How to Get the Best Result With Social Media Ads
Businesses are increasingly shifting their advertising efforts to the online sphere to take advantage of a wider available audience. According to Statista, about 91.9% of US marketers in companies with 100+ employees use social media for marketing reasons. And with 3.78 billion social media users worldwide, it is easy to see why.
Social media is a goldmine for businesses as it allows them to connect with many potential customers. The platforms also allow businesses to target their ads specifically to users who are most likely interested in their products or services. What's more, social media allows businesses to track the results of their advertising campaigns in real-time, making it easy to identify which strategies are working and which need to be tweaked.
But if you want your social media ads to be successful, you need to use the right combination of visual assets, copy, and targeted audiences. In this article, we'll show you how to create social media ads that convert.
What is Social Advertising?
Social advertising is a form of marketing that uses social media platforms to achieve marketing and communication objectives. It involves creating and sharing content on social media that is intended to promote a product or service. This content can take many forms, including blog posts, videos, infographics, and images.
Social advertising effectively reaches out to potential and current customers on the channels they are already using. It can also build brand awareness and create a more favorable brand image. When done correctly, social advertising can be an extremely effective marketing tool.
A recent study by Sprout Social revealed that 55% of consumers learn about companies or brands on social media. At the same time, 68%of consumers agree that social media enables them to interact with companies and brands.
Any successful social media advertising campaign should have several key components to be effective.
- Campaign Overview: Have a clear and concise campaign overview outlining the campaign's objectives to ensure everyone involved is on the same page and knows what needs to be accomplished.
- Target Audience: A target audience for the campaign helps determine which platforms and creatives will be most effective in reaching the desired consumers.
- Develop Campaign Creatives: Engaging and attention-grabbing campaign creatives like images, videos, or even infographics help capture the target audience's attention and encourage them to take action.
- Choose a Social Platform: Consider which platforms -Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., will be most effective for reaching your target market.
- Consider the Campaign Budget: The budget includes the fee you pay to the social media platform for running your ads and any other related costs, such as designing or creating ad content.
- Set Success Metrics: Success metrics measure whether or not ads are effective and achieve the desired results. Possible success metrics could include click-through rate, engagement rate, or leads generated.
5 Steps for Successfully Running Social Media Ads
Here's a step-by-step guide to help you successfully plan, create, and execute a social media campaign.
Determine What to Sell
When selling a large product catalog, it can be difficult to determine what to sell through your social media ads. One way to narrow your choices is to look at your best-selling items and target those items specifically. You can also look at items that are popular with your target audience or items that are unique and would interest them. By narrowing your focus, you can create ads that are more likely to be successful.
Remember your highest margin product might not be the one that drives customers through your funnel. Conversely, sometimes the cheaper the product, the more detrimental it can be to use it to bring in lots of customers. Gross Margins x Volume are the name of the game. Thread that needle 🧵🪡
Research your Audience
Before you create any social media ad, it is important to take the time to research your audience. This way, you can ensure that you are targeting the right people with your ads. You can read reviews of your products, use Google Trends to see what people are searching for, and search for related hashtags to see what people are talking about. By taking the time to understand your audience, you can create ads that are more likely to resonate with them.
One other unsung hero here is doing user interviews with your initial customers or your best customers. Understanding WHY they buy or DON'T come back quickly can cut through weeks of data analysis.
Use a Creative Platform
When creating social media ads, it is important to use a creative platform that will grab the attention of your target audience. As mentioned earlier, there are different platforms to pick from, including Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram. While at it, keep in mind that:
- You have less time to make an impact on social than with other forms of advertising. On average, a Facebook user only spends 1.7 seconds with a piece of mobile content compared to 2.5 on a desktop.
- Your product should be at the center of attention - not the actors or models.
- Create ads for mobile since about 99% of social media users access social apps and sites using their mobile phones.
Create a Digital Marketing Campaign
A digital marketing campaign guides your efforts. So it should include specific goals, target audience, customer personas, and budget. Once you have this information, you can begin to create ads that are designed to achieve your objectives.
Track Performance
However, simply creating an ad is not enough to ensure success. You also need to track your performance and make adjustments as needed. We say pause losers and scale winners. This simple definition allows you to cut through the noise!
5 Best Social Media Ads Tips
If you want to get the most out of your social media marketing budget, it's important to create targeted, engaging, and conversion-friendly ads. Here are five tips to help you get the most out of your social media advertising:
Promote your Content on More Social Platforms
Promoting your content on multiple social platforms makes you more likely to reach a wider audience and generate more leads.
Boost engagement with Audience Targeting
When you target your ads to specific audiences, you're more likely to engage them and get them to click through to your content.
Use Custom Audiences to Target Specific Groups
You can use custom audiences to target specific groups of people with your ads, such as people who have visited your website or subscribed to your email list. This is what we call the inside-out strategy, we want to get small groups of high intent users to purchase our products vs. having to always go broad, which is the prevailing wisdom.
One thing to note: if you are going to try inside/out - then make sure to test higher ticket items against your regularly priced one, to see if you can find incremental profit from these users.
Promote Best-Performing Video Ads
Video ads tend to perform better than other ads, so it's worth promoting your best-performing video ads on social media. This means you need to keep a close eye on your data so you know which ads to ramp up budget on when the time comes.
Generate Free Clicks From Paid Ads
You can generate free clicks from paid ads by using a call-to-action (CTA) that encourages people to click through to your content. Nothing wrong with even customizing the language a bit so that it feels unique to your offering!
How does AI accelerate creativity in Social Media Ads?
Digital advertising is undergoing a major transformation thanks to the power of creative AI. With AI's help, marketers can create more personalized and relevant ads than ever before.
In partnership with Meta Creative Shop, Facebook IQ worked with Pencil to identify examples of four key use cases for creative AI in digital advertising:
- Illumination: AI can be used to gather data and insights that reveal new opportunities for marketing campaigns. For example, AI can analyze customer behavior patterns to identify trends and target customer segments that are most likely to convert.
- Generation: AI can be used to generate new ideas for marketing campaigns. For example, AI can create customized ads based on customer preferences and demographic data.
- Augmentation: AI can be used to improve the quality of marketing campaigns. For example, AI can test different ad copy and images to determine which performs best with a target audience.
- Connection: AI can be used to connect with customers on a more personal level. For example, AI-powered chatbots can be used to engage with customers in real-time and provide answers to their questions or product recommendations.
Conclusion
At Pencil, we understand that getting great results from social media ads can be a daunting task. That's why we've developed an AI-powered social media ads journey to help you get the most out of your campaigns. Our platform takes all the guesswork out of creating and optimizing your social media ads, so you can focus on what's important — reaching your target audience and driving conversions. Ready to see how Pencil can take your social media marketing to the next level? Discover our platform today and start seeing better results from your social media advertising campaigns!
