Social Advertising Best Practices To Better Your Paid Marketing

Social media marketing and advertising have brought new challenges for overall digital marketing. New trends, approaches and strategies have come to change, evolve and improve marketing campaigns. This has made the competition of online businesses more complex.

The Internet gives broad opportunities to marketers to think strategically and creatively and gets closer to their potential clients. As the number of social media users have a tendency to pass three billion, companies integrate the advantages of social advertising in their strategies for achieving business goals.

The effectiveness of social ads in brand success and enlargement brings its importance to a new higher level. It continues to grow since more marketers tend to invest in social advertising. According to predictions by 2020, the average ad spends will have up to 8.7% growth. The growth is connected with more integration of social media in marketing campaigns.

The immense opportunities for social advertising have brought a number of benefits for businesses to get great business opportunities as well as take steps ahead of the competitive marketplace. Among the most vital ones, it is worth mentioning:

Increase in Brand Recognition
Improvement in Brand Loyalty
High Conversion Rates
High Return with Low Risks
Great SEO Ranking.

Being the most common social media trend, social advertising demands a well-thought tactical approach to get success. To understand better and to improve your tactics, look at some of its best practices, which will help in increasing the effectiveness of your social advertising.

Know and target your buyer persona

Providing perfect product or service is great, however, if you do not succeed in reaching the proper audience it becomes useless. Your first step when creating an ad is finding out your target audience based on detailed audience research. It is important since it will help you to focus on your content marketing.

To rich your audience you need to target them by the interest and behaviour patterns based on your previous buyer persona research results. What to show them afterwards?

First, identify the best solution that will be both aligned with your overall goals and attractive to your customers. This will be the base for your ad campaigns. Then the messaging of your ad should provide value and show them the result that they can get by making the action you call them to. Take a look at the example below provided by Smarketa, eCommerce Marketing Agency:

The text refers to their buyer persona who are eCommerce owners
They mention the pain point which may be a real “pain in the neck” for most of the eCommerce owners
Makes the offer, i.e. suggests the painkiller
Provides CTAs as available as possible so that the buyer make the desired action

In order to get the best company targeting buyer persona, for your ad success, you need to follow some certain guides for its creation:

Make a research on your existing customers
Create a questionnaire, including common questions
Understand the needs of your customers and suggest a solution by your targeted ad
Have a customer-centric vision.

Follow your Keyword Strategy

After getting to know your buyer persona, what is really important, is to do keyword research and understand the keyword intent. Social ads will be much more effective and have a greater outreach and impact, if you create the right funnel for your audience, putting keyword intent in the core of your strategy. You can have a look at how to find your best keywords for Facebook ads and draw from other’s experiences as well.

Although keywords are not the only way of targeting, they are essential, since the keywords are what people use to find information and that’s how social media knows about the interests and intents of your audience. Plus, they can give you ads the kind of impact you want. Among a number of tools, you can do keyword research to get an extensive number of shares on social media platforms.

As a huge platform for social advertising, let us take one of Facebook’s examples of choosing keywords for an effective ad. After planning and choosing the best keywords for your business, it is a good idea to test them. Keywords testing will give you a deep understanding of how effective you are in your choice, as well as which of your keywords give your business the best results.

There are steps to be followed when mapping out your keyword strategy.

First and foremost you need to do current keyword research, to see which keywords you are using and whether or not they are still relevant and important for you.
The next step would be to do competitor analysis, to see what keywords your competitors are using, and whether or not it would be a good idea to target them as well and analyse how competitive you are going to be.
Another important thing to look at is the keyword pool, separate from your and competitor’s targeted keywords. You could come across new and interesting keywords, that neither you nor your competitors are using and come on top since there is no competition in new keywords.

Create Engaging Ads

Engaging your audience helps in getting cost-effective results. It is important to connect, communicate and engage your customers since it can be a hint about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. It is also a good way of getting more information about them. When you have already identified your target audience, you need to start designing your ads. The most important part of it is designing with your target audience in mind.

If you manage to interest your audience with your content, you will make them share it, make discussions over it as well as express their experience. However, to reach this, you need to show the benefits of your product or service, not just features. Measuring engagement will help you to understand what type of ads work well, better target your buyers as well inspire others to get interested in your product.

Since Facebook is a very effective platform for creating ads, you need to give much attention and improve Facebook relevance score. It shows how relevant your ad is with your target audience and how they will react to your ad. It is important to pay attention to three metrics as well, including:

Quality Ranking
Conversion Rate Ranking
Engagement Rate ranking.

You can take actions relying on your own marketing strategies. Following some effective tips, you can get fast results. it is important, as high results bring great CPA (cost per action). Besides figuring out your buyer persona, for getting ad relevance you can do split testing and pay attention to the quality of images.

Plan your Business Objectives

For clarifying and improving the success of your social ads, you need to find out and fix what are your business objectives. It will help in driving your marketing strategies. Your objectives will help in better understanding and reaching your customers.

Social media platforms have options for any type of business, regardless of advertising and business goals. Among the most common objectives that all businesses need to take into consideration we can mention:

Increasing brand awareness
Targeting buyer persona
Increasing brand loyalty
Developing customer satisfaction
Converting followers into leads

Test your Ads

Ad testing is really useful for finding out if your advertisement is relevant and properly chosen for your target audience. The process will increase conversion rates as well as will bring you high leads.

Besides, ad testing can give you a chance to pass your competitors. For this, first of all, it is a good idea to make a competitive analysis and audit your competitors and find out their key to success. Creating a data benchmark as well as keeping the interfaces in mind will also make the process more effective. Continual testing will help you to improve your own ad campaign.

Design your ads for All Types of Devices

People differ in their preferences in any situation. The same refers to device choice. Concentrating your ads only on one device will lower your chances in better reaching your customers. Here the term cross-device marketing comes out.

Mobile ad optimization is a key element that every marketer should consider. It is a great approach for engaging your audience. As there is massive use of mobile gadgets, mobile ads will help you to target more paying customers.

Create Conversion Ads

One of the best practices in social media advertising is making an investment in conversion ads. This type of ad increases the chances that people interact with your ad and after it takes an action that is very important for your business. The role of conversion rate is crucial since it helps to better your business and understand which part of your business needs some changes.

Showing this type of ad to your target audience increases the effectiveness of your ad’s success. Optimizing for conversions within your ads will help you to track sales with the help of the information you receive from the data as well as based on your customers’ journey. The certain actions they take will make it easy for you to retarget and move your audience down the sales funnel.

Visuals are fundamental for your social ad marketing campaign. The reason is that people remember about 80% of what they see, which can become a high percentage of your sales.

In order to catch someone’s attention with your visuals, you need to use some important elements in it. Let us see some:

Include a product image

Including impressive and creative images of your product will grab the attention of most of your target audience. It will give them a clear understanding of what you suggest. Besides, communicating visually will increase the number of your shares and will increase brand awareness.

Keep Relevance

Like any other strategies, being relevant is essential in image creation as well. Your images need to be relevant to your target audience and resonate well with them. If not, all your efforts will be useless.

Keep the Quality

Low-quality visuals will never give the desired results. If your customers see high-quality visuals that demonstrate your product features, they feel more confident that it is real and it the product and its quality correspond with each other.

Analyze and Choose the Best Platforms for Your Business

Each of the social media platforms can have their own benefits and advantages in social advertising. However, using all of them is not mandatory. The process demands a thorough examination and research to find out which social media platform your buyer persona uses more. To find out you this information you need to:

Identify your target market
Make a survey and compare the results
Tailor Content for your target audience.

Besides, choosing one or two platforms for your ads, you need to analyze and compare:

The number of users
Demographics
Advertising costs in comparison to your budget
Pros and cons of each platform.

If you do not want to waste money instead of investing it clearly, you need to understand your advertising goals and the budget you are ready to invest. Most companies do not evaluate the situations properly and they spend a lot of money without getting any results.

Measuring success is a separate action for any business. Although it can be a little challenging, setting up a budget will give you the right image about your strategies in contrast with your marketing goals.

Create Positive Feelings

Giving positive emotions with your ad increases chances to attract more attention and to interest your customers to make a buying decision. Each successful brand tries to create certain associations, which later on becomes a winning tool for them.

Let us take a live example for Coca-Cola. What comes first to your mind when you see their ads?

Friends, family, happy moments. It gives positive emotions to the ad viewer. The same is with your brand. Find out what kind of values your brand, product or service gives you. With this, keep close and gently touch to your customer’s emotions.

Learn and Set up Your Own Best Practices

Following marketing trends and success stories will help to create a successful ad strategy and get great results. However, there is also one step that you need to take into consideration: learning your own strong points and making it as your own best practice, which will make you different from similar ads.

The process will become easier with constant testing. Find out what brings you success and concentrate on creative approaches for developing it. Adopting other companies’ success stories may fail to work the same way for your business. Your brand growth depends on your actions.

Conclusion

Although social media marketing and advertising are very effective in increasing brand awareness, reaching customers and creating engagement, it sometimes takes much time. Some companies face the problem of having the lack of time and information to manage their social media. However, due to highly-targeted marketing services, the problem becomes solvable and your company manages to get better results

Author

Tigran Mirzoyan is the CEO at Smarketa and also loves to share his experience and expertise in blogs. Since 2010, the year Smarketa was founded, Tigran has worked tirelessly to grow eCommerce businesses, and now he can share his experience with those in need of professional advice.

Image Courtesy: Pixabay

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