North East Social, Digital & Design agency Curtis Gabriel share their essential tips to achieve your goals with personalised social media ad campaigns.
In a pay-to-play game, social media advertising is a must for brands…but why exactly is it so important? For starters, organic reach is on a downward trajectory across most of the major networks. The days of simply posting on social and expecting all of your followers to see everything are over.
Actually, that mindset has been gone for a few years now. It’s all about how you target your audience, build customer journeys and attract people to your website to make a purchase. Paid social media strategies help with achieving exactly that. The real challenge, however, is understanding the ins and outs of social media advertising, how to get started, how much to spend and how each network operates. That’s a lot of tasks for even the most experienced brands on social media.
Getting started
If you’re just getting started, it’s important to understand the basics of social media advertising. Every business operates differently, so having a strategy tailored to your goals is essential.
Understand your audience
Identifying your target audience will influence your choice of social channels, content and tone of voice.With a specific audience in mind, you can tailor your social content to suit them and grab their attention in a competitive marketplace.
Identify your objective
Social ads work best when you’re focused on what you want to achieve. Objectives help to clarify your goals for campaigns or even individual ads. To choose the right ad objective, think to yourself – “what’s the most important outcome I want from this ad?”. It could be sales on your website, downloads of your app or increased brand awareness.
Carefully select your platforms
Your target audience and objective will have a real influence on the platforms and placements you choose to run your ads. For certain campaigns, such as those with a B2B focus, Linkedin may be a more suitable platform for your campaign over Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
Choose the right ad type
Whether you choose to use video, images or words or a combination of those elements there are social ad formats for every campaign. Ad types for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Linkedin put your goals front and centre, and they can look great on every device.
Produce quality creative content
Social users simply love visual content, which explains why they are always on their smartphones scrolling down various timelines and feeds. It is important to consider which styles of content that you have engaged with on social media yourself. What made you stop and engage? Bespoke creative content, including sleek photography and videos, are a great way to capture user attention and ensure any call-to-actions included on a post are followed.
Your copy is key
Just like choosing creative content for your ads, writing ad copy is both an art and a science. Firstly, keep it short and sweet and decide on the one thing you want people to learn from your ad. Secondly, tie your copy to your creative content and personalise the content to your target audience.
Focus on ROI
You can run ads on Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin on any budget. Like with anything in life, the more you put in, the more you’ll get out and that goes for campaign budgets, too. Set a daily or total budget for your ad and set the duration of the campaign, remembering to focus on your commercial objectives and ROI.
Continually refresh and test your campaigns
Finally, it is essential to monitor and track the success of your social ad campaigns to ensure you are achieving your initial objectives. Utilising tools like Facebook Pixel data can allow you to track results from your ad campaigns and demonstrate clear ROI.
For more information on social ads visit www.curtisgabriel.com or call 0191 340 3600.
