Say you’ve been pouring your time and effort into creating compelling organic content for your brand’s social media platforms for months now, maybe even years. You have seen a slow and steady increase in engagement and following, but you’ve reached a plateau and you’re wondering what comes next. It might be time to start thinking about advertising your business on social media.
Because reach has become increasingly harder to achieve with organic content alone, most successful digital marketing strategies today have some sort of paid aspect involved. Advertising on social media can be an incredibly effective way to reach your target audience quickly, with a great return on investment.
If you’re ready to get your business started on paid social media advertising, here’s a look at what you’ll need before running ads:
Install A Facebook Pixel
According to Facebook, a pixel, “is a small piece of code that goes on your website. With the pixel, you can bring back website visitors, or find new people who will likely make a purchase or become a lead.”
Installing a Facebook pixel on your website can allow you to reach website visitors via social media ads who added items to their cart, went to a product page or specific webpage or checked out on your website. The pixel will also allow you to build “lookalike” audiences that reach new people with similar interests, ages and/or locations based on your website traffic.
Build A Target Audience
On any social platform that you decide to advertise on, you’ll be able to create custom audiences. You should take advantage of the specific demographics and interests that the platform has access to in order to create a defined audience that will benefit the most from your paid campaigns.
In your Facebook Ads Manager, you can create a series of audiences, including “lookalike” audiences that are based on your business’ email lists as well as an audience that reaches people who have visited your website.
Build your audience out to target the age of your potential customer, include specific interests, demographics and geographic locations to make the most of your social ad spend.
Create Your Messaging
Choose the ads you want to run deliberately and make sure there is a purpose behind each social ad you create. Ad messaging should vary on each social media platform. Some ads are geared more towards a LinkedIn audience, while others would be better suited for Facebook or Instagram.
Social ads can be used to promote a new product, share an exclusive promotion, announce a big brand update or share a free resource. The options are endless. When creating your messaging for a social ad, just be sure it’s direct and easy to understand for both the people who already know your business, as well as an audience that is new to your brand.
Specify a Call-to-Action
Creating a strong and compelling call-to-action (CTA) is just as important (or maybe even more so) as creating ad copy and visuals for a paid campaign. Your ad’s CTA could be any number of things. It can be a simple sentence or longer, it could be a CTA button with a link or a graphic used in tandem with any of these as long as it is executed correctly. To make the most of your ad spend, keep your CTA succinct and direct to place focus on what is most important and remove any distractions from the ad.
Choose a Landing Page
Once you decide on the CTA that you want your paid social ad campaign to have, take a look at your website and see if there is a web page that correlates with your messaging. If it’s asking people to sign up for your newsletter with the promise of a helpful PDF landing in the inbox, make sure you have a page on your website that includes a form for people to sign up for the newsletter. If you are sharing the shoppable link to your newest collection, be sure it’s easy to navigate and checking out is a simplified process. If you want people to contact you for more information on your services, make sure your Contact page is set up for a great user experience.
If your current website needs updating but a total redesign isn’t feasible at the moment, consider creating a new landing page just for your social media ads to be directed to. This one-page design will allow new users to get all the information they need about your business in one place and allows them to take action quickly.
Decide on Visuals
While your CTA is arguably the most important part of your ad that asks your targeted audience to take action by clicking through, visuals are what captures their attention in the first place. Just like in organic content, video content is one of the most popular and successful visuals that can be used. Carousel ads are also an option that allow you to include a series of photos to draw your audience in towards the messaging. Using static image ads works well when making announcements, showcasing a new product or rolling out a special promotion.
Get Started
If you’re ready to take the next step in your digital marketing strategy, let’s talk about paid advertising on social media for your business. At TargetMarket, we specialize in Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter advertising and more. Get in touch with us to learn more about how targeted digital advertising campaigns can help increase the quantity and quality of new customers for your business.
