How to Create an Effective Social Media Advertising Strategy
If you want your company to remain competitive in your respective field, it’s absolutely crucial to advertise on social media because organic reach will no longer take you as far as you need to go if you truly want to beat out the competition. On the contrary of expecting your followers to see what you post, you have to target those followers and create customer journeys if you want people to convert. Now, it can be a challenge at first, but we’re here to smooth out that experience by letting you know how you initiate the process followed by some tips and tricks that you can sprinkle in throughout the process in order to make it as easy and effective as possible.
When initiating the process, you need to begin with the creation of a strategy. Keep in mind that this strategy is different for every company as not one business is alike. Now, you could throw in a bunch of money at your paid social, but that’s not how you make the best ROI. Instead, you need to learn to maximize all that you’ve set aside for social media advertising and then watch the cash roll in. Therefore, begin by establishing your campaign objectives by asking yourself what the goal is for your strategy. Going into paid social without an objective is a great way to lose a lot of time and energy, so don’t make that costly mistake. A few common goals that may help you set yours straight include increasing traffic, visibility, engagement, lead generation, and sales. As soon as you’ve got a very clear goal, it’s time for you to select the social media platforms that you’d like to use for your ad campaigns. Today, there are many to choose from. It’s just up to you to figure out which ones would work best for you. Therefore, begin by asking yourself several questions such as, “Is the said channel working organically for your company?” or, “Does the said channel’s demographics correlate with your own brand?”
Facebook is useful for both B2C and B2B as they provide users with a variety of Facebook ad formats as well as are able to create scalable audiences. Instagram, on the other hand, is better for boosting web traffic sales and pushing brand awareness thanks to very visual content. This is the most ideal for B2C. Thanks to Twitter’s numerous advertising options, companies are able to get assistance with increasing their following for, say, a product launch or to begin a new social channel. Their ads are also a great way to increase the awareness and boost the number of clicks to your site. Now, there are many other platforms such as Snapchat and LinkedIn, but Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are definitely your top contenders.
The next step in the social media advertising process is to figure out the best audience to target based on your company’s specifics. However, attempting to match the voice of your brand along with figuring out your target audience while simultaneously trying to figure out how you can appeal to entirely new users that are completely unaware of your company is no joke. Therefore, this is the stage where you should take your time in order to find that middle ground. Let’s take a look at a few options that Facebook offers.
Facebook is a really great place for beginners looking into creating their core audience. For instance, they offer the feature “interest targeting” where you’re able to target an audience based on their interests and the things that they like or share. Another feature that they offer is “audience behaviors” which allows you to narrow down your audience into those that have certain intents such as purchasing behaviors or traveling intentions. In addition, however, you also want to make sure that you know your core demographics which is why you should know the demographics of the platform that you’ve selected. This way, you’ll know how your audience will react to your ads. On top of that, Facebook allows you to save your audiences that way you can reuse them later and make adjustments to them where necessary. Therefore, save them as soon as you’ve found the middle ground between your audience’s interests, behaviors, and demographics.
The next step in the process is to select the kind of content that you’d like to advertise. There are many to choose from, but keep in mind that not every format will yield identical results for your company. Therefore, choose the one of a combination of formats that would work best for your brand. A few different kinds of formats that Facebook offers include photo ads, video ads, carousel ads, slideshow ads, collection ads, and messenger ads.
At this point you’ve invested so much into your social media advertising strategy, so you want to make sure that you get your bidding strategy right. Finding the sweet spot requires time as every industry is different and yet, at the same time, all of them are highly competitive. Therefore, the greatest advice that we can give you is not to shoot too low or too high as you either just won’t see nearly as many impressions as you’d like or you’d end up overpaying. That being said, if you find the middle ground through trial and error, you’ll end up paying for mid-range impressions, thus causing you to make the best ROI possible.
We understand that we’ve just gone through quite a lot of information, but when you train yourself and put it into practice, you’ll watch your conversions soar. That being said, it is a lot of work that requires a lot of attention which is why many companies invest in a social media advertising agency such as our own. TEA, which stands for threat and engagement analytics, is a great social media campaign management solution as we are able to handle the nuances otherwise impossible to deal with if you don’t have the necessary tools. Such nuances include threat detection and elimination as well as gathering user engagement data when the user leaves a certain platform. Learn more by watching our free webinar which you can find on our site.