Advertising is an essential piece of growing your audience on social media. Since the public launch of many of these social media platforms, the ability to attract your customers with a single post has nearly disappeared. If you want to make any meaningful impact quickly will require you to pay to attract your customers. Set aside a budget to figure out how you are going to attract the audience(s) that you are targeting.
Create Ad Creative & Content
The content is essential to making a winning ad program. No matter where your ads are, making the most of your content can help you get the views, clicks, and purchases you want. Part of crafting a successful ad is using the principal like AIDA and making a clear offer to your customers. The better you deliver on the value, the better your ads will perform.
Create a Budget for Advertising
An ad budget helps make the most of your advertising. The question of how do we maximize our budget allows advertisers to innovate, test, and improve on every aspect of advertising. For small businesses, I recommend setting a daily budget which will help you gain visibility, test, and improve. Daily is important because data is important in making a successful campaign. What you will find is that there are some ads that you could throw money at all day long that converts and are cash cows. Starting with a budget can help you in generating customers until you find that sweet spot of every dollar increases your customer base. If you are unsure about where to start a social marketing budgeting, this post might help. I would recommend reviewing your ad budgets regularly to reduce waste and to capture more customers.
Test Ads with Variation
Create variations of ads to improve performance. Testing the imagery, video, and messaging can all have a strong impact on how ads perform. Good marketing tests everything and advertising more so. Multivariate testing uses this combination of ads and landing pages to find the best performing ads for the best advertising results. Don’t let one advertisement kill the program simply because you didn’t test or create ad variations.
Target Through Email Lists
Use an email list of customers to build similar audiences. Building an email list can either helo you get customers you already have to connect or to attract new customers. Facebook has very sophisticated and deep information that can easily identify similar types of people where you may otherwise not be able to see the connections. Using things like Facebook’s lookalike audience can help you reach more of your target audience even if you don’t know what that is. You will want to start building an email list to help you deliver great ads to customers you want and reduce ad spend. You usually can get these lists from your marketing automation tools or email tools.
Use Interests to Target Your Audience
Use interests to help broaden your reach to customers. If you’ve created customer audiences (aka personas), then using information from your research to identify interests can be helpful in advertising to them. Facebook allows you to target people to the interests of your audience. If you are targeting parents with kids, then find subjects that fit the profile of parents (i.e., interest in Parenting Magazine or Lego).
Use Experience to Increase Interest and Conversions
Social media advertising offers a more interactive experience. Connections, conversation, and experience help brands to connect with consumers. Platforms are beginning to utilize things that enhance this experience, such as chatbots, augmented reality filters, and even games. Using some of these, not for novelty sake, but customer experiences with your brand can boost the conversion rate of your ads. Consumers are more likely to favor businesses where they have positive experiences. Looking for an opportunity where immersive advertising can help improve your customer’s interactions.
Retarget Your Customers
Customers who follow you can provide you with a specific opportunity to advertise to them. The 80/20 principle (a.k.a. Pareto Principle) refers to 80 percent of your business profit comes from 20 percent of your customers. When you consider the repeat nature of your customer, it makes sense to use ads to encourage a purchase. Using retargeting can help you improve your profits by reaching these customers. You may ask why not just email them? We all recognize that email only reaches a portion of your customers. By retargeting customers, you can increase the reach of your promotions to customers who have already purchased.
Measure Your Social Media Ads
Measurement is essential to making successful social media ad campaigns. Understanding the KPIs and the results will not only make you a better marketer but also provide you with better results. Remember, ROI will provide you with the best results and get buy-in from your clients or managers. Be sure to set the important metrics to make the most of your campaign.
Conclusion
Advertising is important aspect to building brand awareness and sales. Use these tips to improve your advertising copy and conversions so that your ads perform at their best.