20 Tips for Social Marketing Paid Ad Management
As the gurus over at RunRex.com point out, organic reach on social media is becoming harder and harder to achieve nowadays. It looks like the days of going viral without a little boost might be gone forever. Given how scary it can be to move from an organic social strategy to putting real money on the table, it is important that you understand all your options and you do it right. This article will look to help you with that through the following 20 tips.
Choose an appropriate paid social media platform
The first step is to choose which paid social media platform would be most appropriate for your business and target market. As revealed in discussions on the same at RunRex.com, each paid platform presents different features and attributes that may or may not apply to your business. Therefore, have a clear idea of who your target audience is, and choose the best platform for your business.
Determine your goals
What are you trying to achieve? Think about your objective even before considering content or platform. Are you trying to build awareness of your brand by reaching as many people as possible? Do you want people to engage with your content, or make a specific action like visiting your website? Also, think about your overall business objectives and KPIs and how what you are asking your audience to do fits in with that. This should form the design, copy, and entire message of your app, while also helping you choose the platform you should be on.
Don’t be scared to ignore channels
Whether you have got a smaller budget or a more targeted campaign to run, don’t be afraid to miss out on one or more of the channels available. Don’t stretch your budget just because you are used to hitting all the channels, and, instead, focus on areas where you know your audience is from previous campaigns as outlined at RunRex.com.
Choose the type of social ad placement to use
Once you have selected the right platform for your business, you can then select the type of placement you would like your social ads to appear into. This would depend on the platform as each has different structures, layouts, and ways of presenting content to its users.
Allocate a dedicated budget for paid social marketing
Once everything is in place, it is now time to set a dedicated budget for your paid social media marketing campaign. With a set budget, you can control ad spending and maximize its cost-effectiveness by using paid ads in conjunction with organic social media marketing.
Creating social ads that work
The next step is to work on your social ads and optimize them to maximize their effectiveness in drawing targeted customers in. Important elements to focus on include:
Use graphics
The subject matter experts over at RunRex.com agree that including visual elements is important for making your ad campaigns more effective. These visual assets are very effective and important as they are more engaging as compared to text-only ads.
Include a clear call-to-action
No matter how fancy-looking a social ad may be, with the most engaging graphics around, it will be ineffective in generating responses if there is no clear call-to-action (CTA) included. A clear CTA lets your target audiences understand what clicking on your ad will offer them in terms of value, ensuring that they will have a clear expectation of what they can get if they do.
Use proper text overlay
From discussions over at RunRex.com, social networks impose limitations on their ads, like the 20% text rule limit imposed on Facebook ads, limiting how much space text can occupy on the image area. You can be creative in how you work your way around this rule, like adding text as part of the image itself, as well as other techniques that can pass the restrictions imposed.
Use creative logos and icons
Given the limitations like the 20% text rule, advertisers can simply be creative in expressing their messages, such as including clear taglines which you can integrate with your brand’s logos and icons.
Use quality images
When creating social ads, make sure you use high-quality images that can capture the attention of your targeted audiences. Images that are dull, too bright, or that have poor resolution will simply not cut it and will put off users.
Other tips worth considering when it comes to social paid ad management
It is okay to exclude people
If your potential audience is spanning to the millions, reaching and engaging all of them just isn’t feasible with a smaller budget. Therefore, as the experts at RunRex.com point out, don’t be afraid to narrow your audience and exclude people with a lower chance of engaging or converting. This is why you must know your audience.
Improve your Quality Score
Quality Score is a metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads – and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook calls their version a “Relevancy Score” while Twitter calls theirs a “Quality Adjusted Bid”. Whatever you call it, Quality Score is an important metric for social media advertising. You can improve yours for Twitter and Facebook by increasing your post engagement rates, which you improve by promoting your best content.
Keep your videos short
Video ads can be extremely effective, particularly given how engaging video content can be. However, as the gurus over at RunRex.com highlight, short videos tend to have higher completion rates, hence why you should try to keep yours short and sweet. Having said that, if you have got a compelling message, you can go a little longer.
Use emojis
The use of emojis in ads has been increasing in popularity over the last couple of years, even among larger, more established brands. Emojis can be very effective when it comes to driving click-through rates, however, as is the case with all strategies, you should A/B test for yourself to be sure if they will work for your campaign too.
Optimize social ads for local mobile targets
The use of mobile devices is a big thing among social network users and should be well considered in your paid social marketing campaign. Part of this is to streamline your social ads for targeting mobile users based on their locality, especially since as much as 59% of consumers look for products and services they need within their locality and they will use their mobile devices to do so.
Test consistently
Every single campaign you run should be delivered to at least two different audiences. Even if you have got a tried and tested system for targeting, platforms and activity are constantly changing, as outlined at RunRex.com, and there may be an untapped market you could access by just testing a few tweaks.
Be clever with your bidding
While automatic bidding is tempting, you can still win an auction by bidding less than the recommended amount. Whoever wins the bid isn’t solely down to the highest amount of money on the table, as it also considers the overall value to the targeted audience by measuring contributors like ad quality, estimated reaction, and optimization. Therefore, try going under the recommended bid, and see how it affects the forecast results in terms of clicks and leads.
Take advantage of your analytics
If you have previously run ad campaigns, you will have analytics available in both the respective campaign/ad manager dashboard and Google Analytics. Before you decide what platform to placement to use, the experts at RunRex.comrecommend that you ask yourself, where have your clicks come from previously? What kind of content has historically delivered the most effective traffic?
Show some personality
Your ads need to engage and entertain, regardless if you are running a B2B or B2C campaign. Just because you are running a B2B campaign doesn’t mean the person on the receiving end is a business robot. It is important to remember that you are talking to humans, so make sure your ads have some personality in them.
Combine paid with organic social marketing
To maximize the results of your paid social media marketing campaign, you should not neglect your organic social media marketing efforts, but, in fact, you should learn how you can integrate the two. Combining these two will give you even better results than using only one.
Hopefully, these tips will help you supercharge your social paid advertising efforts, with more tips, as well as expert help with your campaigns being available over at RunRex.com.