” a post. From getting started and planning your campaigns to measuring ROI and finding enterprise tools, social media is a great ad solution for businesses of all sizes. With this information to guide you, how will your alter your strategy for 2017 to get the greatest impact from your social media efforts?