Making Paid Ads Work, Our Guide to Advertising Online
Running paid ads on social media gets you in front of more of the right people, but only if you know how each platform works. Plenty of business owners, and plenty of newer marketers, shy away from paid altogether, or drop it the first time the numbers come back flat.
Because every platform treats ads a little differently, it’s impossible to create a one-size-fits-all guide that will guarantee success every time. However, we have boiled down our years of experience into these three basic points. These recommendations will not be able to provide you with the specifics, but it should serve as a rough framework from which you should base your strategy for adding paid advertisements in your social media marketing strategy.
1. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience could mean a lot of different things. Every article talking about any type of marketing will tell you to study your audience. This is even more important if you’re doing paid advertisements on social media.
This is because every platform will have some form of hyper-targeting, which will allow you to target certain segments of the user base using basic demographics such as age, gender, geographical location, interests, etc. Not only will you be able to tailor your message, but you can also choose the demographics of the people who will see your ad, making for cost-efficient and measurable campaigns.
2. Know Your Goals
Goal-setting is a skill that every marketer should master regardless of field, but it is even more important for social media. While other types of marketers will be content to wait for actual effects on the bottom line, social media marketers have to understand and plan for metrics such as:
Volume, measures the size of the conversations about you. Different social media platforms may have different names for this, but it generally measures how much people are talking about a topic that you may have created through a campaign. This is the metric that marketers gun for when they try to come up with clever hashtags in hopes of seeing it on the trending board of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
Reach, measures how many people have seen your ads, but does not tell you whether or not they took action upon seeing it. Reach is an important metric because it helps you contextualize the other metrics. For example, if you are trying to measure your engagement rate (more on this below), you can divide the number of clicks, retweets, replies, or favorites of your posts by Reach.
Engagement, measures how many people are interacting with your campaign’s ads. It comes in different forms across social media platforms, but the most common indicators of engagement are likes, shares, and comments.
3. Understand How It Helps You
Social media metrics don’t tell you exactly what a campaign did to your bottom line, so plenty of business owners struggle to justify the spend. Going viral and making money are two different things. When the two split apart, go back through your metrics and work out which numbers are moving and what is moving them.
For example, if your skyrocketing engagement is not translating to increased revenue, then you should look at the nature of conversations that are happening around your product. If the conversations tend to be negative, then you may need to tweak your messaging.
Conclusion
Paid social buys you reach without burning the budget, and the audience is already paying attention when your ad shows up. You can also push the creative as far as the platform allows. The difference between a campaign that works and one that wastes money is how well you know the platform and how your own customers use it.
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