Social media platforms open more doors to your target customers. However, to ensure your budget on marketing is well spent, finding the right platform for your brand is key. The goal is to spread the word about your business and turn casual visitors to long term customers and clients. This requires a well-thought strategy. While good, well-optimized content may fuel organic traffic, ads remain a handy tool to maximize your outreach potential. Here are 7 tips to ensure you get the most value from your advertising campaigns.
1. Have a Strategy
Like in anything else, planning is key when taking on the advertising side of business. You want to know the type, frequency and time of the ads you'll be publishing because not all content types are sure to resonate with your audience, and there are peak times when ads may perform better. Besides, you want to reiterate your strategy and optimize your campaign as often as possible, something difficult to do if you don't have a strategy of some sort to fall back on.
2. Choose Your Platform
With plenty of platforms out there, choosing one that's right for your brand can be a tricky dance. Your ideal platform should welcome most of your target customers. Different platforms have different users, depending on their content preferences. So you want to figure out where your target customers spend their most time before deciding on your ad-platform of choice. Some may simply decide to use all platforms and see which works best. And this may not be a bad idea starting out. However, since each platform has different pricing and advertising rules, spreading too thin on all platforms may mean more funds spent and more underperforming ads in the long run.
3. Who Are Your Ideal Customers?
If you don't know what commonalities unite your target customers, how are you going to target them effectively? What drives the purchasing decisions of your target customers? Are your products for a particular age group? Demographics, shopping habits, and content preferences are other important pointers that will help you successfully market your brand to your ideal customers.
4. Double down on Engagement
People want to do business with a brand that speaks to their needs and personality, and one they trust. Here's where engagement comes in. You want to be as close as possible to your audience. Posting frequently, replying to inquiries, comments, messages, and organizing polls and giveaways are some ways to bring your brand closer to your audience.
5. Consider Your Ads Budget
Setting a budget is important when running social media ads. The goal is to spend more time and resources on the platform with the best ROI on your ad spend. Make sure to know what's working and what's not. While click-through rates are important, if this is followed by high bounce rates, then something's wrong somewhere. A good strategy would be to run two different ads and see which style performs better on which platform. This will make it easier to address pain points and help you decide on which platforms to look when allocating your budget on advertising.
7. Keep tabs on Analytics
A good insight on your social media campaign provides ample data on your ad platforms and allows you to know what content is bringing the most traffic to your website. How did your traffic respond to your landing page? What decisions did they take and how many leads converted? These important details are sure to come in handy when tweaking your ads to maximize reach and impact your bottom-line positively.