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Social media has become a core channel for digital marketers. As mobile usage grows, marketers have a great opportunity to provide relevant and timely ads to their target market.
Before we get into some key optimizations for social media campaigns, let’s talk about the growth of social media advertising. According to a study by Matter Communications, it’s estimated that 89% of marketing leadership plans to increase their budgets in the coming year. The three areas they saw the greatest ROI in the last year were:
Now that we’ve identified the top social media channels for advertisers to allocate their marketing budget, let’s go over the benefits of paid social advertising, and nine best practices for launching and optimizing social media campaigns.
Here are some of the top reasons to invest in paid ads for your social media platforms:
Social media rocks in terms of defining a target market. Put on your consumer hat for a few minutes and think about all the personal information you input into your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts. Now, think about how often you engage with other brands on these channels. Your profiles and engagements are all accessible to advertisers to build a custom audience off of.
As digital marketers we can develop creative based on a custom audience build, which can be defined by job titles, location, age, interests, gender, relationship status, and more. Marketers should take advantage of the custom audience tool – the targeting options are endless.
In reality, getting multiple images and messages out in the market when you’re trying to launch a campaign quickly can be hard. Best practices in social are to launch many ad variations and let the algorithm work its magic. Even if it’s a change in text or call to action, do your best to launch different ad variations to each of your custom audiences.
This tip is my favorite because I experience this first hand every week. I have never seen creative get stale quicker than in a social channel. The moment I launch new creative, my conversion rates will skyrocket back up to initial launch levels. Put together a calendar of creative rotation and have a stock of images, headlines, and descriptions that you can use to build out new creative.
Any calls to action (CTAs) you use should be short, clear, and unambiguous. We recommend using “Call Now” or another CTA encouraging a call for considered purchases, where customers prefer to engage with a human before making a buying decision. Also, don’t be afraid to A/B test to see what verbage, shape, font, or even colors your audience is responding to the most. Some of these may help with that as well:
It’s hard NOT to look away when you have a combination of audio and animated imagery blaring at you to grab your attention. And that’s EXACTLY why video ads work better than a static image or content ad. It’s also staggering to know that your audience will remember 95% of your messaging if it’s received via video compared to the 10% they remember when they only read it!
Here are some rules of thumb when it comes to creating video ads about your product or service:
In my experience with running social campaigns, content is king. My calls to action are focused on getting content vs. taking a conversion action. One of the best tools at our disposal for promoting content is the Facebook lead gen ad type. My conversion rates for content downloads are through the roof and very efficient. Again, ensure you promote relevant content to the custom audience you built. Don’t waste budget trying to reach an audience that doesn’t relate to your content.
I am bringing back my favorite graphic for this last optimization post. And, the process of assessing the data, reporting out, and implementing action plans is as true in social media campaigns as it is in PPC, SEO, and display campaigns.
Remember to track all conversions with your brand that social media achieves, including call conversions. You can use a call tracking solution to capture this data. Your reporting will only be as good as the data you track — and so will your optimizations. If you don’t factor in call conversions, you’ll be making changes to your social campaigns based on incomplete ROI numbers.
Invoca’s AI gathers information from phone conversations you have with your customers and provides you with first-party data and insights that you can utilize in your paid social ads. In these conversations, you may discover questions, concerns, or needs that they have that you aren't currently addressing. You may also find that they use different terminology to refer to your products or services than you currently do — you can, in turn, update your creative to "speak their language." When you use conversation insights to enhance your ad messaging, you build a deeper sense of connection and trust with your customers. It shows them that you’ve taken the initiative to really learn what they want, how they want it, and what changes you can make to meet their needs.
Once you’ve launched a high-performing campaign, how can you build on your success? One of the best ways to accomplish this is through lookalike audiences. By finding people with attributes similar to your best customers, you can keep the gravy train flowing.
Facebook and Instagram offer robust tools for finding lookalike audiences that mirror your best customers. You can also use your call tracking data to help you find customers who are likely to call from your social ads and convert over the phone. These customers are extremely valuable — according to Forrester, 84% of marketers report that phone calls have higher conversion rates with larger average order value (AOV) compared to other forms of engagement.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you improve your paid social campaigns? Check out these resources:
