Are you thinking about social media advertising for your business? In a world filled with ads, social media is a great place to expand your business’s audience. From Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and more. Social media is a great and growing platform to invest your business’s marketing budget into. But when it comes to understanding likes, clicks, engagement, followers, interaction, and shares, most people are unsure where to start.
Social media advertising is a perfect option for companies with lower budgets that are taking the first steps to expand their business. It is a great starting point for your digital advertising strategy. These five things are important to keep in mind when first starting to advertise to increase your chance of success.
1. Have a plan and goals.
Having a plan might seem like the basic first step, but having a set strategy and goals is what a lot of business owners forget when they start. Think: What is the best website page to lead your new customers to? Who is my target audience in terms of age and location? What do I want the customers to do when they get on the website? Why are we using social media to do this? Without set goals in mind, it is hard to measure the success of your ad and whether your money is being well spent. Having a plan helps narrow down a more specific audience and increase sales more effectively. As you create your plan, check out this blog for some tips to help you get started.
2. Social Media campaigns can’t be “copied”.
Social media advertising is not a cookie-cutter marketing strategy. It’s individualized and very specific to each company. This makes it hard because you simply can’t “copy” a strategy that was successful for a similar brand to yours. Social media advertising is so targeted to your audience and goals that each campaign is incredibly different. Even the platform you advertise on can differ. For social media advertising, you want to make sure the platforms you choose are the ones your customers use. If you pick a platform like Instagram just because it’s popular, if your customers aren’t active on it, you’re not going to have success no matter how much money you spend.
Unique and creative ad concepts are also the best way to keep your audience engaged, which can’t be done if you take the idea from someone else. A creative social media ad campaign will be an effective way to build awareness and brand your business.
3. Set a budget and stick to it.
The great part about social media advertising is that you can stick to a strict budget. Yet, it’s important that you let each platform use the full budget to be most effective. If you set up a $200 advertisement over two weeks and end your ad early because it’s “not working,” you’re actually wasting your money. Social media platforms optimize the money spent, spending more of the budget on some days and less on others to try to get the best results. The platforms want your ads to be successful; if you edit the algorithms, your budget isn’t being used to its full potential. It might be complicated to understand, but the moral of the story is: let the computers do their thing.
4. Don’t try to play the system.
What do we mean by this? When you go to publish a social media ad, you’ll have to answer a multitude of questions about your goals and target audience. Some people try to play the system to get more clicks for less money. Yet, the best policy is to be transparent and honest. If you want website clicks, click that option. If you want a larger reach, choose that type of ad. All social media ads are run by an algorithm, and trying to game it in the end will cost you more than you think you’re “saving”.
5. The more you do, the more success you’ll have.
Many business owners give up if their social media ad isn’t as “successful” as they wish. Yet, like many things, advertisements take time to perfect. The more ads you run, the more data each platform has to pull from. The more data you provide, the better the platform understands your audience and goals, and the better the audience it shows your ads to. It can take time to figure out what kind of graphics and captions work best for your target customers. In the long run, the more you run ads, the better your chances of success.
Social media advertising may be complicated, but with this knowledge in mind, you’re already off to a better start. In the technology-heavy world we live in, it’s important that your business stays up-to-date too. Social media advertising is a great way to experiment with a low marketing budget and very low risk. With this type of advertising, there is a reward regardless: brand awareness and recognition. Even if you don’t get as many likes or clicks as you wanted, your brand is still being put in front of people who would otherwise never see it. Take the next step and start your social media advertising journey today!
Still have questions, don’t be afraid to contact our Iowa digital marketing experts.