How to Leverage Social Media Advertising

posted on 10/19/2015

People spend a lot of time on social media. According to Ipsos, social media browsing, connecting, and content reading takes up about 3 hours per day. Whoa. That certainly means your business should have a social media and content marketing strategy. With these plans in place, you’re gearing yourself up to be seen by customers and keep them interested in what you’re saying.

Developing a social media plan is an important part of your marketing strategy. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are where you connect with customers, share your products and services, and stay at the top of mind.

But with hundreds of friends sharing tons of posts, it’s not always easy to be seen in the News Feed – especially when it comes to big marketing pushes, product launches, or company news.

Luckily, the partner to developing great social content is social advertising – the ability to pay to be seen in customers’ social feeds.

Using Social Media Advertising to Drive Engagement

In the early days of social media platforms, these paid ads seemed forced and irrelevant – like obvious advertisements for things you weren’t interested in.

But over the last few years, the integration of paid and organic content has become a blurred line – with followed-content and ads weaved side-by-side and all ads tailored to the individual’s likes and interests. These ads can now be seen right in the News Feed or as super-relevant side bar ads, which allows the advertising messages you share to be seen by customers actually looking for your products or services.

Now Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest are using social advertising to show users relevant ads they might be interested in. This is where your marketing goals come in.

How can you use social advertising to meet your marketing goals?

Grow your page likes or followers
Share a really great piece of content
Share a big piece of company news
Promote a new product or strong product launch
Increase website views
Draw visitors to a specific landing page for website offers
Share a Facebook-specific coupon code
Increase your email list
Promote an upcoming trade show
Announce a new store location
Promote an in-store sale
Announce a geographic-specific promotion or alert

Knowing your goals will help you decide how and when to use social advertising and help you target the right people.

With social advertising filters, you can target your reach to address very specific audiences: current followers, age brackets, geographical areas, women or men, interest groups, or fans of other pages. You can use these audience filters to get the right message to the right people.

Create the right ad content

Once you select your audience and their demographics, you’ll want to create the content, social posts, and social ad that speak to them:

Write ad copy that addresses your specific audience and their needs
Add a relevant photo that will speak to them and what you’re advertising
If you’ll be linking to an outside site (like your website), design a landing page that addresses the reason the visitor clicked the link
If you’ll be promoting a piece of news or an interesting blog post, make sure this content speaks to your audience’s interests and concerns

Once you know your objective, audience, and content you can use each social outlet’s advertising tools to create an ad that speaks to your customers.

Set budgets and follow up with measurement

Each social media platform has ways to set budgets and timelines for an ad. Make sure to use these tools to match your marketing objectives by selecting options that support your campaign.

After your ad is complete, be sure to measure its effectiveness by looking at:

Audience reach
Number of clicks
Number and quality of leads
Sales completed
Total investment
Return on Investment

As your digital marketing partner, Web Solutions can help with any step of the process – from defining goals and determining who your audience is, to setting up metrics and creating captivating ads. If you’re ready to create the perfect social ad, give us a call and let’s strategize.