Social media advertising has quickly become one of the most cost-effective and relevant advertising channels in modern day. The ability to target hyper-specific demographics and areas for brand exposure and retargeting campaigns drastically improves the buyer experience as a way to excite, inform, and motivate through all phases of their buying journey.
Social media advertising is using paid tactics to gain visibility or encourage an action from your target audience. This includes boosting organic content posts from your business’ profile to your audience’s content feeds as well as stand alone advertisements directly appealing to your audiences to encourage action.
Social media advertising is a perfect compliment to SEO and content marketing in that it can string together multiple touch points after an initial website visit to further connect with visitors over time and earn their trust.
According to Hoosuite, 52% of all online brand discovery still happens in public social feeds, which includes both organic and paid posts. Additionally, Hootsuite reports that the average user spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media on average each day.
For businesses that are new to advertising, this is a perfect way to dip a toe in the water to spend ad dollars in the most efficient way possible and understand clearly the effectiveness of those efforts over time.
The extremely detailed tracking and reporting data available in these advertising channels is a key factor to strategically developing campaigns and improving their performance over time in ways that traditional advertising channels simply cannot provide feedback on in similar detail.
Our creative team is expertly equipped to write and develop amazing ad graphics and videos that capture attention in the feed. We don’t simply rely on good targeting to get results in social media advertising efforts. While targeting and budget management are very important aspects of running an efficient social media campaign, the creative itself is the difference maker.
Social media advertising is about more than gaining followers, likes, or comments. It’s about clicks and conversions. Creative ads and relevant landing page content are critical elements to the success of this style of digital marketing campaign.
The secret to all of this is that it’s only worth embarking down this journey of pay-per-click social media advertising if the destination for the ad can actually convert the traffic that is being sent to it. Without a value-based message, inspiring visuals, motivating content, and a clear call-to-action all the traffic in the world won’t make a difference to actually growing your business’ revenue.
We start with strategy and research. The overall success of any social media advertising campaign depends heavily on the up front work put into topical interest research, demographic targeting, regional targeting, and campaign creative that speaks to the audience resulting in the only result worth anything to a business… conversions.
Your PPC social media advertising campaign starts with thorough audience research which identifies which interests and lookalike profiles will be most valuable for your business. This research includes a mix of interest and demographic campaign performance forecasting to help dial in the budgets for the campaign.
One of the biggest differentiators between a successful social media advertising campaign and an underwhelming campaign is the creative. Creating compelling visuals and copywriting for the appropriate audiences that delivers a differentiated and inspiring message leads to more clicks and more conversions.
By narrowing the audience profile and geographic targeting, campaigns can become more effective. This also comes into play when retargeting is part of the strategy. As campaigns progress, certain ads within the campaign will start to shine and others will fall flat. These are opportunities to capitalize on what the data is telling us by prioritizing bids for converting ads and updating others that may be underperforming.
Retargeting is a very powerful aspect of social media advertising. Unlike search engine marketing, the typical social media user isn’t in “research mode” when browsing their app feeds. One way to increase the effectiveness of your campaign is to focus more on retargeting rather than first impression advertising in order to stay top of mind for a website visitor that found you through SEO or SEM channels. This approach is becoming less far-reaching though as platforms like iOS and Facebook dial back cookie and tracking terms of service.
A great ad can earn a click. It takes a great landing page to turn that click into a lead or purchase. Landing pages are a critical step in gaining the trust of a visitor and using education and inspiration to convert that visitor into a customer. Strong landing pages benefit from an overall strong website. A conversion does not have to happen on the specific destination page for an ad, the tracking will follow a visitor throughout the site.
Over time, tracked campaign data will start to uncover statistical trends related to click-through-rate, cost-per-click, conversion percentage, and metrics of the like. The ultimate goal of a social media advertising campaign is to get conversions; a phone call, a form submission, an email, or a purchase. Conversion rate optimization, is the process of analyzing the data to see where improvements can be made to raise the conversion rate. This typically involves updating ads and landing pages over time with new creative and writing that may improve that performance.
We think it’s vital that you understand everything that’s happening with your PPC social media advertising campaigns. Our reporting doesn’t just list clicks, impressions and conversions: we break down what works, what doesn’t and where your budget is being spent every single month so that you’re empowered to make intelligent decisions on the future of your campaign. Beyond the statistics, we include actual summaries of what is happening with each aspect of your campaigns in a way that actually makes sense to you, the client including our recommendations moving forward.
