**You already know that social media is an important ingredient in your business’s marketing mix.**
Yet it’s still amazing the number of brands that don’t use it to its full potential. You’ve mastered (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/pinterest-for-business-guide/ text: Pinterest for business), and understand how to (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/optimising-twitter-marketing/ text: optimise your Twitter marketing); but there is still a large area of social media that you could be ignoring.
With (link: http://www.smartinsights.com/internet-advertising/internet-advertising-analytics/paid-social-media-advertising-is-it-worthwhile/ text: 64% of marketing professionals) saying they were looking to increase their spend in paid social media advertising; it’s clear than an integrated approach is fast becoming *the *way to get ahead online.
Whether you’re yet to invest in paid ads or are struggling to boost your ROI, it’s never too late to take your social media advertising to the next level. Here we’re going to share our essential social media advertising tips for savvy marketers:
1. Be goal focused
First things first; there’s no point just “doing” social media because your competitors are. Trying to benchmark your potential against their current success and just following the crowd will get you nowhere.
Instead, you need to ask yourself why you’re planning on using social media. Are you trying to:
– Increase brand awareness by growing your online footprint?
– Grow brand loyalty amongst your client base?
– Boost your sales and conversions?
By having a clear goal in mind, it is much easier to plan and implement a robust advertising campaign. This goal will help you identify the right tone of voice, imagery, and calls-to-action to use in your ads; jumping straight in will only set you up for failure and blow your budget.
2. Understand the different options
Once you have a goal in mind, you need to identify which advertising option is geared to helping you achieve this.
Take Facebook for example. The world’s biggest social network boasts a number of paid advertising options; each offering you different benefits. Do you choose a traditional side bar advert? Or invest more of your budget in a Promoted Post or Sponsored Story?
Making the right decision is key here, so it’s important you’ve done your research. To help you identify the best Facebook advertising option for you, download our free whitepaper – (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/white-paper/mastering-facebook-marketing/ text: Mastering Facebook Marketing).
Twitter is much the same; boasting a number of paid options including Sponsored Tweets, Trends, and Accounts. If you have an ebook you want people to download, a Sponsored Tweet could really boost your conversions. If you’re trying to grow brand awareness, opt for a Sponsored Account.
LinkedIn and YouTube also have a plethora of social media advertising options open to their users. Take the time to research these carefully, and identify the most beneficial for you, your business, and your budget.
3. Target your demographic
There is one key reason why social media advertising beats any other; it can be demographically targeted right down to a person’s interests. For businesses like yours, this kind of targeting can’t be beaten.
Never again, will you return to a blanket method of advertising once you see how effective reaching out to the right people at the right time can be. It sounds simple enough; but targeting adverts in this way can dramatically increase your (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/social-media-roi/ text: social media ROI).
First off; identify exactly who your target customer is:
– Are they male or female?
– How old are they?
– Where do they live?
– What’s their job?
– What are their key interests and hobbies?
With Facebook advertising, you can even target users based on their marital status, sexuality and more. This gives every business an unrivalled opportunity to reach out to exactly the right audience.
Answer these questions, and tailor the content of your adverts to this audience. Everything from the words and images you use, through to the calls-to-action and landing pages are hugely important factors in converting those who click your advert; make sure they’re aimed at this demographic.
4. Constantly test
We’ve said it before and will say it again; test, test, test!
Whether it’s an eshot or PPC advert; you need to constantly be testing he effectiveness of your campaigns. Something as simple as changing a few lines of text or the image used can have a real impact on the success of your social media advertising.
By testing your ads, you will find out which perform best and where you should invest more of your budget. Running split tests is always a good way to trial this in real time, but is dependent on the advertising method you chose and the budget at your disposal.
5. Monitor your “Social Value” in Analytics
Once your campaigns have been running for a while, you will want to know how you can measure their effectiveness.
For starters, you should be using trackable URLs in all your social media adverts. This will show you exactly how many visitors you had from each advert, and how well they are performing. Not only how they’re performing; but how they’re performing against your Goals.
Google Analytics does a great job of visualising this through Social Value. As long as you have the right Goals and Events set up – you can get some top tips for that (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/event-tracking-in-google-analytics/ text: here) – you should be able to benchmark your success against your other marketing efforts.
One of the ways we can help you manage your social media advertising is through (link: https://www.superdream.co.uk/campaign-tracking/ text: Campaign Tracking). This exclusive service will show you more than just click-throughs; it will show you how many customers picked up the phone after clicking one of your ads. Again, this helps you with the testing and design stage; ensuring you always get the biggest return from your adverts.
Social media advertising is a great way to utilise your marketing budget with targeted campaigns that drive targeted traffic. Whatever goal you identified, these ad campaigns can help you achieve – and exceed – your ambitions.