If you plan to have any type of successful online marketing, a strong social advertising strategy is key. Here are 9 tips to help you make a successful social advertising strategy:
1. Establish your goals
Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, there are several types of ads you can use. Are you trying to get people to your website to buy your products? Do you want more engagement on your Facebook page? A little of both? Start with the purpose of social media in your online marketing and establish your social media advertising goals.
2. Identify your audience
Who is going to buy your products? Do you already know the demographic information of people shopping on your website or in-store? Figure out who your audience is or who you want your audience to be. Keeping in mind your online audience might need some adjustments, it is best practice to start broad then narrow.
3. Plan your content around your goals and your audience
Once you have your goals and audience established, you can start planning your content. Think about who you are talking to and why. Trying to get men in their 20s to buy a shirt is a different conversation than getting women in their 30s to comment on your profile.
4. Determine your budget
Part of building ads on social is setting how much you want to spend on what. You can even determine and set how much you are willing to pay for a post engagement or a click to your website. Start with an overall budget and figure out the details as you go.
5. Allocate your budget
Once you have a total amount you know you want to spend, go back to your goals and assign a percentage to each goal based on its importance to your social advertising strategy. Use these percentages to divide up your budget. For example, getting people to comment on your page is your primary goal, set 60% of your budget for engagement. If driving traffic to the website is of secondary importance, allocate 40% of the budget to this goal. So if you have a $1,000 budget, spend $600 on engagement and $400 on website transfers.
6. Plan your advertising time frame
With the ability to set the exact hours your ad will show, it is important to have a time frame as well. For example, if you have a flash sale every Friday, building weekly ads geared towards each sale would be a smart idea.
7. Use your social advertising strategy to complement other ads you are running
Do you have a billboard campaign going on in the city? Complement it with some local awareness ads to increase your visibility with consumers and keep your brand top of mind. Do you have an ad running on TV? Take some screenshots from it to run in your social advertising.
8. Start general, whittle down
If you know your product is for women, but don’t know what age group your online audience is, start with all ages. As data is collected, you will be able to narrow which age groups you should be targeting based on who is most engaged and responsive.
9. Check your ads every day
Unlike traditional advertising, you can see almost instant results for social media and adjust accordingly. Because of this, frequently checking and updating your ads is a good idea. As a side note, make sure you are allowing the ad enough time to run and gather some data to inform you decisions as you make changes.
Looking for more help with your social advertising strategy? Connect with us; we’d love to help you quantify your social efforts in 2017!
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