social ads Archives

When it comes to social media, there are few areas that can be more powerful than social media advertising, and these social media advertising tips will help you get the most out of a campaign.

It is no secret that the social media space is increasingly favoring the pay-to-play model for brands and businesses. That being the case, we are starting to see a move by many users towards social media advertising. Whether you are building your social presence, launching a new product, or driving conversions from untapped audiences, social media advertising can be a powerful tool. But it is important that you are using it properly.

These social media advertising tips are really presented as thought points that should be considered when deciding to venture into the space. Though social ads are cost-effective, you still want to make certain that you are not wasting any money by simply throwing it at a network and hoping it works.

Know Thy Target Audience

Target audiences are extremely important on social media, and that is particularly true for social ads. With so much noise online, we need to ensure that we know exactly who we are talking to. When developing your social advertising campaigns, have a particular audience in mind for the message as opposed to a generic one – it will lead to significantly greater conversions.

Use Relevant Content

Once you know your audience, you’ll want to make sure that the content you plan on promoting is relevant to their tastes and preferences. One of the greatest benefits of involving one’s brand on social media is the amount of information that is available about your audience. Determine what type and tone of messaging will work and create that ad.

Don’t Boost Your Account

It might seem enticing, but one of the most futile ad types are the promoted account ads. While these ad formats might generate positive results in terms of audience growth, we have moved away from the days where a larger audience means a more valuable social presence. With a targeted message and a clearly defined audience type in mind, you will find that your ads not only garner engagement, but acquire new fans and followers as well.

Take Advantage of Additional Features

Simply boosting a post to your friends and fans can be somewhat useful, but to really get the value out of social advertising, take full advantage of its capabilities! In Facebook’s Power Editor or in the advertising backend of Twitter, you will find several additional capabilities, like Custom Audiences and Twitter Cards. Learn all you can about these features and then incorporate them into your campaigns.

And on that note…

Study the Social Advertising Landscapes

Social advertising is much more than “boosting” your content. If you have decided to begin taking advantage of the social advertising landscape, you should be taking the time to learn everything there is to know about the platforms. As noted above, there are a lot of valuable features that can be exploited in the backends of these programs. Figure out what they are!

Pay Attention to Your Ads

Throwing a budget behind some content will yield average results, but you want your results to be above average! Keep a close eye on the activity of your social ads and make adjustments where you see opportunities. Real-time ad optimization is a great practice, and one that will keep your operation profitable.

Avoid Optimized CPC

Bid for yourself. Optimized cost-per-click does not yield the best results. It is significantly more convenient, and the results are not bad. But again, you don’t want your campaigns to simply be average! Once you understand how these ad platforms work, start bidding for yourself in order to extrapolate all the potential that you can out of every penny you invest.

Keep some of these tips in mind when you decide to begin your journey into the world of social media advertising!

What other practices have you found valuable? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

When it comes to targeting your social ads, what should you consider in order to find the perfect audience?

Perhaps the greatest evolutionary feature that has resulted from the recent history of advertising is the specificity with which you can be targeting your social ads. By properly targeting your social ads, you can significantly increase your reach and decrease your cost-per-acquisition, whether that is new followers, clicks or something else.

But so few publishers are taking advantage of these advanced targeting capabilities and it is hard to understand why. After all, one of the greatest benefits of running a social business is increasing efficiencies, and this is one of the ways in which that can be done.

So next time you decide to run a social advertising campaign, keep a few of these important criteria in mind for targeting your audience.

Interests

This seems like an obvious one, but it is so rarely used. Instead of A/B testing ads on social media to find the right audience, most brands simply throw out a net and hope to catch something.

The ability to target users by interest is extremely valuable. You can craft ads around these targeted interests in the hopes of finding higher engagement (often achieving that goal). People are out there telling you what they like; why not listen?

Age

People of different ages have different priorities. More importantly, your key demographic of customers might fall into a particular age bracket.

The ability to target by age means that you can specify whether you want your ads to reach an already engaged audience, or try to penetrate a new age demographic. Again, targeting by age allows you to test different copy to see what kind of rhetoric resonates with a young or older audience.

Job Description/Title

While this is a feature unique to LinkedIn, it is extremely valuable when trying to reach decision makers.

Often, we do not have control over whether or not the people seeing our ads are decision makers at their respective companies. We simply have to hope. On LinkedIn, however, we can not only see the job level of our engaged audience, but target an audience by seniority. This makes it much easier to reach decision makers and get your message out to the right people.

Location

Again, this is a demographic that seems obvious, yet publishers are not using it in the most effective ways.

As with age, people in different locations (even within the same country) have different priorities. If you sell skiing equipment, you won’t want to target people in South Florida. (In fairness, that’s an oversimplification of the issue, but the easiest way to convey the message.) Craft your ads according to the priorities of the people in specific locations and change the message for others.

Commonalities

One of the most valuable features of Twitter and Facebook advertising is the ability to target users who follow or like similar brands on the network.

When someone likes other brands in your industry, they are all the more likely to be interested in your brand. By targeting your ads and sponsored messages to these users, you can be sure to see your clicks and conversions rise.

Remember, even if your super targeted social audience is small, it is a group of people that are more likely to engage with the content you are sharing. Would you rather have ten million impressions, or an engagement rate ten times the industry average with a sensationally low CPA?

What are some of the target audiences you hope to reach with your social advertising strategy? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

t2Marketing International

Marketing Rundown

Insights

Books, white papers and more

Specialized Expertise

Tag Archive for: social ads