How to get started with social media ads
If you’ve scrolled through a social media newsfeed in your time, chances are you have encountered numerous social media ads. Social media ads include any paid marketing campaign on social media. These campaigns reach certain audience groups based on their demographics, behaviours, and interests.
With the help of social media ads, brands can send targeted promotions to past and potential customers alike. They are the linchpin of modern marketing making them perfect to incorporate alongside your organic social media marketing efforts.
At Social Directions Agency (SDA), we’ve seen firsthand the benefits of social media ads in helping our clients reach their most desirable online goals. Continue reading as we share three tips to truly harness the power of social media ads.
The benefits of social media ads
There are many reasons why social media ads are incredibly worthwhile for brands. For one thing, they help businesses to get even more out of their organic content. If you put a lot of time and energy into your organic cotton, you’ll know how disheartening it is when metrics fall short.
Unfortunately, it is the reality of the fact that social media is constantly changing, and the algorithm is not always in your favour. Social media ads mean you can get more value for that time as you get to squeeze more out of your organic content. For this reason, selecting your best-performing and most attractive content for your social ads is a good idea.
These kinds of ads also help businesses to build awareness with audiences they otherwise would not reach. Ads enable you to hyper-target social media users based on certain parameters. With this in mind, you ultimately reach more people, including those who may have never heard of your brand.
You’ll reach people who have visited your website before, those who have purchased from you in the past, and new potential customers. Another way social media ads can help your business grow online is by helping you quickly gather valuable information about your brand and audience.
In other words, you’ll learn a lot from your campaigns. They will not only teach you about which ad creatives, CTAs, and offers work but also about who is following you and loves your brand. Social media advertising is essentially a scalable way to conduct quality market research!
How we’ve incorporated social media ads into our client’s strategies
To give you a bit more context on the power of social media ads, let’s talk about how we (SDA) have incorporated social media ads into our client’s strategies. With our client, the National Flight Centre (NFC), we identified that the ‘student story’ was a sense of inspiration, and as a result, this kind of content was generating leads for the business.
After we figured this out, we set out to create more content like this for ads. On our next filming day, we told the story of 16-year-old Max, who flew solo for the very first time. This has generated fantastic results through our lead generation forms and brought our cost per lead down by 30 per cent.
Through analysing previous ads, click-through rates and cost per lead, we also learnt some insights for another one of our clients, AltLiving. We discovered showing off an exact mobile home and that what is currently in stock is the best kind of content to generate leads.
We film very simple videos, doing a walkthrough of the mobile home in question with some music overlaid. This was the most effective way for us to help this client drum up more business from social media. It brought our cost per result down by a whopping 50 per cent. We’ve been able to figure all this out through some basic analysing.
Three ways to harness the power of social media ads
Now that we’ve touched on the advantages of social media ads, let’s talk about how you can harness their true power. We’re sharing three tips below to help you navigate social media advertising. (FYI - these are the steps we’ve used to get our clients set up on social media ads and ensure their success!)
1.Use organic content first to identify what’s working
If you are a newcomer to social media ads, don’t create new content for your first ads. Instead, utilise the organic content that you’ve already created. This will help you determine what works best and what content you should use for your ads.
You may think a graphic with the details of your latest course may be the best choice, but the customers you target may prefer videos. Use what you have and test the waters.
2. Read your paid ad results
When running social media ads, it is important to review your results. This is because results are key to your success, and your results will tell you what is working. You’ll receive data on the cost per lead, cost per call, etc.
3. Make content to suit what’s working
Once you find out what content is working best for your social media ads, make content to suit that. For example, if videos work best, film and design more videos to use for your ads.
Summary
Social media ads are an opportunity that everyone should be taking advantage of right now. However, it is not about just creating new, enticing content; it’s about selecting content and constantly tweaking it to align with the latest data from your campaigns.
We hope the above three tips help you as you embark into the world of social media ads and that you see great results. If you would like to take your social media game to another level, including your social ads efforts, contact us today, and our team would be delighted to help you.