Are you tired of recycling through
the same old formatted content every single week?
Or are you looking for new ways to take
your social media marketing to the next level?
Perhaps you're falling behind on how to best engage with your customers.
Whatever the reason might be, we're here to give you the guide on how
to stay on top of your social media marketing game.
What's good guys? It's Trav here from Neighbourhood where we
help brands find, sell and keep their people.
In this video I'll be covering, what exactly is social media advertising?
The importance of running social media ads,
what to prioritise between organic and paid ads and how to optimise them,
goals to set the social media marketing campaigns and a bunch more.
So stay tuned.
In today's world, social media has become something more than just a platform for communication.
Platforms like TikTok and Facebook have
become as widespread as television or phones.
Whichever one that you prefer, chances are that you spend a large chunk
of your time on some kind of social media platform.
Naturally, brands go where their target audiences are, which is why all successful
companies have a robust digital marketing strategy with a strong social media component.
Specifically for consumer facing enterprises.
Not advertising on social media has become unthinkable.
Of course, with so much content out there
and people's attention spans shorter than ever, plenty of competitors and other
content creators are vying for the target audience's attention.
That's why your efforts must be original, thumb stomping and cringeless.
So, how do you ensure your social media marketing ads truly drive engagement?
Well, let's break down what social media advertising is.
First, it's important to dispel all
of the buzzwords most marketers are trying to fill your head with.
At its core,
social media ads are an extension of your overall advertising and marketing
strategy, as well as your brand's online presence.
As a company, you'll write,
record and publish all kinds of adverts on social media websites like Twitter
and Facebook, and they should be entirely relevant to your industry.
When people follow a corporate account,
they may expect some humour, but they don't expect nonsense.
Naturally, all of your social media ads
have got two goals to increase brand value by feeding into your wider advertising
strategy and promoting specific services and products.
And while the format of social media may
seem to constrain at first, especially to content marketers who are
used to filling huge blog posts with walls of text, social media ads actually allow
you to be your most creative.
On a daily basis, your social media advertising largely revolves around publishing visual content
and adapting existing content into a social media format.
In the long run, it can also involve cooperating
a relevant influencer to further spread your brand message.
The format also gives you a great
opportunity for a community focused approach.
You can directly respond to customer inquiries, post engaging polls,
or even engage in Winnie Banter and other corporate accounts.
Okay, but why is it important to run paid
social media ads? If there's one thing the biggest corporations and the smallest
mum and dad businesses have in common, it's the fact that everyone has expenses
and they loathe to add more red to the bottom line.
So why should you spring for paid social
media ads, when social media is basically free?
Isn't the whole point building organic reach, without incurring additional costs?
Well, yes and no.
All indicators show that the popularity
of paid social ads have been steadily rising for the past decade.
And since companies have begun investing more into their creative quality,
engagement with online audiences has been rising as well.
That's not all, though.
A study from "Trust Insights" showed that organic reach has been very much
on the decline, while paid ads have simultaneously been on the rise.
And no, that doesn't mean organic search is necessarily dead.
At the end of the day,
there are no guarantees to what your unpaid posts are reaching to the right
audience, some of your content could result in mass engagement,
while other chunks of posts could particularly be invisible.
Put simply, paid social ads give you
tangible foolproof impressions, and if you don't want to worry yourself
about the restricted reach or whether you're on the algorithms good side,
but you still want your eyes
on the social media content, paid ads are definitely the way to go.
Plus they allow you to specifically target
the audiences that you want to, while organic content has you flinging
a bunch of stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Paid ad platforms are social media
websites that let you get pretty granular about who you're selling your ads to.
While traditional display ads and older email cold campaigns were made up of one
size fits all, these ads are a lot more targeted.
You're paying for each view,
and you can make sure that every single one of them are a prospective lead.
Scaling your online presence is tricky without a push from paid ads,
as going a 100% organic way is a longterm, painstaking process.
So rather than viewing organic and paid social media as strictly either or,
try and see them as a completely different tools for achieving the same goal.
You can't consistently run sprawling,
untargeted paid ads, or you'll bleed yourself dry.
So a long term organic game is still necessary.
But on the other hand,
you can't make it work without the short term paid ads either.
So how does advertising on social media work?
Before you can actually put together your
social ads, you should become acquainted with how ad bidding and targeting works.
For instance, Instagram and Facebook's ad platforms let you target users based
on specific parameters like common interests, demographics and age.
You can also use your company's email list to target similar audiences to the leads
that you already have, or run campaigns for existing website visitors as well.
The most important thing to note here is still your audience.
Before a campaign, consider doing a social media audit and see what your target
demographics and ad opportunities are and which of your products you can promote where.
Another vital aspect of your social media advertising is bidding.
Based on your budgeting and bidding,
Facebook will be more keen to present your ads to its most relevant users.
More precisely, you can set an ad budget and let Facebook take care of the rest,
essentially turning over its entire campaign to them.
But it's not always the smartest, as your budget will be drained pretty quickly.
Instead, you need to consistently be reexamining and redefining your ad budget
by understanding its costs and its effectiveness.
Yep, it's all about the boring stuff like cost versus ROI,
but statistics are essential if you want
to create compelling social media ad campaigns.
If you want to avoid the risk of blowing your entire budget quickly,
it's always good to run a small scale test campaign at the very beginning.
It's worth differentiating through what
the social media advertising is compared to the organic content that you've got.
In terms of the optics, your goal with paid social ads content should be simple.
The only notable difference between it and your unpaid post should be,
ideally the little tiny sponsored tag that it carries.
In other words, paid posts are supposed
to be anchored to a specific promotion, service or product,
come with a sustainable call to action like "Click Here" or "Shop Now" and provide
a link to the landing page tied to this specific promotion.
You want your paid ads to provide the same level of content quality that your unpaid
organic content does. Meaning that you get a lot more of your
money's worth from each click that you pay for.
Of course, you need to know where you're aiming for, which is where sample goals
for social media ad campaigns come into play.
Social media advertising isn't always
necessarily about chasing profit on specific service or product.
The goals a company plans to reach through social media ads can differ wildly.
It all depends on your buyer's journey and the marketing funnel.
For example, you may be looking to bring in some traffic and impressions
to a website rather than the actual purchases themselves.
On the other hand,
your goal may be for social media ads to be a remarketing tool that you need
to catch your leads that bounced off your website before.
The best thing about social media is
that it lets you optimise your approach for achieving it all.
Some example goals are: raising brand awareness,
for instance, you may simply be interested in getting your brand in front
of potentially interested customers, regardless of whether they're retargeting
to familiar customers or introducing your company to new people.
Next is lead generation,
whether you're chasing for ways
to increase your demo, downloads, email sign ups, or just the plain old
website traffic,
social media ads are there to funnel all of that lovely social traffic to your well
designed landing pages that gets qualified leads on the right track to conversion.
Then it could be direct sales,
at the end of the day, companies that are laser focused
on pedalling their services and products will be looking to make direct sales
through social ads, which works great for ecommerce stores.
For example,
you can use a series of Instagram stories to introduce a limited time discount
on certain products or to present new collections to existing customers.
So what are some sample social media ad formats?
First up, we have static image ads.
While targeting on social media can be fairly complex,
the actual content that you're presenting doesn't have to be just posting clean
photos is effective as long as you are showing specific products, services, or products,
or if you're making announcements.
You know, stuff that people can immediately get behind without much fuss.
If you're interested, a niche hipster closed brand doesn't
always need to have a clever tagline if their goods are solid.
Sometimes just posting a picture of them is good enough.
Next is video ads.
It's a well known fact that video content
is the King of social media when it comes to engagement and popularity.
Even if users aren't initially interested
in what your company has to offer, video ads can naturally grab their
attention while they go scrolling down their endless social media feeds.
Plus, the short form video format brought
to us by Snapchat stories is simply dying to be used for clever ads.
First of all, their short nature means
that they remain accessible to companies even with the smallest marketing budget.
All you need is some imagination
and a phone with a camera, meaning that any phone in existence today.
With that, you can create looping Slideshows and images that attract the eye,
real time product demos as well as bite sized company commercials.
One you might not utilise is Carousel ads.
Don't worry though, it's actually just social media slideshow
with a bunch of potentially connected pictures.
These Carousel ads are especially potent on Instagram, where people are used
to consistently scrolling vertically and horizontally.
They allow to easily showcase a bunch of your products at once,
or use the extra images to show off one product from multiple angles.
Carousel ads are inherently interactive
because your viewers have the opportunity to explore a story by clicking through it.
A mini buyers journey unto itself.
Using them in the right contents can make people more at ease with engaging
with the rest of your products and services as well.
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So how do you optimise your paid ad
strategy? Okay, so maybe you've come up with a paid ad strategy.
You've decided what kind of ad type you want to serve best and you've found
the right and relevant platform for your target market.
Now that it's all left to do is create
and publish your content, but in the most optimised way,
that brings you the biggest ROI on your online ad budget.
So, how do you do that?
Firstly, find concrete goals.
Okay, so we realised that your overall aim is to secure more leads or get more sales.
But if you break it down into multiple steps and find smaller actionable goals,
you'll have a much better social media strategy.
For example, if you are using a specific post to ramp up your CTR or click through
rate to get more followers, perhaps you're aiming the direct traffic
to this specific page on your company website.
Give yourself some time to figure out what precise goals you're aiming for with each
post and you won't waste as much money on meaningless paid ads.
Second, understand your demographics.
Naturally, knowing your audience matters,
but it also pays to be specifically tailored to your presence on social media
platforms to each of the individual platforms.
Take a look at your social media channels as they are now.
Who's following you on which platform? Are these demographics
the ones that you had in mind when you
started your online presence on Facebook or Instagram?
If this is not the case, then why?
When marketers have an unrealistic idea of the people that they want to sell their
stuff to and a completely different people that are interested in their product, in reality.
A lot of paid money will go down the drain for nothing.
For example, if your Facebook stats are suggesting that College undergrads are
predominantly interested in viewing your content, it's something you probably want
to factor into your broader content strategy.
Even if you're not aware of it right now, there's always a logical reason why some
people are engaging with you and why the others aren't.
Third, is to treat your platform individually.
Many people don't know how to strike
a good balance between the need for a consistent brand image across all
your channels and the need to bend your content to the house rules
of the individual social media platform that you're on.
While most people use and visit multiple
social media platforms on a regular basis, each have a contained internet culture.
For example, Facebook is a place where you
should share news relevant to your business and your customer stories.
While Instagram is great for making personable visual interactions on what's
happening internally, LinkedIn is a different beast altogether.
It's where you promote your company
to potential employees and converse with likeminded professionals.
If you want it to be consistent and yet relevant on every platform,
you need to adapt your content accordingly to ensure that you're matching
the customer's expectations at every single point.
Next, and most importantly is that consistency is crucial.
While adapting your content to each
platform is crucial, you should maintain some manners of consistency.
For example, the visual look and feel
of your Instagram feed post should be consistent as it needs to be recognisable
instantly when customers come across onto their feeds.
You'll want to post at regular intervals and at specific times.
It's a good business habit and if you do
it proper targeting, you'll be posting when your target
audience is checking their social media feeds.
Fourth is utilising the content calendar.
Yep, it may seem pretty spontaneous, creative and carefree, but in reality,
all of great social media ad campaigns are meticulously scheduled and thought out.
As with every other kind of work,
the trick is to make it effortless when it's completely the opposite.
So use a content calendar.
It will become a central hub of all your
social media out activities for the months and years ahead.
A no brainer here,
but adapt to the trends much like today's 24 hours news cycle for the world
of fashion, social media is all about the trends.
You always want to be in line with them and you never want to be out of touch.
While this gives online advertisers and marketers a chance to be quite
flexible with their campaigns, it's also a duty as much as it is a privilege.
A big one for us is that we always use video.
If you have failed to dabble in the video
content before then take this as a sign for it to be the first thing to do
to change about your social media advertising strategy.
More than half of the consumers
consistently prefer looking at videos compared to the other visual content.
You can literally do it all with a smartphone, and if you're running
a small business, even better, your target audience will see you as more
relatable if you don't have a huge budget for video content.
And finally, focus on mobile.
And don't forget about desktop.
Yes, we may be stating the obvious here, but it's also important not to forget
about desktop devices and tablets completely.
Because half of the world's internet traffic comes from smartphones,
the other half still comes from desktops and laptops as well.
Let's not forget about that.
Create ads with responsive design in mind
so that they can be properly viewed on multiple platforms.
That way you're maximising your reach to every corner of your target audience.
So there you have it your complete guide
to executing stellar social media marketing ads.
So if you found this video helpful, then feel free to share it with someone
that you know that needs a hand with their social media strategy.
You can also subscribe to our blog where
you'll find a bunch more tools, tips, templates and videos that can help you
find, sell and keep your people just like Neighbourhood does.
Well, that's it for me. Happy marketing.