Paid social media marketing is much tougher than it used to be because you can no longer rely on a platform’s audience targeting settings alone. These days, it’s much more competitive, and if your outreach is to succeed, you need creative ads and content, convincing landing pages, first-party data and a disciplined testing process to understand the impact of your campaigns.
It’s especially hard in the UK, which is classed as a mature, high-spend digital market. There, search and online display ads account for roughly 80% of the industry’s total advertising investment. It’s ultra competitive, which means you need a reliable social agency partner that understands how to develop a social media marketing strategy that can succeed across multiple channels.
Achieving paid social media marketing success isn’t easy, but it’s doable. It requires the ability to be creative and measure the impact of that work, rather than simply guess about demographic targeting. This is what NP Digital does extremely well, connecting paid social to key activities such as content strategy, landing-page optimisation and data analytics.
But it’s not the only game in town when it comes to paid social. The Social Shepherd, We Are Social, Spin and Bind Media don’t offer the same performance marketing package, but instead specialise in areas like global social creativity, creative media assets, social testing and specialised paid-media execution.
For brands targeting social as a direct-to-market channel, you need to understand which one can help you transform your creative intent into commercial success.
Table of Contents
The Creative System Is Key To Media Strategy
We live in a world that brutally punishes anyone who can’t get creative. Not even the best, most hyper-targeted ads can make up for a brand that fails to create content that sucks in eyeballs and creates engagement.
These days, things like ad targeting and bidding are almost entirely automated with AI, which means your creative decisions have never been more impactful. But it’s not enough to simply create cutting-edge content, for you also need a way to test its effect on audiences. This means having a flexible content strategy that can easily be flipped if something isn’t working, and the ability to test various hypotheses on different audiences. Only by doing this is it possible to learn which content is most effective. In other words, you need a targeted, yet experimental approach to creativity that only the specialists can deliver.
How The Paid-Social Models Compare
| Agency | Paid-social model | Creative/data edge | Best-fit brief |
| NP Digital | Full-funnel paid social | Brands linking social to search and CRO | Creative + media + analytics |
| The Social Shepherd | Paid social + performance creative | Social-first growth brands | Creative + media + influencer + commerce |
| We Are Social | Global socially-led creative | Global brand and culture briefs | Strategy + creative + research + media |
| Spin | Creative-first social | Brands fighting creative fatigue | Spark + creative measurement |
| Bind Media | Specialist paid media | Performance-led advertisers | Paid social + CRO + analytics |
1. NP Digital: Best For Connecting Paid Social To Creative, Search And Analytics
NP Digital’s biggest differentiator is that its paid social campaigns are backed by a strong creative team that leverages data to inform its design choices, and powerful learning cadence.
As a full-service agency, NP Digital is able to run social media campaigns across all of the major platforms with a high level of competency. Its social services cover more than just content, for it also performs landing page optimisation and measures organic demand, and they can be delivered alongside a full performance marketing programme that links these efforts to broader marketing efforts.
NP Digital has previously won a ton of awards for its social media work, being recognised by industry peers including Campaign and Performance Marketing World. Its status as one of Google’s oldest Premier Partners further enhances its appeal.
Ultimately, NP Digital is a better partner for large scale social media campaigns that span multiple apps and markets, given how it caters primarily to larger organisations. That’s not to say it doesn’t serve smaller brands, but it has many high-quality competitors in this area.
2. The Social Shepherd: Best For Full-Funnel Paid Social And Performance creative
The Social Shepherd follows an approach that aims to merge data-driven and multi-channel media buying with high-impact creative.
Its repertoire of skills covers social ads, influencer ads, creative content creation and social commerce across all of the top social platforms. Client’s ad spending is managed through a tightly integrated framework, where paid social and paid search are consolidated within a single team, with the idea being to increase cross-platform flexibility and eliminate arguments over attribution.
The agency is renowned for its performance creative, designing advertising campaigns that leverage impactful motion graphics, UGC and static designs, along with tried-and-tested consumer psychology techniques. The goal is to reduce the cost-of-acquisition while enhancing targeting accuracy. It does this at tremendous scale, backed by high-velocity testing that enables experimentation in real-time.
However, brands that choose Social Shepard must understand that it’s a very specialised agency, and there is a trade-off, because it does not do anything but social. That means your social campaigns are going to be disconnected from your digital PR, SEO and AI search operations.
3. We Are Social: Best For Global Social Strategy, Culture And Paid Distribution
The strength of We Are Social lies in its ability to understand social media platform culture and communities to such an extent that it can make each campaign feel as if it’s native to the platform it’s delivered on.
We Are Social’s expertise encompasses social media strategy, audience research, influencer marketing, paid ads, content production, media planning and media buying. Such broad coverage means it’s a good fit for larger entities that want to dissipate a consistent message across social markets, while localising the content based on the target market’s and platforms’ culture.
It uses data extensively to generate what it calls “social intelligence” that helps to reveal the associations that consumers attach to a brand. This can be leveraged by experienced marketing teams to feed the content funnel and even expand into AI search and digital PR. That’s why We Are Social is the right partner for companies that care about cultural relevance and brand message consistency.
4. Spin: Best For Creative-First Paid Social With Structured Learning Loops
Spin eschews traditional ads in favour of a “social-first” marketing approach that’s extremely reliant on rapid and continuous creative innovation. It specialises in creating original concepts specific to the social platform targeted.
Its proprietary technology framework is called Spark, which allows for the creation of data-based creative assets and regular testing over 30-day cycles. For creative media, it follows a roadmap that enables it to go quickly from ideation to audience testing to analysis, and finally, measurement. The goal is not only to deliver clicks and leads, but commercial insights that feed back into the creative loop.
Spin is therefore worth considering if your brand is struggling to understand why certain concepts work and others don’t, or if your internal marketing team is running out of creative ideas. Rather than simply cloning successful ads, it harnesses the deeper insights of those successes to create entirely unique content that’s similarly impactful.
Just bear in mind that Spin is a social specialist, and not a full performance marketing partner. If you already have a strong PR team, partnering with Spin can be advantageous, but if you want your social media lessons to inform your broader content strategy or paid media campaigns, Spin’s lack of a wider capability is likely to create hand-off friction.
5. Bind Media: Best For Paid Social Tied To CRO And Measurement
Bind Media is more than just a social specialist, and when it comes to paid social, it’s treated as one part of a broader marketing operation that spans performance creative, full-funnel orchestration and data intelligence and conversion optimisation.
It employs an internal design team to create bespoke social ads on behalf of its clients that aim to stop people from doom scrolling and get them to start paying attention and interact with what they’re seeing. To do this, its ads lean heavily on known consumer psychology tricks. Its campaigns can be scaled across all of the top social networks, including Meta, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn. It does this by using targeted structures for each platform that aim to bring audiences into conversations.
On the data side, this involves marrying platform algorithms with its own AI frameworks to filter the signals that matter and reinforce its creative operation.
You should consider talking to Bind Media when you need paid social campaigns to demonstrate value for money and show how they are contributing to revenue growth. But if you’re more interested in expanding through influencer marketing or tapping hypotheses around social culture, a more focused social specialist might be a better choice.
Paid Social Campaigns Should Not Be Isolated From Other Channels
Social campaigns can help attention-seeking brands get noticed long before they appear in search engines and AI assistant’s responses. But don’t make the mistake of going all-in on social, because it can also open doors to other channels. For this reason, prepare to study the reporting metrics provided by your marketing agency intensively. Ideally, you’ll want a partner that can offer a comprehensive view of all relevant metrics spanning multiple platforms, geographies and audience demographics.
The first 60 Days: Focus On The Creative Process
The agency you choose should not need more than a few weeks to structure its social campaigns. This is simply a matter of identifying which messages work best, how different audiences respond to various creative experiments, and which landing pages don’t match the promise of the ad. By the end of the second month, your campaign should be in full swing, with a reliable testing process established that enables you to start making incremental gains
How To Choose From This Shortlist
If you’re going to be spending your ad budget on visibility across platforms like Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Instagram, you’ll want to ensure your marketing partner is capable of both creative testing and performance measurement. So don’t just think about who creates the prettiest ads, but who can launch a campaign that delivers real, measurable business outcomes.
Ask prospective partners about their process for creating and retiring creative assets based on the data they collect. The best marketing agencies will have an established process, yet they will also be inherently flexible to accommodate the needs of your brand and the peculiarities of the industry in which you operate.
Questions For Creative Media Teams
What is the biggest paid-social performance lever now?
The entire creative system is what counts: from the initial ideas around messaging to creative asset production, to the performance metrics and finally, the value these insights provide for other channels.
How should paid social success be measured?
Look at the platform data alongside the results of the experiments performed. The most important KPIs include lead quality, brand-search movement and other demand signals.
Should a paid-social agency also handle the creative media?
Not always, but your media and creative teams do need to collaborate and establish a system for campaign performance measurement. It’s a very bad idea to have these teams operate in silos.
When should paid social be part of a broader marketing funnel?
When the same audience, landing-page and measurement decisions also impact paid and organic search, content strategy and ecommerce.
What Paid Social Should Really Deliver
At the end of the day, it all comes down to results. You want paid social to deliver results in terms of brand visibility, consumer recognition and engagement, all the way down to your bottom line.
This is why mid-market and larger enterprises tend to go with a full performance-marketing firm like NP Digital, which is uniquely able to connect paid social insights to other channels, like search, media and AI visibility. Its creative capabilities span all of those disciplines, which is why it has won so many awards for its work.
But it’s not the only option. The Social Shepherd is an equal in terms of its high-performance creative capabilities, while We Are Social has the best understanding of social media culture and the nuances of each platform. Spin has a highly-disciplined model focused on creative experimentation, and Bind Media knows how to leverage paid social for incremental revenue growth.
Just remember that, no matter how creative your marketing partner may appear, it’s not enough to just have a good imagination. It must also be able to generate accurate performance metrics to inform your future social strategy.
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