- If I were teaching this class five years ago,
I might sit here and tell you
that a paid strategy on social media
is not worth your time.
Organic reach was booming,
businesses and brands were seeing a ton of organic
engagement, and success with social media
without using any sort of paid ads.
The fact of the matter is in 2017,
even a small paid strategy will help businesses
reach new customers because of the increasing decline
in organic reach on social media.
So, this paid strategy is meant for beginners,
it's a great starting point for anybody
looking to dive into the paid strategy world,
and I'd love to give you some key tips
on things you can do to start
with as low as even a dollar or five dollars per day.
So why invest in the paid strategy?
Well one of the biggest benefits
of investing in paid advertising on social media
is the ability to reach new customers
and potential customers that might buy your product
or interact with your page.
Another really, really great option for advertising
is the fact that you get more data
than you would with organic posting.
Things like cost per click or cost per acquisition
are all available through the ad platforms
that you choose to advertise through.
What this does is allow you to get information
that you might not usually have about your customers.
Things like where they're coming from,
where they're clicking from,
their interests and demographic abilities
is all available through the advertising platform
like Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter or LinkedIn.
If you're looking to get started with paid advertising,
Facebook and Instagram offer a low cost way
to test out ads and really hone in on the strategy.
I have a five step paid advertising strategy
that I would love to share with you
that'll help you get started today.
At the heart of this five step paid strategy
is the fact that you're not creating posts
necessarily to advertise.
What you wanna do if focus on creating great content
that you think would perform well organically
and then using this paid strategy to really boost
those results as an added bonus.
But the first step is to do that.
So what you wanna create a post,
let it go organically for at least 24 hours
to see how it performs.
The second step is to look at your insights
and identify the posts that are performing best.
Third, you're gonna wanna find an audience
that should see these posts.
A lot of times with organic reach declining,
a lot of your audience that might benefit
from your organic content just might not be seeing it.
So identify a target audience
that should be seeing these posts is the third step.
Next, you're gonna wanna go ahead
and throw just a little bit of money behind it
to see how it performs as a boosted post.
You can start with something as low as five dollars a day.
You can boost a post or create an ad,
and this is gonna help you start to identify
the top performing organic posts
that perform well as either boosted posts or an ad.
After these boosted posts or ads
have been running for just maybe a day or so,
you're gonna start to see some of these paid advertisements
perform better than others.
What you can do is identify a low cost per click
or cost per engagement post that you've been running
and then start to put a little bit more money behind those.
The theory behind that is that you're getting more
bang for your buck with those advertisements
and those are the ones that are great candidates
for continuing to run as long as possible
or even creating variations of those
for more organic posts that you can then piggy-back
to more boosted posts in the future.
If you're wondering what metrics to look at
for great candidates for boosted posts,
you're gonna wanna first identify the goal.
So if your goal is to drive engagement or brand awareness
to your social media content,
then obviously you're gonna wanna look at engagements
like likes, comments, or shares,
and if your goal is to drive traffic to your website,
you're gonna wanna look at metrics like clicks to posts.
That will give you a good start
for identifying the posts you wanna boost.
The other thing you're gonna wanna look at
with boosted posts is the amount of negative feedback
you're getting on all of your social media posts.
Those are the ones you might wanna be careful with
when boosting, and also the ones to help you
identify feature content to avoid.
And if you're wondering what size budget
makes Facebook or Instagram or any of these
advertising platforms worth it,
I'd say any budget that you have
is definitely a great option for you to start with.
I've said it before, but something as low
as one or five dollars per day
will help you at least get a feel
for what advertising can do for your own
social media channels,
and if it's something you'd like to invest more
in the future.
At the end of the day, if you're spending money
on social media posts,
it's pretty important to tie those back
to real business objectives and results,
and I'm not saying that's gonna be easy,
but what you can do is start to hone in
directly on the stats from all of your social media
boosted posts or advertisements.
So showing to your boss or your manager,
or even to yourself exactly what performance
each ad has and the result that it makes on your business
is really key in first of all justifying
what you're spending on ads currently,
and also justifying spending more
on those ads in the future.