how to: create a successful social media advertising campaign
SOCIAL ADVERTISING 101
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SOCIAL ADVERTISING 101 〰️
Social media is great for creating an audience, nurturing a community, and showcasing your products and services. Once you’ve got your business established on social media, however, you may try to grow your following or create more opportunities for engagement online through social media advertising.
Social media is an incredibly useful tool when it comes to advertising. Firstly, it provides unparalleled targeting abilities allowing businesses to reach specific demos, interests, and behaviors. Secondly, its reach is unmatched when it comes to connecting with new, potential customers. Finally, social media advertising is cost-effective, offering flexible budgeting options and allowing businesses of all sizes to compete on a level playing field.
Social media plays a critical role in the “top-of-the-funnel,” so it’s important to have an understanding of your business goals, your audience, and how to set up a social media ad campaign properly.
Here are our best tips for DIY-ing a social media advertising plan…
Step 1: make a plan.
Before you start flinging ads into the void hoping one of them does the trick, you need to make a plan. Start with defining your goals and business objectives to make sure your ads are in alignment with them…To get started, ask yourself these questions:
What do you want to achieve through your social media efforts? Do you want to brand your business, drive traffic to your new website, generate leads, drive sales? Once you’ve set your overall goals, it’s time to create a strategy.
For example, if your goal is to drive traffic to your new website through social media, some steps could include increasing posting frequency, optimizing content for sharing, and running targeted ad campaigns on your preferred platforms.
Now that you know what you want to get out of an ad campaign, you need to find an audience to speak to…
Step 2: get to know your audience.
Goals and plans are a great place to start, but creating actionable steps to actually reach those goals is just as important.
When it comes to creating ads that make the desired impact, you first need to know who you’re talking to, like, really well. Here’s how:
Take notes on your current customers.
Conduct market research
Create buyer personas
Social listening
Ask your audience
Now that you know who you want to reach and a bit more about their motivations, you need to decide where you want to reach them.
Step 3: Decide which platforms you’ll use.
Now that you know the why and the who of your campaign, it’s time to find the where. Start by:
Research where your audience spends the most time online and which platforms align with your brand's identity and values.
Evaluate each platform's features, such as demographics, engagement levels, ad targeting options, and content formats, to determine which ones best suit your goals.
Consider your resources and bandwidth for managing multiple platforms effectively.
Focus on quality over quantity and prioritize platforms where you can consistently produce engaging content and interact with your audience.
Monitor your performance metrics regularly and be open to adjusting your strategy based on audience feedback and evolving trends.
Step 4: create great content.
It’s time to build out your campaign creative and content. Whether it’s video, images, text, or UGC, if you want to snag your audience’s attention, the content has gotta be good.
Here are some things to consider while you create your content strategy:
What do we want to accomplish with a social media campaign? Is it growth, sales, web traffic? This will affect the type of content you create.
Know your audience’s paint points and use them to snag their attention.
Create a variety of content like photos, graphics, and videos
Next, it’s time to monitor how it’s going…
step 5: Measure and analyze.
Selecting the right metrics to monitor and evaluate is key for accurately assessing the performance of your social media campaigns and their alignment with business objectives.
With the wealth of available social data, it's crucial to focus on metrics that directly reflect your goals. For instance, engagement metrics, such as clicks, likes, comments, and shares, often provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Once you've identified the key metrics for your campaign, regularly measuring your success and analyzing social media analytics allows for timely adjustments to your strategy and content based on real-time audience feedback.
Let’s summarize.
Running an effective social media campaign for your business requires a bit of homework. With this step-by-step guide, you have a roadmap for doing your research, creating content, analyzing and improving your advertising campaigns.
For some extra help, see what our team could do for you. Share your ideas with us and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to make them happen.