Hell no! They suck if you have no idea what you’re doing. Social Media Marketing is perhaps one of the most powerful paid promotions available to date.
Facebook vs Google:
You may be a business or marketer wondering which way to go on this one. Do you invest your marketing budget into social media ads or Google search ads? Remember, Google is great for demand fulfillment (think search -> buy) but Facebook (or Social Media Marketing) is great for demand generation (discovery).
Let’s say hypothetically that you just invented a revolutionary product. Let’s say you invented the LayBag™ (which I bought and LOVE by the way!). The LayBag™ is an inflatable air mattress that you inflate with your own movement. You’re still curious, okay, go check it out already. But be sure to come back here to finish our post. Okay, back to my hypothetical situation, which isn’t so hypothetical because, well – it did happen. Let’s say (hypothetically) that you’re the inventer of LayBag™ and you want to market your new product (an inflatable air mattress). But how do you market it? You have your option of initiating social media or Google search advertising. Most people will buy some type of inflatable mattress in their lifetime, but how many of those individuals will actually search “inflatable mattress” or “beach lounge chair” before buying? Not many, I’d guess. The addressable market on Google is just way too small for this opportunity. Alternatively, on Facebook or Instagram, you can target your ads based off of individuals behaviors and interests, and successfully reach a much larger audience than with Google – generating a higher brand awareness. Not to mention, giving you countless other benefits such as improving the chances of shareability, virility and brand recall.
If you’ve already tried hiring a social media marketing agency, or tackling it yourself and it didn’t work out for you, chances are it was done incorrectly. Additionally, it’s quite possible that the company you hired was too passive or not experienced enough with social media marketing.
There are certain design elements, targeting tactics and landing page must-haves you should consider before your Facebook advertisements performance can improve.
Best Social Media Marketing Tips:
Like everything in Marketing, there’s a right and wrong way of doing something. From gaining more attention for your business, to attracting your ideal target audience, you want to ensure that you’re approach is effective and leaves a lasting impression.
We have gathered a few tips to help you improve your social media marketing performance:
1) The Right Design Elements:
It is important to consider the right design elements when constructing your social media ads. Bright colors, captivating graphics, professional typography and fonts, and a clean design.
Take a look at the above ad. Things that you’ll instantly notice is it’s clean design, bright use of colour, and graphics.
Use creative elements:
What we mean by this is – don’t make an ad look like an ad. Don’t come off as a hungry company that’s looking for more business. Use eye-catching illustrations, ask questions creatively, and express your personality. Asking your fans questions can get you some responses, but if you really want to inspire engagement and kick it up a notch, consider including multiple choice answers with captivating graphics to help promote response. Let’s say for example you’re in the food industry. A question like “what’s your favorite dish?” could be so basic that fans might not be engaged to answer. Ask a similar question with multiple choice answers, illustrated by a captivating graphic, and your more likely to get loads of responses.
Use the right size:
When creating an ad don’t just assume your oversized image will make its way inside a little box that’s nearly half its size. It’s like asking for an XL coffee but for it to be put in a small cup – it just won’t work. Your resolution will be distorted, things are at risk of being cut-off and visually it looks bad. Most importantly however, Facebook won’t be pleased and will reduce your reach significantly (See Facebook Image Size Guidelines).
Limit the text:
Text heavy ads are a huge N-O. People expect to see visually appealing ads and that means with the right use of images, graphics and call-to-action text. If your ad seems too overwhelming (usually due to heavy text) chances are it’ll just get scrolled away and lost amongst all the other eye-catching images that consumers come by on social media. Also, use too much text and your reach will be crippled.
Reduce the use of Stock Images:
Although some stock images are visually appealing, people know when you use a stock image. Be careful when using stock images for advertising your products/services and if you’re going to use them, make sure you add some quality creatives. Throw in some text, your logo, and some graphics to give it a little more character.
2) Create Multiple Ad Versions:
When you read about successful social media ads, it’s likely it has gone through many variations before finding one that works. Some of the actions that could have occurred are:
- Testing different ad images
- Adjusting and refining your targeting
- Writing and re-writing several versions of ad copy
- A/B split testing
You should be creating many ad variations to see which one works best and split testing often to see what’s working and what’s not. If you find ads that are not performing, simply deactivate them and try something new. At Exposure Social, we refine and reconstruct ads for each client at least 8 times per week because we are only interested in keeping ads that outperform and ditching ads that don’t.
We ran A/B split testing on two different ad types (which have the exact same copy but different visuals) with the same budget and the bright blue advertisement had a 121% increase in clicks and a slight increase in impressions. Both advertisements are somewhat appealing, but there was a clear winner from a cost and conversion standpoint.
3) Use the “Learn More” Option:
When creating ads, you have the option of including one of several button choices. If you’re in doubt and don’t know which one to choose, it’s better to pick a button then one without, and we will explain why.
There are seven buttons you can choose from:
- Shop Now
- Book Now
- Learn More
- Sign Up
- Download
- Watch More
- Contact Us
The reason why we suggest to always place a button in your ad is because adding one increases the call to action – which moves the user to proceed to act. Buttons increase your click-through rates and ad relevancy score, as a result decreasing your cost per click.
We ran A/B split tests on two different ad types (which have the exact same copy and visuals) with the same budget and the one with the button had a 208% increase in clicks and impressions (at a lower cost).
4) Custom & Optimized Landing Pages:
Creating a custom landing page for each sponsored post is perhaps just as important than the ad itself. If the goal of your social media marketing advertisement is to increase sign ups or inquiries, then you’ll definitely want to think about including the appropriate message on the landing page. Where the person lands on after clicking the ad is just as important as getting someone to click your ad. The more targeted your social media ad is, the more specific your landing page should be as well.
Social media advertising is a two-step process:
- Create and optimize the ad
- Create and optimize the destination
Here are some social media ad landing page tips:
- Have Goal Driven Copy – explaining your product/service clearly and briefly.
- Call to Action – if you want someone to inquire, purchase, leave their email, or call your business, make sure there is a clear call to action on the page.
- Limit the Amount of Form Fields – if you’re using a form to collect leads or to generate a call to action, make sure there isn’t too many details. Too many form fields will defer people from leaving their information.
- Key Visuals – make sure you have some great visuals on your landing page. People hate websites with only written content.
- Mobile Responsive Design – more than 60% of online users use their mobile phones to do research and more than 65% of individuals browse social media on their mobile phones. Make sure your landing page is mobile responsive, otherwise you’ll be throwing away your marketing dollars.
Also, make sure you follow the 5-second rule. Using a 5-second test to optimize conversion is a powerful way to improve the ROI of a website. If someone lands on your page and they scrolled through for 5 seconds, would they know what your main objective is? If the answer is no, keep refining your page.
Five seconds may seem like a short time, but in fact it is more than enough time for a website visitor to determine if there is enough quality on your website to stay.
5) Ad Targeting and Custom Audiences:
Segmentation, targeting, and positioning – marketing segmentation and targeting are particularly important to ensure you’re finding customers that are the best match for your business. Target your ads not only by demographics, but psychographics and usage data.
An important aspect of social media advertising is creating custom audiences. A custom audience is used for targeting purposes where you can create a list of people who share similar interests or have already interacted with your business; those individuals that have already established a relationship with your brand. Creating custom audiences can enhance your ads targeting, improve conversion rates and ad relevancy.
You can create a custom audience targeting individuals with similar behaviors and interests, or from your email list, your past inquiries, previous engagement on Facebook, and people who have visited specific pages on your website.
How you target your ad is very important because you want to make sure to match your ads to people who are most likely to be interested in what you’re selling. Some brands make better use of mass marketing (marketing their product/service to a large group of end consumers) strategies and do not need to target more closely. When you’re a big brand like Tide or Mr.Clean, you can get away with broad level targeting, because at that point, you’re not trying to reach people that only like cleaning- you’re reaching a wider market. For those brands, generating a higher level of reach would be more important than getting advertisement clicks. However, for the majority of businesses, mass marketing simply does not work, and this is why specific targeting strategies must be implemented.
An Example:
Let’s say you are selling an online digital fitness magazine and in your first month you did some social media marketing, targeting women 20-60 years of age. Within that month you’ve managed to generate 700,000 impressions and 5,000 website clicks. But your conversions (online sales) were only 50 individuals. You have two choices, do the same thing next month, or utilize some more advanced targeting strategies like retargeting with custom audiences. Now that you’ve collected important information about your potential target audience, you can implement some more advanced strategies and target your ads to appear to those same women who went on your website (5000 clicks) the previous month, or taking it one step further, you can target those individuals who went on a specific page of your website (like the checkout page) but did NOT complete the checkout process. With the information you collected, you can make your next month’s ad more targeted and more relevant to women who have already shown an interest in your business but did not yet convert. The next month you retarget those 5000 women who already know about your brand (warmer leads) but with a more relevant message. Retargeting on Facebook helps improve your ads relevancy, increase purchase intent and captures more conversions.
Never neglect your: 1) Ad Design 2) Ad Targeting and 3) Ads Landing Page.