With the volume of content available for people to consume on social media, it’s not enough to hope they stumble across your company in their scrolling. Paid advertising is a great way to reach consumers who don’t already know about your brand or products. According to the “Marketing Rule of 7”, a prospective customer needs to hear your message seven times before taking action on purchasing. This is where social media can shorten lead times and more efficiently drive consumers to your brand.
Establish Your Goals
Are you hoping to increase brand recognition? Is your focus on promoting a sale or new product? It is imperative you establish well-defined goals for your social advertising in order to create content that drives a consumer to action. Focusing on growing brand awareness and increasing reach and engagement are all goals to help grow your community and pool of prospective buyers. Driving traffic to your website and focusing on lead generation can help consumers navigate your products and make purchasing decisions.
Creating the “Right” Message
You need to reach your prospective audience several times before they’ll convert, but you also need those interactions to be meaningful and related to your advertising goals. When you created your social media strategy, you should have identified your target audience and established your brand identity.
By understanding who you’re marketing to, their buying goals, and the parameters of your brand, creating messaging that is impactful to your audience should be simplified. Clearly express your call-to-action with direct, compelling copy. A good tip to remember – messaging that tells a story, elicits an emotion, and resonates with a consumer will stick with them longer.
Designing Your Ad
On most platforms you can choose the layout and location of your ad. Do you want to incorporate a video or display products in a carousel style? Are you planning on boosting content that you’ve already posted to help it reach a larger audience? Do you want ads that will run on a person’s stories or their social feed? The options are endless, but your goals for the ad will help you narrow down the right layout and location.
Once you know what type of ad you’re creating, you can get started on visual design. You want to choose design features that are eye-catching to stop a consumer while they scroll. Use your buyer personas to target the needs of your potential customers and search engine optimize your ad content with specific keywords and phrases (and image alt text) when possible. Using bold colors or interactive videos will attract consumer attention, but be sure to stay true to your brand guide so viewers associate the ad to your company.
Setting Up a Campaign
While the specifics of setting up a campaign on your chosen platform will vary, there are a few general rules:
- Name your campaign something unique so you can easily identify it later when measuring the campaign’s success.
- Consider A/B testing ads to see which resonate more with your target audience. This can be helpful in clarifying customer personas and will give you a better idea of what works for future advertising.
- Set a budget. Providing a cap to the amount the campaign can spend towards your goal will help keep your advertising profitable.
- Set a schedule. Some platforms allow you to dictate when ads can be shown to better target the times that your audience is online.
- Clarify your target audience when scheduling your campaign to ensure it’s reaching the right people! If your brand only does business in the United States, it doesn’t make sense to set your campaign for a worldwide audience.
- You will also be able to set where and how your ads should be shown. Do you want to target mobile or desktop viewers? Should they be reached via stories, social feed, messenger, etc.
- Measure your campaign success after it has finished running, and make adjustments as needed.
While this article only provides basic guidelines to setting up social media advertising for your company, the more you research and understand advertising in the digital space, the better you can tweak your campaigns to achieve your goals.
