Posted: April 12, 2021
Not Your Mother’s Ads
If you’ve ever used a social media network before, you’ve encountered social media ads. While in the nascent days of social networking, ads were clunkily placed and clearly exuded marketing tactics, the social media ads of today most often are a native part of the social media landscape. In fact, in some cases it’s so difficult to tell what is an advertisement that platforms like Instagram and Twitter have required accounts to use discerning hashtags to mark ads as such (#ad and #sponsored are the two most common hashtags).
Not only have social media ads intuitively pervaded social media accounts, making it easy for consumers and brands to interact, but it is even easier for brands to target their perfect customer using hyper-focused social media advertisements. Unlike traditional marketing methods like newspapers and billboards that are visible to everyone, certain leads may see one type of ad versus another. If the brand’s marketing team is taking full advantage of the tools available to social media marketers today.
Which brings us to today’s topic: the basics of social media advertising. For startups and fledgling businesses, figuring out the ins and outs of advertising on places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram can feel overwhelming. And that doesn’t even include other popular platforms like Pinterest, TikTok, ClubHouse, and YouTube, among others.
How to Get Started
If you are brand new to building a social media advertising strategy, the first place to start is determining where you’ll get the most traction! Hopefully you already have a social media presence for your brand, but if not, that’s step one. You’ll also want to determine where you’ll get the most bang for your buck. What social networks are you using currently? Are you looking to expand to other platforms?
Do the research and planning to sketch out a basic social media ad strategy. This strategy should encompass the scope, goals, and reach of your ads. You’ll also want to ask yourself questions that demonstrate what information you’ll need to acquire to move forward fully prepared. Because you don’t just need advertisements, you’ll also need money for your ads! Which brings us to...
Choose Your Demographic
A necessary part of the budget for your ads is knowing what your demographic/ideal customer is for each ad that you are paying to show to leads. Unless you have an unlimited budget, you can’t show every ad to every person on a social network. And even then, you’d have to compete with other brands looking to advertise as well!
Use your brand Personas to determine what the exact demographics are for your target audience. Age, location, interests, gender, time of day, annual income, desktop vs. Mobile, and more can all determine who exactly is seeing your ads. And that’s a good thing for brands who want to get the most out of their social media ad spend! If you are targeting a younger clientele, maybe in the 18-29 age range, you can choose your social media platforms accordingly, compared to a brand targeting adults aged 40-59. You can get very granular when it comes to choosing your demographic so get creative and stick to your personas.
Getting your ad to stand out in a sea of breakfast photos is also a big challenge.
Ad Buy Budgets
Digital advertising still takes an advertising budget, just like traditional advertising. If you have dabbled in online advertising using Google Ads, then the concept with social media ads is relatively similar and simple.
In order to have your social media ad appear to one of your targeted demographic leads, you need to compete with other ads that would also be shown to those leads. That’s why you bid on the ad space, and why each ad has a cost. Depending on how competitive the digital space is, it could be as low as a couple of cents per ad. That’s the power in being very specific with the type of lead you are targeting with your ads.
So how do you determine how much budget is enough budget? It takes time to learn about what the ads will cost. As you get to work building your ads, you’ll set a maximum bid for a target result (click, impression, conversion, video view, etc.), or a maximum budget per day. Each social network is a little bit different and most offer some flexibility so you can choose what works best for your budget. As you create your ad, the ad manager interface will provide a recommended bid based on your stated goals.
All of this takes some practice and familiarity to become successful at doing. If you feel totally overwhelmed, you can always take online courses in learning the basics or hire a social media paid ad expert to get you started.
Start Small and Adjust
When you’re just starting out and getting used to ad buying, starting with a small reasonable budget is usually a great way to start because you’ll be able to try it and see how far your budget takes you. You’ll also get a gauge for how well your ad(s) are doing and what kind of conversion rates you’re getting with your target audience.
If you don’t feel like you’re gaining any traction or seeing improvement after 3-6 months, it may be helpful to learn more about social media advertising or get insight from an expert. If you want to manage your social media ad strategy long term, you can hire an expert to get you started. They can help get your strategy off the ground and hopefully increase the number of leads you’re seeing converting from social month to month.
Or maybe this all sounds fine and dandy but you’d love for someone else to do ALL of it for you. In that case, hiring a digital marketing agency like Four Tens is the way to go! We work with you to determine your digital marketing goals so that we can craft a customized digital marketing package that works for your company and your budget.
Want to learn more? Reach out to our digital marketing experts today!