It is tougher to get your contentment noticed in the era of the internet than it was ever before. There are umpteen businesses in the market and most of them use the internet for promotion. Being found in this crowd is very difficult if your advertisements are very common and not creative. Social media has taken upon our lives for a long time. We spend most of the day browsing through social media sites. This makes social media one of the best platforms for marketing business. This fact is not unknown to the marketers and so most of them use social media for marketing too. So, there is a competition here too. If you want to stand out and be found, your advertisements should be catchy and unique.
You feel like online marketing is a very simple process.
Step1. Create new content.
Step2. People will come across your content.
Step3. People will buy your product or subscribe to your service.
Well, it is not the case most of the time. People do not just buy by looking at the content online. They need some more solid ground. Also, most of the content posted on the internet goes unnoticed. So, even if these are the correct steps, for people to buy your product, they should first come across your ad.
A better way out from this trap is to use social media ads. Go with the following steps.
Step1. Create new content.
Step2. Post ads on social media sites.
Step3. People come across your ads on social media and redirect to the actual content.
Step4. People will buy your product or subscribe to your service.
Social media has provided a solid ground here. People feel some kind of connection with you once you have an ad on social media as they got this chance of observing you from closer proximity. So, investing resources in social media advertisements is going to prove fruitful. Also, social media ads do not demand high costs. All you need is to create unique and luring advertisements for social media. For doing so, follow the tips mentioned below.
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Define your objectives
Knowing the objective your business wants to achieve by this campaigning on social media is the most important step. Without having a clear notion about the objectives if you keep on creating ads and keep posting them on social media, it is not going to help you in any way as it may not fit with your business objective and the loss of time and money behind the ads is a bonus. So, it is better to know the objectives that you want to achieve through this social media campaigning. Every business has a different set of goals to achieve. So, you need to decide yours and prioritize them. This way you can get a vision of which direction to start working in. Some of the most common objectives of businesses from social media campaigning are – increasing traffic on their website, increasing their visibility on the internet, increasing user engagement, increasing lead generation, and increasing sales.
By having cleared the goals, you will then be able to decide the social media site on which you want to do the promotion. This will also guide you in creating a strategy for the entire campaign.
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Know your target audience
After you have decided on the objectives you want to achieve through the campaign, you need to decide the audience group you want to target. Most of the time, the product that you are advertising will not be needed by all the people. There will be only a group of people who will be interested in using the product. You are supposed to identify that group and see that your ad reached them at the appropriate time. Also, knowing the target audience, you can create the ad template in a suitable way. The content can also be prepared accordingly. For example, you will not want to advertise some cooking appliance to young video game players. The social media ads provide you with a chance of micro-targeting the audience and it is one of the best advantages of it.
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Use the experience from organic posts
Apart from posting just the ads on social media, you must be posting some other content too. You might be posting on various social media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Analyze how the posts on each of these social networks perform. Based on that, you can decide on how and where to promote using the ads. If you embarking upon a new social media site, then start slowly. Do not rush into posting everything and very frequently. Give the audience some time to get used to with you and then move forward gradually. It is not necessary that the experience you had with organic posts will translate into the one you will have with the ads too.
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Choose the platform(s)
Not all platforms will do well for your ads. It is also not necessary that your ad’s format will fit with every social media. So, you will have to choose from this wide range of social media sites available on which you will post your ads. There are several factors that you can consider while choosing the site: the site’s performance for your organic posts, your ad’s format and the formats supported by the sit, your competitors take on this site, the type of people that use this site, audience engagement of the site, etc.
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Choose between impression and engagement
You might not have a budget to fit in both these. So, choose the one that is more important for your business. If you think impressions are more important for you, you pay for every time someone sees your ad. On the other hand, if engagement is more important, you go with paying only when someone engages with your advertisement. This way you only pay for the audience that is genuinely interested in your content. But for this, the content in the advertisement should have the required potential to get to every person that will be interested. The content should be meaningful and unambiguous.
Both kinds of campaigns are valuable for the business; you just need to choose the one that is more important for your business goals.
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Keep the designs of ads mobile-friendly
People tend to use mobile phones more than desktops. So, keep the designs of the ads responsive so that they do not take an unaligned and unstructured form on the mobile phones’ small screens. Also, keep it short and simple that people do not have to keep scrolling to go through the entire ad. Also, the content of the ads should not get cut to fit the resolution of ads that social media networks allow posting. You can also take the assistance of the location services and show the ads to only relevant users. People often like such personalization.
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Blend in with the organic content seamlessly
It is now time for you to choose the content you put in social media ads. Try to create and design your ads in such a way that they blend with other organic content on social media. This way people will come across your ads and still find that they are viewing just another normal organic post. For example, add ads in the form of 24-hour stories on Instagram. While people view the stories of their friends, your ad will come in seamlessly and people will not even realize the change. There is a lot of chance of getting a hit from such advertisement tactic. Also, the ads can be personalized. Users should be shown with only those ads that they can relate to and find interesting.
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Test your ads
Instant feedback straight from the audience without any filtering is the best advantage of having ads on social media. This feedbacks can help you gauge the effectiveness of your campaign on the users and this will let you post better ads the next time. Advanced analytics and reporting techniques are also available to assist you in this phase. So, the best technique before posting the actual ad is to test it with a smaller group of audience and see their reaction. Use this reaction t optimize the advertisement(s) as much as you can and then post it for everyone. This is like the beta testing phase of any software product. You can also go with the A/B testing technique. Here, you post two ads of the same subject and see which one performs better by comparing the reactions on both. So, test your ads in some way and then optimize them to reach the audience in a better form.
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Refresh everything
Refreshing and altering your content is very necessary for any kind of ad campaign. People are more attracted to dynamicity than static content. Here are some of the tips that you can use to refresh your ads.
Check ad copy: Analyze the performance of various keywords and phrases from your past ads or ad copies, and then you can update the keywords in your new ads accordingly.
Check the creativity: Keep a check on the creativity you have used in the ads. See that illustrations work better for your audience or simple images. Know that even the slightest change in the design style can have a huge impact on the performance of the ad.
Keep the landing page updated: The page on which the users would land upon clicking the link in the advertisement should be refreshed with unique and attractive content from time to time.
To recapitulate, there are many ways in which you can hone your social media advertising. You just need to learn what is working the best for you and then try to stick with it. But at the same time, you should also try to be as dynamic as you can and bring updates in this technique as frequently as you can to give the users some change; otherwise, you might bore them away.