Making Your Money Count: 7 Effective Social Media Advertising Tips
According to Hootsuite’s Global State of Digital in 2019 report, there are 3.484 billion social media users worldwide. This number keeps growing each year by 9 percent.
With the rise of social networks, it’s becoming harder than ever to put your content out there and reach potential customers. Algorithms change constantly, and brands try to keep up with the trends.
As a brand, you can’t afford to spend time and effort on posting content without spending money on ads. Only a few of your posts will have an organic reach. You have to pay for the rest in hopes of being noticed.
Here are seven essential social media advertising tips you need to know to get your money’s worth for each ad you put out there.
1. Build a Social Media Strategy
Before you begin with social media advertising, you need a solid social media strategy. First, decide on the content you’ll post, the timeframe, and frequency. These parameters are different for each platform and for each type of audience.
For example, LinkedIn users are the most active after work, while Facebook users are the most active at noon, during their lunch break, or in the evenings. Then, decide on the type of ads you’ll run, your budget, and frequency.
Remember that it takes time for your strategy to produce results. Even with paid ads, platforms need time to figure out the best audience to present your ads to and gain momentum. However, if you don’t see results after a month, either kill the ad campaign or change something about it.
2. Decide Which Platforms You’ll Use
With so many social media platforms, it can be hard to decide which ones to use for the best results. Where does your target customer spend the most time online? Which platforms do they use every day and for what purpose?
Each platform has its own rules on advertising, but also different types of audiences. This means you should prepare different ads and pay different prices.
It’s important to choose your top advertising vs marketing channels and allocate your budget accordingly. Some marketing efforts don’t require big budgets but may need the support of paid ads to convert.
3. Know Your Target Customer
Social media ads are easy to set up, but no matter how advanced their algorithms, this doesn’t mean they’ll reach the right audience. This is why you have to know your target customer in terms of demographics, purchasing power, lifestyle habits, shopping habits, and even the generation they belong to.
Once you have a detailed buyer persona, you’ll know the type of voice to use, images and graphics, price ranges, and calls to action. Running ads just for the sake of it will not only drain your ad money but also result in low conversion rates.
4. Engage With Your Followers
If you want to learn what your audience wants, you have to interact with them on a daily basis. This means replying to comments and messages, organizing giveaways, making polls, asking questions, and posting regular social media content.
The more you engage with your followers, the closer they’ll feel to your brand. They’ll tag their friends, post photos of your products, and participate in discussions. This will help algorithms show your posts in users’ feeds, and earn the trust of your followers. And when your audience learns to trust you, they will buy from you.
Remember that trust is hard to earn, but it’s easily broken. Your interactions with the audience should always be friendly, professional, and helpful, no matter how much time it takes to turn them into customers.
5. Set a Social Media Advertising Budget
Most social media platforms make it easy and affordable to run ads, but you still need to set a budget. Otherwise, your ads will run indefinitely, and you’ll spend money with little ROI.
Divide your advertising budget into several parts for different social media platforms. Then, decide which platform can bring you the most return on ad spent, and assign the biggest chunk there.
Remember that click-through rates aren’t as important as conversion rates. If you see a great CTR, but also high bounce rates on your website/landing page, you need to change something there.
6. Do A/B Testing on Ads
Advertising on social media can be tricky because you don’t know how the audience will perceive your ads. This is why A/B testing is important if you want to see what type of copy and content performs better.
A/B testing means you’ll create two different ads and see which performs better. Then, you can easily see where to tweak and optimize until you get a better conversion rate.
This is especially true when you want to attract new customers and don’t know how they’ll respond to your ads, if at all. This data will help you create better-targeted ads in the future, and with better results.
7. Dive Into Social Media Insights
To truly understand the results behind your advertising efforts, you should dive into your social media insights. There, you can see which ads performed best, what the conversion rate was, and what the audience was.
Then, follow the analytics on your website to see where users clicked, how they interacted with the landing page, and if they took some action. The goal is to make a sale or generate a lead, so if these metrics are too low, you need to adjust your ads or landing pages.
Learn how to read and analyze your data to make the most of it. It’ll always show you the real state of your ad efforts so you can learn, adjust, optimize, and repeat.
Reach New Customers Online With These Advertising Tips!
No matter what industry you’re in, using social media ads to boost brand awareness is a must if you want to get new customers.
The first steps are having a social media strategy, an advertising budget, and a lot of patience until things take off.
Want more marketing and advertising tips? Check out some of the other articles on our website where we share the latest trends and tools in the social media world.